WP Courseware

When we first launched WP Courseware, we launched it as a premium plugin, however, we offered the plugin, plus support plus updates for life. That quickly became unsustainable. We had to incorporate a subscription model if we were going to sustain the business. It takes money to fix bugs, add new features and to support customers. This was a huge turning point for the company. We went to a yearly subscription model which obviously didn't benefit us till the following year, but it was by far one of the best decisions we made.

One thing we did right from the beginning was invest in getting a custom license manager built so that we could easily manage licenses, and push updates to the plugin. However, as we grew, we needed more flexibility and functionality. We offered to pay our developer to enhance the licensing plugin, but he really wasn't interested. In fact, from the beginning we encouraged him to sell the licensing plugin as a premium plugin for other plugin and theme authors, but he didn't think it was a lucrative idea. That said, we had to jump ship. Thankfully there was another super intelligent entrepreneur/developer named @pippin who launched a plugin called EDD Software Licensing. We jumped onboard full force with Easy Digital Downloads and we still use it today.

We'd been updating the plugin constantly and consistently since launch. We learned that each time an update was released, sales increased. We also recognized that major updates were the perfect time to increase the price. Although we were scared to death about raising the price. We've only raised the price a few times since launch, and we've never seen any pushback. Obviously you have to provide the value otherwise you may get called out.

One thing we were concerned about when we launched our online course was protecting our video from being hot-linked across the internet. After a little research we found that Amazon Web Services S3 had a solution that would allow you to host your files and generate expiring URL's when linking to them. So we invested a little money and built S3 Media Maestro. S3 Media Maestro has full integration with AWS S3. You can create buckets, folders, upload files and embed any of that content on your site utilizing an expiring URL. All this is done through the plugin. This seemed to be a great complimentary product to WP Courseware. I know I'm a bit biased, but this plugin makes it easier to manage your files on AWS than the actual AWS Console.

WP Courseware was launched as a $20 WSO on the Warrior Forum 😂. We quickly learned that the plugin's value was much higher. We needed to figure out how to market a WordPress plugin.