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So You Want to Sell a Theme or Plugin (WordCamp Atlanta 2013)
1. So You Want to Sell a
WordPress Theme or
Plugin
Dave Donaldson
Co-founder
Max Foundry
2. Things That Make You Go Hmmm
• Going to pose a lot of questions
• Hard lessons learned
• The goal is to make you think
3. Things We’ve Built
Themes Plugins
Liftoff MaxLanding
Venture MaxSales
Marketeer MaxSqueeze
Tenenbaum MaxA/B
Folio MaxButtons
Panorama MaxButtons Pro
MaxInbound
MaxGalleria
4. Things We’ve Actually Sold
Themes Plugins
Liftoff MaxLanding
Venture MaxSales
Marketeer MaxSqueeze
Tenenbaum MaxA/B
Folio MaxButtons
Panorama MaxButtons Pro
MaxInbound
MaxGalleria
5. Things We Never Released
Themes Plugins
Liftoff MaxLanding
Venture MaxSales
Marketeer MaxSqueeze
Tenenbaum MaxA/B
Folio MaxButtons
Panorama MaxButtons Pro
MaxInbound
MaxGalleria
6. Things We Currently Sell
Themes Plugins
Liftoff MaxLanding
Venture MaxSales
Marketeer MaxSqueeze
Tenenbaum MaxA/B
Folio MaxButtons
Panorama MaxButtons Pro
MaxInbound
MaxGalleria
7. Congratulations
• You can maybe design a bit…
• …and can write some code to go with it…
• …and you can do it in your parents’ basement.
• Sweet! You’re gonna be filthy rich!
9. Things to Know Up Front
• Themes:
– It’s a commodities market
– All about great design
– Lots of competition
– Extremely hard to stand out from the crowd
– Many companies compete on price
10. Things to Know Up Front
• Plugins:
– Not quite the commodity that themes are
– Only a few plugin-only companies
– Much easier to find a niche
– A little easier to stand out from the crowd
– Need to have the engineering chops
11. Things to Know Up Front
• What people are really buying is support
and upgrades
• You are always competing with free
15. Support
• Don’t bother charging for your product if you
aren’t going to offer support
• How long will you offer it? 1 year? Forever?
• Is it 24/7 or only between certain hours?
16. Support
• Do customers have to activate a license key to
get support?
• Did you build that into the product?
• Don’t underestimate how long this will take to
implement and test
17. Support
• Email
– Fine to start, but doesn’t scale
– Email is already hard to stay on top of
– What email address?
– Yours or a support alias?
18. Support
• Phone
– Maybe for priority (paid) support only?
– What number will people call? Your cell?
– Google Voice is good for this
19. Support
• Forums
– Might be best to go this route first
– bbPress is good for this
– Or maybe an external service like ZenDesk
– Is it publicly available or for paid customers
only?
– If for paid customers, you’ll need to integrate
the forum software with your e-commerce
software
21. Pricing
• Try to avoid competing on price
• How much will you charge?
• Will you use tiered pricing?
• What about multisite pricing?
• Ask potential customers how much they’d be
willing to pay
22. Pricing
• You must consider the costs of supporting
your product for a customer who uses it on
multiple sites.
• Example: each site might use different plugins
that cause different conflicts with your plugin.
That gets expensive to support.
24. Marketing
• How will you drive traffic to your site?
– Email
– Social Media
– Adwords
– SEO
– WordPress.org
25. Marketing
• Email
– Very important
– Can be very effective
– Collect email addresses ASAP
– Have you ever run an email campaign?
– Use MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, etc
26. Marketing
• Social Media
– Can help raise visibility
– Time your posts properly
– Should NOT be your only marketing
– If Twitter is your marketing strategy, good
luck with that
27. Marketing
• Adwords
– Ever run an Adwords campaign?
– It’s an art all by itself
– And extremely time-consuming
– And can get expensive
– Know that Google always wants you to
spend more money
28. Marketing
• SEO
– Takes time for Google to grant you authority
– The more quality backlinks the better
– Avoid doing scammy things
– Identify your major keywords
– Use tools like HitTail to help you
29. Marketing
• WordPress.org
– Utilize its high search engine ranking
– Build a slimmed-down free version and put
it into the repo
– The free version helps you gain traction
– Then upsell your paid version within the
free version
31. Branding
• For many people it’s an afterthought
• Think about your branding early
• Affects all of your marketing
32. Branding
• Max Foundry:
– Plugin names intentionally start with “Max”
– Plugin websites all look similar, yet different
– Same with the plugin logos
34. Auto Updates
• No worries for plugins in the wordpress.org
Plugin Repository
• Commercial plugins require more work
• Critical to customers because they expect it
– It’s part of what they paid for
35. Auto Updates
• A couple options:
1. Roll your own
– Lots of work, tedious
– Code on the internet, Google it
2. Use WP Updates
– Makes it very easy
– Not free
36. Auto Updates
• WP Updates – 3 easy steps
1. Upload your plugin version
2. Download updater class
3. Add 2 lines of code
37. Auto Updates
• WP Updates – 1 gotcha
– Version numbers
– 1.10.0 should be more recent than 1.9.2
– But not in WP Updates
