Lessons Learned Building a WordPress Plugin Business to $10k/Month – Phil Derksen

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0:15all right thanks everyone my name is Phil Dirksen and this talk is for you if you're still at a day job or consulting gig and you're trying to get that first 5 to 10k a month to buy your buy out your time and your you're open to selling WordPress plugins as a way to get there so for me this was recently I got to this point late last year and recently quit my day job so okay thank you and I couldn't have done it also without this community Robin Mike the Academy this this whole thing so I hope most of it to that so I'm gonna go right

1:04into coming up I so free premium plug-in is the way to go as far as what I work for me so it works because you're just going to get a lot of traction in the WordPress WordPress that art forms and if you give that up you're giving up a huge traffic channel so and getting ideas there is it's the same place you go through the forums what are people requesting what are the issues what are the pain points they have you can scour the forums and get that and and that's you know and there's another tool called searchwp plugins calm is just more advanced search but that is that's what

1:47I recommend of getting ideas and you want to for your ideal target customer you want to really consider the b2b verse b2p the prosumers you it can work with the prosumer it's it's like to do it yourselfers like they're setting up their own site maybe they're not real technical little more price sensitive but that can work it's just it's a different route that my first my first plug-in was b2p and the free to pay conversion rates between those two it's just going to be a longer road gonna have more support down the road that kind of thing to give me an example so a couple guys here you can talk to WP

2:33migrate D beats Brad - nard here's an attendee his his and coming soon it's John Turner he did an attendee talk last year both those guys have really B to be focused plugins and and it's worked well for them and they're they're way past where I'm at in my point so there's like freelancers agencies consultants those are those are an e-commerce would also fit that bill those are the B to B type plugins everyone else is kind of the other the other category so like general plugins like photo galleries and social media plugins or those are the types of plugins I should say that would fit that

3:21category and my own Pinterest related plugins the same thing so just ask yourself does it does your plug-in salt like is there a direct way to relate are you saving them time or money or making the money or saving them time with your plug-in directly can they directly quantify that so here's some numbers of my plugins so my first one is the longer ones of the pin it's been around longer are the Pinterest plugins there's the free plugins it's so the free plug-in itself has 30,000 active installs right now and you know quite a bit more downloads but you'll see it's only 35% of my sales my stripe plug-in only 2000

4:09plus but you'll see 65% my sales so there's just a comparison there so ideal plug-in types if you can don't mess with theme out but don't mess with the front-end and let me qualify this that a lot of plugins that is their job and all three of my plugins right now do this but if you can't have but if you can't if you can't avoid it because of the niche you're going after or the idea you're going after it's going to save you quite a bit of support load down the road and and the reason is it's there's just an infinite number of WordPress themes out there are

4:50customized tweaked so as soon as you're changing around any kind of the front-end HTML CSS JavaScript that's that's just there's a lot of support it can work it's just that's just a suggestion well WP migrate DB so that just transfers database records and coming soon and so that's just on the back end there's no front end messing with front end at all coming soon he's overriding the whole front end with his you know he's he's taking over the front there's an email opt-in or whatever but he's getting rid of the theme so to speak and so there's a lot of other good ideas like this that don't mess with the front

5:30end and that's email notifications payment gateways are a big one in the WordPress community so launching your first plugin get it I suggest to get it out real quick I mean and you can because you're building on a framework one two three months development stops keep the settings real simple don't do anything any fancy UI stuff in the settings just real simple options use there you know there's a lot of built-in UI elements that you can just use that already WordPress provides for you skip custom tables and post types if possible so these are very useful things to do in plugins down the road and you might even

6:16need them for what you're working on but it does add a lot of development time and if that first free plugin that you get out there can avoid that it's just gonna be out there much quicker so I have Pinterest plugins a stripe check out plug-in and I have a Google Calendar plug-in and the works the data for all those that I'm pulling and Pinterest I'm pulling all their stuff through their API with stripe I'm storing everything on strike I'm not storing anything in my Kress database right now even in the Pro plugin right now even though that's that might be coming Google calendar I have

6:57custom post types but there which is a way of storing in WordPress but all the calendar data is people you know it's their Google Calendar I'm not storing all that stuff in my own custom tables for a calendar so so here is my first plugin was simply a Pinterest pin a button and I went to Pinterest and there's the embed code that they give you and there's a few options that you don't see on here but it people so the last point there was don't make users edit code or FTP so just even though you know we're all a lot of us here don't mind doing this

7:39opening up code plunking this in there changing a few things most your users even other developers would love to skip this step and that was my first plugin I just took this put in some settings and the settings page put it out there and that's what got the ball rolling so and yet even as developer myself if I can avoid actually going to editing the code I'd prefer that too so so launching your first free plugin the readme text is your landing page it's what's going to come up when people search in the admin and when they're searching on Google because it's hosted on wordpress.org you

8:17can you can also add plug-in banner intro video screencast to that and building your mailing list from day one I've done this with all my free plugins you can just you can plop it somewhere in the settings and just start collecting those those email addresses build up to your launch and you later on you can change that to an upsell to your paid plugin just ship it get it out there quickly don't spend a ton of time talking well you can get it out there quickly and only talk to a few people or respond to a few things but what's going to happen is once you get that simple

8:55free plugin out there then you'll start getting people using it and responding in the forums there and then you can start engaging with them there get you know ideas on how to proceed yeah and just keep responding in the forums fix bugs if you need to and then for the folks that are happy with your plugin and you just ask for review straight out so there's reviews built in and if you get those reviews coming in then that's gonna just get you that much farther along quicker and if you oh you can reach out to other WordPress sites say hey here's my my new free plug and

9:35get written up a lot of a lot of sites out there in the community I'd like to do that and and so let's say you're not getting these responses in the forum's you're not getting downloads that kind of thing then now you've only spent a month creating this right so now let's let's pivot maybe maybe you don't even have to launch a whole new plugin maybe you slightly tweak it rename it change around the readme copy that kind of thing here's some of the settings page examples the top on the top left that's in my G Cal plug-in which is currently in the free stage right now there's no

10:11pro plugin yet but I'm building up the list it's just something above some settings in there you know get notified when features are really it's real simple maybe I could work on that deadline but it's it's working so on the bottom left is my striped check out my free stripe check out plug-in what you see when you go to the settings it's on the right side sidebar it's just listing off some features they get if they upgrade and and upselling them straight to call to action straight to straight to the to my site where I sell it and that is probably around half a third a half of my traffic it's coming

10:48from that so again Brad's WP migrate DB this is his free plug-in settings he I like what he did here probably gonna steal it soon he is not he's he's getting you on an email list opting you in and sending you a discount code for the upgrade all-in-one there and and he's pre filling the email because the person's logged in so great idea I'm gonna go through this quickly but building your first paid plugin hire developer and hire support and this is gonna vary from person to person whether you're developed or not but if you can invest in this early and get this ball rolling then your then

11:30your day-to-day tasks later on especially for support are it's just gonna be out of the way and you can push the business forward I hired a developer partway through I've hired several but I did partway through my free plugins after I got it started at least on my first one and then said okay so you want to sell on your own sales site all right in my opinion there are marketplaces out there code Canyon and whatnot that worked for some people but you'd have to bring the price down they take a big cut all that kind of stuff it was worked for me it's a little more

12:06work but if you set it up on real WordPress hosting and what I mean by that is like managed wordpress hosting WP engine page ly those kinds of hosts you're gonna pay more but the admin tasks are taken care of for you if you get cheap shared WordPress hosting which works for simple landing pages that you guys might have done that's fine but not this is gonna be processing distributing your license to your license key I mean your plug-in your license keys and so on so you need something good and and get these admin tasks out of the way don't spend time on them they have staging

12:41sites automatic backups all that kind of stuff you still want to worry about that stuff so easy digital downloads is a plug-in itself that you that is the e-commerce plug-in to sell I just just use it it's good it works for me it works for some other guys here it has basically out of the box you can start accepting payments with PayPal stripe you can dish out license keys people can get the updates from your site using that license key and it just gets better and better and keep that mailing list form that you've been building it while while you're developing this you know send them stuff help you know what's

13:14coming that kind of stuff build up the launch alright so tasks to skip until 5k ish okay so these all these might help and they probably do at some point I'm starting to test some of these but I don't think you need to do them to get to that that first that first milestone so you're policing license keys in stolen code this might become a problem later on but you can't worry about anybody stealing all your code reselling it whatever that kind of stuff it it's probably not going to happen there might be something that installs on way more servers and they they they bought but

13:57you know you can you can track down some of that if you want but you should not spend time on that and some of these other things paid acquisition retargeting a be testing it if you're spending too much time on that then you're not getting the plug-in out fast enough and remember that this is for people that are doing this on the side or very limited time to if you have the time maybe you want to do this the beginning so more than a little content marketing this is I'm sure this is a good idea later on and I want to start doing more of it but I didn't I found

14:31myself spending way too much typing a blog post or didn't have you know I'm already spending on a developer and support wasn't ready to hire a good writer you know those those kind of things affiliate program people always ask and I have one set up because it's easy but it I've never really made a whole lot from it up to this point start simple get it out there target ideal plug-in types let's see B to B over B to B P if possible scour the forums pivot if you need to and get good managed hosting and setup easy digital downloads and if you wanna hear more of my back story

15:11I was just on startups with the rest of us a few weeks ago check that out and if you want to talk more plugin like MVP ideas and such catch me after and or if you're past that stage or you want to know what happens after myself and some other guys and or if you want to talked about selling your plugin or adopting acquiring so thanks everyone you