How I Built a 6 Figure WordPress Plugin Business While Working a Day Job

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0:07[Music] my talk is how I built a six-figure year WordPress plug-in while working a day job Who am I my name is John Turner these are my free plugins in the wordpress.org repo and yes superlatives do work there believe it or not I have over 800,000 downloads of those two plugins combined and this is my pro plugin it's coming soon pro which is basically allows people who developed WordPress sites to set up a landing page and collect leads before they launch and they work on their website behind the scenes this funny the look I had Pete from conversion XL review my site last weekend it's like dude what's up with

0:56your logo I was like it's a $50 99designs logo I might need to change that look is that an apple yeah alright so how did I get started so I've been working on a sass ever since I graduated college the first one I built was a band website generator I lived in Nashville I had ties to the music industry and I had a little bit of success with that I think at its peak I had around 30 customers I was making around $700 a month but I had no idea how to sell it I was word-of-mouth at that time as years progressed I ended up rebuilding

1:37it in WordPress at one point in time and I really learned the internals of WordPress which are pretty bad as everybody knows here but little did I know that experience would later believe me with my future ventures that eventually failed again because I didn't know what I was doing my next project was to build a Facebook app it was a horrible failure as well around that time I joined the Academy and I started reading what Rob and Mike had put together and stored to dawn on me that I was doing completely wrong I needed to step away andrey approach how i was gonna sell something so as i worked my way through

2:25the academy it hit me that all right I'm gonna build a coming soon plugin based off the lessons in the academy of the killer website lesson and so before you build so I was building this plugin to test ideas and I had a theme that I was gonna build to allowed SAS websites to basically get it up and going within minutes so I started to research to see what was out there there was nothing really out there and stuff that was out there was pretty bad so launch effect was probably the biggest competitor at the time and I remember buying it and downloading a look at it I was like this

3:04is horrible this is a really bad product it it would do broke half the time the Support Forums with full of questions so I was like I can build it better I looked at the WPE or grief bow I saw what was in there the bar was set really low at the time so what I said is I'm going to start from scratch I'm gonna start very simple and I'm gonna learn how to sell something and market it and that's what I did so I had a plan what I was going to do is I was going to build a coming soon plugin stick it up and

3:42collect leads for my theme that was building I released my free version of the coming soon plug-in to the WP you orb repo and about a month later I realized it had 10,000 downloads and it was people were starting to mention it in blogs so we're like here's a really simple solution to build your WordPress website and collect leads while you do it and you know it was stable it worked and a little at that time I didn't know I was filling a need that existed so basically I started getting a features request I was like alright I've got something here I need to capitalize on

4:26this I put the theme on hold and I started building out the pro version of my plugin I started very cheap so obviously you need a market I had a market it was getting ten thousand you know it was growing quite quickly the product took me about two months to build out the pro version and test it I threw up a cheap website so when I say static website I mean you don't need to actually don't recommend setting a WordPress you don't need to worry about the - you just get your product up there let people know what it is and be able to take money for

5:08it don't worry about the licensing the all these stuff that goes along with it just take money and get get some momentum going so that's what I did I stuck up a three page website on Amazon s3 it was fast I took payments from a junkie for five dollars a month so it took me five dollars to launch this business plus the $50 for the 99designs logo so first month sells $622 as a person that has worked there most of their life on fixed income whenever you make anything over that fixed income it is amazing you're like wow I'm so used to living on the sixth income and now I have extra money

5:57I can do all these things with it so it was really that feeling of making those cells and it was addictive I was like alright I gotta keep working on this and keep going forward my conversion rate was horrible is 10.16 which is laughable but anyway what I did is I was like alright well I've got this theme let's release that and then focus back on plugins because if I can build this one maybe I can build more plugins and work on a quantity method that was my initial thought I released the theme it did around it it was not good it did around 3,000 I eventually shut it down

6:42I considered more plugins but after I spoke to people they were like just keep working on what you've got keep you know doubling down on it basically and what I learned during this process is that the WordPress plug-in and theme market is is incredible right now okay so basically WordPress as everybody knows is open source it is used from enterprise to education to small businesses to mom and pops people need support they need support they need something that works it's kind of the red hat model here you know you the red hat basically the software's free but if you need support they're gonna charge you for it so I

7:27discovered that people need support and it was an underserved market so it's funny I actually had to go back and look through the micro preneur academy forums and I kind of reach out my memory and this is a quote for me it kind of hit me during I guess the third month or so these concepts that have been learning in the academy we're all starting to come together so you got a market you got a product and everything was just starting to flow and this was one of my quotes from them and this baby if ever met anybody saying what about Bob you know it's kind of baby steps and that's

8:07kind of my philosophy is that I was just taking small steps and learning how to do all this stuff and breaking it down into bite-sized chunks and progressing so as things started to go I started obviously applying some of these techniques I did price testing package testing asking for blog post trying marketplaces a be testing I did that a little too early I didn't really quite have the traffic at the time to do that I started testing ads and affiliate programs and then really just started to expand my marketing reach and seeing what worked and what didn't work here's my growth for the first year this major first spike was me doubling

8:57my price and the second spike was me adding packages and as I was doing this I was learning and I was figuring out what worked and what didn't work and it was kind of funny because every month since then really if I had a plateau I'd be like all right I'm done is it's plateaued out let me shift focus on something else but every time I read back to the market and do more marketing efforts I grow last month was a record month for me so this is something you want to avoid so I had considered multiple times building more plugins building a hosted version and I actually got caught in the

9:43trap I built my platform to sell the plug-in and I was like well I can sell this to people who want to build plugins and sell it I launched it last month I had 80 people sign up and I was bombarded with questions I did not have time to answer them so I was like I'm shutting it down and I'm just gonna continue to focus on what's making me money right now and I might come back to this in the future but what's important is if something's working stick with it and keep going forward all right how did I do it with a day job that's probably

10:16the biggest question so I was really focused at night I would work three or four hours my daughter was just being born at the time so I had the time and I would focus on the weekends and the biggest thing is I wouldn't dick around I mean I would open up and get on tasks and get stuff done unlike Jesse I had a lowest low stress day job I work for the state and 35 hours a week is full-time and of those about 20 hours is work so it's quite nice and again I just focused and I did baby steps so I use a software called work flowing and the way I do it

11:01is I take and I develop goals and then of those goals I develop basically how I'm gonna reach those goals and then I break it down the task and I really try to every time I sit down I know what I'm working on it's not like I'm blind I know where I'm going and that helps me stay focused and helps me get done stuff that I needed done in little time all right why do I still have a day job so obviously I think it was Mike said we do this stuff for our families and to help you know us be provide for our families so I let my wife quit her

11:44job she was commuting about an hour and a half a day she finally has had another job which is awesome she works for one of the best schools in the state now and I we bought a house so my mortgage loan guy was like don't quit your job you need you'll never get a house so we bought a house about three months ago also it allows me to make mistakes so if I sometimes I run av-test and I lose three or four thousand a month you know like I don't sweat it because I do have some income coming in I still learn I'm still learning grammar approach

12:25I'm still learning how to how to do this so it's definitely a journey and obviously I don't like risk and at this point I do plan to quit I'm just getting my runway built up and how can you do it the key is to find your niche and it's not wish it just with plugins it's anything you do find your niche there's niches and themes the niches and your SAS business find it and figure out what it is and focus on that for plugins or themes release a free version and get feedback be the best in your space launch effect about a year after I develop my plugin release their numbers

13:10and I was beating them by about twenty or thirty percent I'm a one-man I'm a one-man team there are 20 team per 20 people team out of New York City so that was quite a win for me I thought never stop learning and don't forget to smell the roses because it's it's definitely so much celebrate your small wins and enjoy the ride because it's ongoing thanks for listening to my story you [Music]