Podcasts about paid memberships pro

In a recent episode of the WP Minute+ podcast, Matt Medeiros sat down with Kim Coleman, co-founder of Paid Memberships Pro, to discuss the often-challenging topic of raising prices for WordPress plugins. Kim shared valuable insights into why WordPress companies should consider price increases, how her team prepared for the change, and the market's reaction to the move.Kim emphasized the importance of finding the right balance between providing value to customers and ensuring the long-term sustainability of your business. By carefully considering pricing strategies and communicating changes effectively, WordPress companies can successfully navigate price increases while maintaining customer loyalty.As the WordPress ecosystem continues to evolve, plugin and theme developers must adapt their pricing strategies to remain competitive and support their ongoing development efforts. Kim Coleman's experiences with Paid Memberships Pro serve as a valuable case study for WordPress professionals looking to make informed decisions about their own pricing models.Key Takeaways for WordPress Professionals:Regularly evaluate pricing against inflation, market competitors, and your target audienceSlowly increase prices over time to avoid a significant jump that may deter customersAlign pricing with the value your product provides and the type of customer you want to attractExperiment with different pricing models, such as introductory pricing, to find the best fit for your productCommunicate price changes to customers in advance, honoring legacy prices and offering a grace periodConsider offering an enterprise-level plan to cater to larger organizations and agenciesDiversify your marketing efforts by attending events outside the WordPress community to reach a broader audienceImportant URLs Mentioned:Paid Memberships Pro: https://www.paidmembershipspro.com/LifterLMS: https://lifterlms.com/Kim Coleman on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ColemanK83 ★ Support this podcast ★

Jason Coleman shares insights on launching a consulting business, developing an open-source plugin, and balancing work and life. The post Entrepreneurship Money and Life with Jason Coleman Cofounder of Paid Memberships Pro appeared first on LMScast.

Kim Coleman is co-founder of Stranger Studios, a creative team of 15 people that build open source technology and produce digital content to help people get paid. Our flagship product, Paid Memberships Pro, is used by over 90,000 WordPress sites to manage their members, protect premium content, and charge recurring subscriptions. Kim's experience in product development and digital marketing refined a deep understanding of the stages in a business life cycle, from the seed of an idea to maturity and commercialization of the technology. She applies this knowledge by helping other entrepreneurs focus on the right problems at the right time. Key Moments [06:19] Balancing work and home life flexibly. [07:04] Flexible work allows chores and personal time. [10:41] Desire to travel, but tied to computer. [14:57] Passionate commitment to open source over profit. [17:07] Positive feedback on a free plug-in for channels. Find Kim Online https://www.paidmembershipspro.com https://sitewidesales.com https://www.strangerstudios.com https://twitter.com/colemank83 If you're enjoying Entrepreneur's Enigma, please give us a review on the podcast directory of your choice. We're on all of them and these reviews really help others find the show. GoodPods: https://gmwd.us/goodpods iTunes: https://gmwd.us/itunes Podchaser: https://gmwd.us/podchaser Also, if you're getting value from the show and want to buy me a coffee, go to the show notes to get the link to get me a coffee to keep me awake, while I work on bringing you more great episodes to your ears. →  https://gmwd.us/buy-me-a-coffee Follow Seth Online: Seth | Digital Marketer (@s3th.me) • Instagram: Instagram.com/s3th.me Seth Goldstein | LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/in/sethmgoldstein Seth On Mastodon: https://s3th.me/@pch Seth's Marketing Junto Newsletter: https://MarketingJunto.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There's a solid batch of headlines this week that I think you'll find interesting before you head out to WordCamp US next week.Speaking of, if you're headed to WordCamp next week, be sure to say hi! I'd love to hear more about your experiences with the WP Minute and any feedback you might have. The entire WP Minute squad will be there like Me, Eric, and Raquel.Equalize Digital is blasting off into outer space — literally!NASA selected Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker for automated accessibility testing in WordPress. To make reports easier to understand for non-developers, Equalize Digital developed the front-end highlighting feature. This feature adds a “view on page” link to each issue in Accessibility Checker's reports that, when clicked, takes users to the public view of the web page, highlights the element with a dashed pink box around it, and shows a panel explaining the issue and how to fix it.The WP Community Collective Successfully Funds the First Fellowship for the WordPress Contributor Community.The WP Community Collective is proud to announce the successful funding and launch of their inaugural Fellowship program, the WPCC Accessibility Fellowship. Long-term WordPress contributor Alex Stine was selected by the WPCC as the inaugural Accessibility Fellow as a result of his expertise in accessibility and seven years of experience as a WordPress contributor.group.one strengthens WordPress commitment with acquisition of BackWPup.WordPress plugin BackWPup is joining group.one, along with two newly acquired plugins Adminimize and Search & Replace, adding to the group's growing WordPress ecosystem. group.one acquired the three WordPress plugins with a combined base of more than 1.1 million users from German WordPress agency Inpsyde GmbH, bolstering the group's WordPress offering alongside flagship products WP Rocket, Imagify and Rank Math SEO.The Make Team announced a new Blocks page on WordPress.org intending to be a strong starting point for visitors looking to see what blocks can do within WordPress and beyond.Citing the original Github ticket created back in March 2023 from Ben Greeley “Currently, there isn't a page on wordpress.org that explains in a compelling way what ‘Blocks' are or markets it very effectively on the website. We have a filter in the plugin directory, which is useful, but that page is lacking the context of what blocks are, what the block editor is, and why it is so exciting. “My First Million podcast, co-hosted by Sam Parr the founder of TheHustle.co now owned by Hubspot, interviews Awesome Motive founder Syed Bahlki.2023 has drawn a lot of criticism around AM's products and how WP Beginner leverages it's content juggernaut for their products. I thought it was important to include an interview with Syed that didn't revolve around WordPress, but to understand his approach to business and life.We have some fresh new content on the WP Minute!This week Eric Karkovack wrote about what he's looking forward to experience at WordCamp US next week.I sat down with Paid Memberships Pro founder Kim Coleman to help me understand how she uses ChatGPT for her content and marketing needs. ★ Support this podcast ★

I've been skeptical about the AI tools I see emerging in my Twitter feed.So many of my WordPress friends are using these tools to code, write articles, build websites, and even develop their own AI products. But I've been struggling to catch on. Until I saw a thread from Kim Coleman in Post Status about her success with better prompts in ChatGPT.So like any podcasters would do — I invited her on the show to learn more.The Right Prompts Unlock AI's PotentialBoth Matt and Kim initially struggled to get good results from ChatGPT and similar AI tools. They found the content too generic and not helpful for their WordPress needs. The breakthrough came when they learned to craft detailed, structured prompts to give the AI more context. Instead of just saying “summarize this blog post,” they give background like: “You are an expert WordPress content creator. Summarize this blog post in a conversational tone for our podcast listeners.” Kim shares prompts she uses to turn video transcripts into step-by-step tutorials, and to turn technical changelog notes into readable blog posts. Carefully shaping the prompt helps the AI stay on track.Trying New AI Tools Yields Mixed ResultsMatt has had more success using Claude.ai instead of ChatGPT to generate show notes by giving it two separate interview transcripts. The key is uploading both transcripts at once so the AI doesn't confuse information between interviews. Kim experimented with some tools like ContentScale and others where you fill out forms instead of chatting. She didn't find these as effective as crafting her own prompts in a chat interface. They agree that graphic and video AI tools like Midjourney are not yet ready for marketing assets, though they see potential in the future.AI's Role in WordPress' FutureThere is some debate around integrating AI directly into WordPress products. If it's just a basic tool that pastes in text, it may not add much value and could even backfire if it provides bad results. More complex integrations like LifterLMS using AI as a “coach” to guide course creation show more promise. This takes into account the human goals instead of just spitting out generic content. Matt and Kim agree responsible humans are still needed to oversee AI tools, but they will likely continue shaping parts of the WordPress workflow. Using the right prompts unlocks the benefits while avoiding potential downsides.Important linksHere are the important links we mention throughout the conversation: ChatGPT (chat.openai.com) Claude AI (claude.ai) ContentScale (contentscale.com) Midjourney (midjourney.com) Canva (canva.com) LifterLMS (lifterlms.com) Paid Memberships Pro (paidmembershipspro.com) The WP Minute Podcast (thewpminute.com) ★ Support this podcast ★

There are a lot of exciting features coming to WordPress 6.3 which will set the tone for the next few years of our favorite CMS.We'll explore the upcoming state of this new release and provide some thoughts on which demographic of WordPress user it's shaping to serve. As always, please share this on social and be sure to join the newsletter.The Not-So-Nice Side of the WordPress CommunityThe WordPress community, like any other, has its share of negative behaviors and incidents. While the majority of the community is supportive and positive, there are instances of abuse and misconduct that can't be ignored.Several recent incidents highlight the issue: Mika Epstein, a member of the WordPress Plugin Review team, faced abusive behavior from plugin developers; Raiber Cristian, a WordPress developer, decided to stop offering free support on WordPress.org due to abusive behavior; and WordCamp Dhaka was cancelled due to concerns about corporate influence and favoritism.The author suggests that the community needs to police itself, support each other, and stay informed about abusers. They also suggest that more concrete rules could be part of the solution, but acknowledge the challenges in enforcing them and the potential for unfairness.Read the original articleAccessibility expert Adrian Roselli sued for wanting accessibility to be accessibleAdrian Roselli, a well-known accessibility expert, is being sued by AccessiBe, a company that provides automated accessibility solutions. The lawsuit is in response to Roselli's criticism of AccessiBe's product.Roselli's main argument is that automated tools like AccessiBe's cannot fully ensure a website's accessibility and may give a false sense of compliance, potentially leading to legal issues for the website owners.The lawsuit has sparked a backlash from the web accessibility community, with many viewing it as an attempt to silence valid criticism and discussion about the effectiveness of automated accessibility tools.Read the original articleVox media drops its own CMSIt stopped licensing Chorus to external publishers last year, per Adweek, but continued to use it to power its own network of over a dozen digital media sites.The company still owns other tech products, including Concert, its advertising platform, and Coral, the commenting platform it acquired in 2019. But moving forward, monetizing its own audience engagement will become a bigger focus.Vox Media will move its own websites off of Chorus and into WordPress VIP, the enterprise arm of the 20-year-old CMS company.Read the original articleUse ChatGPT to Generate Group Conversation Topics for Your Online CommunityThe article discusses how AI, specifically OpenAI's ChatGPT, can be used to generate conversation topics for various online communities, including those focused on Brie cheese lovers, video game wiki writers, backyard gardeners, and digital nomad business owners.The author emphasizes the importance of a well-crafted prompt in generating relevant and engaging conversation topics. Being clear and specific in communicating what you want from the AI greatly improves the chances of getting a useful response.The article also promotes Paid Memberships Pro, a WordPress plugin for building and managing online communities. The plugin allows users to sell free and paid subscriptions to their community and offers a variety of add-ons and integrations designed for community websites.Read the original articleLinks from the grab bagJeff Matson has officially joined Pressable's marketing teamSyed Bahlki defends WordPress with a $1M wagerWPCoffeeTalk: Going deeper with Bluehost new WondersuiteWatch the 6.3 product demo ★ Support this podcast ★

Paid Memberships Pro is the lifeblood of my main product offering, The Podcast Liftoff Playbook. So in this first bit of 2023, I want to tell you everything I love about the plugin, and why I thought it best for my membership/learning site.This clip is brought to you by Paid Memberships Pro ★ Support this podcast ★

Paid Memberships Pro is the lifeblood of my main product offering, The Podcast Liftoff Playbook. So in this first bit of 2023, I want to tell you everything I love about the plugin, and why I thought it best for my membership/learning site. This clip is brought to you by Paid Memberships Pro

Paid Memberships Pro is the lifeblood of my main product offering, The Podcast Liftoff Playbook. So in this first bit of 2023, I want to tell you everything I love about the plugin, and why I thought it best for my membership/learning site.This clip is brought to you by Paid Memberships Pro Get your FREE copy of my Automations Library ★ Support this podcast ★

The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 16th January 2023.

The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 16th January 2023.

Escuchar en iTunes Escuchar en iVoox Escuchar en Spotify En el episodio 345 de WordPress Semanal hablamos de Paid Memberships Pro. Seguramente el plugin gratuito más completo para crear webs de membresías. Resuelvo las 7 dudas más frecuentes sobre su uso y posibilidades. ¿Cuál es el plugin gratuito más popular para crear membresías? ¿Dónde está […] La entrada 345 | El mejor plugin gratuito para crear webs de membresía: resolviendo dudas frecuentes es una artículo de Gonzalo Navarro.

This week I sat down again with Eric Karkovack to talk about the three top WordPress stories on the top of our minds. Independently, we made nearly the same selections! It seems the temporary loss of active install stats at WP.org has created an opportunity to rethink long-held assumptions and find new ways forward. Our news picks are all related to this in one way or another. So there's a single throughline in this episode — what works, what doesn't, and what will take WordPress businesses forward in the product, agency, and hosting spaces.Are Active Install Counts Irrelevant to Your Plugin Business's Success? (Even if they were accurate?)There are always going to be developers who push the envelope when it comes to littering the dashboard and just making it a difficult user experience. Maybe data is part of the way we solve that.Eric KarkovacFirst up is Alex Denning's article at Ellipsis, "WordPress.org is ineffective for plugin distribution in 2022." Alex argues the likely temporary loss of Active Install Growth data for plugin owners is not a bottom-line, business-relevant concern. Apart from the revelation that that data itself was not just obfuscated and inexact but "basically garbage," Alex draws on Ellipsis' marketing experience and extensive data (as well as Iain Poulson's insights at WP Trends) to show 1-2% conversion rates are the norm for plugins in the WP.org repository. Only a couple of big players can crack the 100k+ install tiers today.The Plugin Repo's Glass CeilingAlex notes this "glass ceiling" has a lot to do with how the repo's search algorithm works. It's biased to favor plugins that have many active installs already, so if you're not there yet, it's not going to help you get there. As a result of these observations, Alex disrecommends the plugin repo for anyone thinking about launching a business there on the freemium model. He considers WP.org a poor distribution channel and assumes the freemium product model's fate is tied to it. On that point, we're doubtful and optimistic about exceptions and opportunities for plugin developers to make their own way, with or without the repo.While Eric and I don't fully agree with Alex, his data-based analysis does establish that the plugin repository is "broken" if it's intended to be a place where a small entrepreneur with a good product can break in and take off.Let's Fix What's Broken (The Plugin Repo) Not What Isn't (The Freemium Model)Matt Cromwell politely disagrees with Alex in a long, thoughtful post of his own: The Case for the WordPress Plugin Freemium Model. (There's a great Post Status Slack thread on it too.) In it, Matt describes ways plugin owners can make the wp.org plugin search engine work better for them, but he also notes a few of its deficiencies as well. His best point is that an average conversion rate is just that — an average. He's seen much better results due to marketing efforts he feels are accessible to many plugin vendors. Matt also points to examples of successful freemium plugin shops, like Paid Memberships Pro which recently did an A/B test with their pricing page, and the version with a freemium option converted better.Where Alex and Matt agree is how much the plugin repo has changed due to market saturation. It isn't an easy place to win in anymore. And I'm pretty sure Alex would agree with Matt this is true across the web as a whole — you can expect to have to work hard with stiff competition and give high attention to Google as well — not to mention all the other things that go into making and supporting a good product.Ideas for Improving the WordPress.org Plugin RepositoryEric and I also discussed the excellent suggestions for useful, actionable data that product owners — and even agencies — would like from a new, improved plugin directory. Vito Peleg's ideas are especially exciting and seemed to draw a nod from Matt Mullenweg on Twitter. We also note how better data for plugin owners might satisfy some needs that historically have led them to try all kinds of (often unpleasant) gimicks in the WordPress backend to connect with users and upsell or cross-market their products. In a comment at Post Status this week, Justin Labadie imagines how this could work as part of the plugin install process, along with other suggestions. Eric connected this line of thinking with Mark Zahra's question in a recent post at WP Mayor, Is Deceptive Marketing Ruining WordPress' Reputation?Plugin Developers Must Make Their Own WayEric asked (and answered) a big question at the WP Minute: What should plugin developers expect from WordPress? You've got to make your own way is a message I agree with, and I brought up my conversation with Till Krüss about Performance and the Plugin Business as an example of all the possibilities that open up if you think about meeting big needs nobody else is meeting or solving big problems others are creating!Follow the Leaders, Adopt StandardsWhere we end up is 10up's newly released resource site for Gutenberg Best Practices. It's got tutorials, resources, references, example code — and they're encouraging use of their GitHub discussion board for the site. It's intended to go beyond the official WordPress documentation, according Fabian Kaegy's launch announcement. It's a “more client-services-centric approach tailored to engineering enterprise-level editorial experiences.”To me, that's a signal WordPress has turned a corner with Gutenberg. Top agency adoption of Gutenberg is huge, and as we see a growing body of accumulated knowledge, standards, and best practices emerging, it signals and amplifies a wave of change.Building Products to Scale Opens Doors and Creates Opportunities for GrowthToward the end of the show I suggest that plugin developers (as well as agencies) targeting middle and low-end markets have tended to neglect standards around performance testing and security because their customers don't need to scale and because they can treat performance and security as a hosting problem. That's a barrier to accessing high-value enterprise clients, hosts, and agencies connected to both. It represents lost opportunities and money left on the table.

Cómo crear un podcast Premium de pago por suscripciónQué opciones hayCuánto cobrar Qué ofrecerCuándo hacerloMi experiencia¿Podcast de pago por 100€/mes con Newsletter o 500€/año? ¿Solo podcast? ¿Solo se accede al contenido que se publique desde que entres? FOMO. https://substack.com/ permite crear podcast de pago y newsletter.Que se escuchen en todas las plataformasSin publicidad.Exclusivos en mismo feed o en otro.Perdemos control si usamos plataformas.- Acceso a podcasts premium antes que nadie y después en abierto como hace El Sentido De La Birra con Ricardo Moya que está en Podimo.Audiencia actual: Spotify 40%. Apple Podcast 30%. Ivoox 17%. Google Podcast 8%. (YouTube más)¿Creo podcast nuevo de pago o episodios de pago en alguno actual?Siempre he dicho que hacia todo gratis. ¿Cambio de opinión?Ya probé SEO para Google pero nadie se apuntó en ivoox hace unos años.¿Cuáles son los beneficios exclusivos para suscriptores que puedo ofrecer?Si bien depende de ti, según tus objetivos y tiempo invertido, los beneficios pueden incluir acceso a contenido adicional, acceso anticipado al contenido, acceso a entrevistas exclusivas o una versión sin anuncios de tu contenido.PLATAFORMAS PARA CREAR PODCAST DE PAGO- Substack. MEJOR OPCIÓN. (we charge 10% and there is a credit card fee charged by Stripe): Se crea un rss distinto para cada suscriptor de pago y al suscribirte se te mandan los enlaces con acceso directo para cada app que uses con la que se añade ese rss con un click.Casi todo en inglés.- Anchor/Spotify: https://es.blog.anchor.fm/paid-subscriptions Obtén la mayor ganancia posible. Solo deja 1, 5 o 10€/mesEl programa de suscripciones más amigable para los creadores: sin tarifa anual ni tarifa por plataforma hasta 2023 (luego se cobra un 5%). Eso significa que recibirás el 100% de tus ingresos por suscripción (a excepción de las tarifas de procesamiento de pagos). Probar una nueva fuente de ingresos nunca ha sido tan fácil para los creadores.Si bien Spotify ofrece la suscripción y experiencia de escucha más fluidas, los oyentes tienen la opción de agregar una fuente RSS privada a su aplicación de reproducción preferida una vez que se hayan suscrito a tu programa.- Ivoox (5% del total de los apoyos recibidos, sobre los cuales hay que aplicar la comisión de la pasarela de pago y los impuestos correspondientes) Muestra 7 minutos de inicio de cada episodio. Solo acceso y pago con app de ivoox. ¿Widget para web?- Podimo: Audiencia joven. Reparten ingresos. Creciendo.- Mumbler (20% comisión RSS abierto y privado): Opción interesante.- Spreaker con Patreon poniendo cada episodio con acceso limitado. Patreon: Entre 5 y 12%. Además, tramitación del pago.Si tu podcast o episodio es de Acceso limitado, podrás compartir la URL para que los oyentes lo sintonicen desde Spreaker.com o desde un reproductor integrado de tu sitio web (desde una página a la que solo podrá acceder una audiencia específica. Membership site).Podrás copiar el enlace del acceso limitado desde la página de información básica mencionada anteriormente.Además, los oyentes podrán utilizar un feed RSS de acceso limitado especial en plataformas como Apple Podcasts o Pocket Casts.- Apple Podcast: Pago mensual o anual. Crear canal con acceso a varios podcasts. Red de podcasts. 14 días gratis. ¿Widget de pago? https://www.pushkin.fm/join-pushkinhttps://www.apple.com/es/newsroom/2021/06/apple-podcasts-subscriptions-and-channels-are-now-available-worldwide/https://podcasters.apple.com/Crear canal y luego abajo: Las suscripciones te permiten ofrecer a tus oyentes prestaciones especiales, como acceso anticipado, contenido extra o episodios de archivo.Tendrás que pagar una cuota anual de 19.99 EUR- Audio de Podcast en tu web con suscripción mediante membership site con Paid Membership Pro por ejemplo.WordPress con membersite site que accedan a los audios desde la web 1. MemberPress · 2. Restrict Content Pro · 3. OptinMonster · 4. WooCommerce Memberships · 5. Paid Memberships Pro · 6. S2 Member7. https://simple-membership-plugin.com/8. También WPForms de pago https://wpforms.com/how-to-accept-recurring-payments-on-your-wordpress-forms/PowerPress Podcasting plugin by BlubrrySeriously Simple PodcastingSmart Podcast PlayerPodlove Podcast PublisherSimple Podcast PressBuzzsprout PodcastingLibsyn Publisher Hub- Ivoox Originals, Amazon Audible exclusivos, Spotify...Me doy de alta en https://www.ivoox.com/podcasts-patrocinios-welcomeEnlaces recomendados:Prueba gratis Audible y escucha audiolibros desde https://borjagiron.com/audible Prueba Canva Pro 45 días gratis para crear diseños fácilmente: https://borjagiron.com/canva Hostinger: Mejor hosting WordPress al mejor precio: https://borjagiron.com/hostinger Semrush: Herramienta SEO y Marketing Digital todo en uno: https://borjagiron.com/semrush Sendinblue: Herramienta de Email Marketing: https://borjagiron.com/sendinblue Benchmark Email: Herramienta de Email Marketing: https://borjagiron.com/benchmark Manychat: Automatiza mensajes en Instagram: https://borjagiron.com/manychat Cursos Marketing Digital Gratis: https://triunfacontublog.com Blog: https://borjagiron.com

What if you locked yourself in a room and threw away the key to work on your business? Stop the Slacking, the doom scrolling, but forced to focus on the agenda of improving...everything. That's exactly what Kim Coleman, co-founder Paid Memberships Pro & Sitewide Sales, did to re-focus the Sitewide Sales business. Running a business of 2 core products, 14+ employees, and with her husband...it was time to "get away." If you enjoy today's episode, please share it on social media! Links Kim Coleman on Twitter Paid Memberships Pro Sitewide Sales Jason Coleman on Matt Report Support the show; Join our #linksquad membership ✨ Check out what InMotion hosting is up to with their new Managed WordPress product!

What if you locked yourself in a room and threw away the key to work on your business? Stop the Slacking, the doom scrolling, but forced to focus on the agenda of improving...everything. That's exactly what Kim Coleman, co-founder Paid Memberships Pro & Sitewide Sales, did to re-focus the Sitewide Sales business. Running a business of 2 core products, 14+ employees, and with her husband...it was time to "get away." If you enjoy today's episode, please share it on social media! Links Kim Coleman on Twitter Paid Memberships Pro Sitewide Sales Jason Coleman on Matt Report Support the show; Join our #linksquad membership ✨ Check out what InMotion hosting is up to with their new Managed WordPress product! ★ Support this podcast ★

Strattic was acquired by Elementor. Miriam Schwab, co-founder of Strattic writes: “Life is interesting – sometimes outcomes are obvious, and sometimes what ends up happening kind of blows our minds. When we set out to build Strattic, we expected to follow the usual path: raise Pre-Seed, Seed, A rounds etc. An exit was always on the table, but who knows when that would be or how that would look? It was hard to imagine.”Miriam Schwab Well, imagine no more as her team brings Jamstack to Elementor. A move that should add a lot of value and expertise to the cloud offering of Elementor. Stay subscribed to hear an interview with Miriam on this podcast. Julien Melissas tweeted that his company Craftpeak was acquired. Craftpeak is complete with web solutions for craft breweries. Good news! If you've been struggling with FSE, WordPress 6.1 is set to improve that experience, writes Sarah Gooding on the Tavern. See the roadmap for 6.1 and learn what's ahead…all the way to 2025?! Brian Coords continues to challenge the WordPress status quo over on MasterWP in two featured posts today. First, When the Cathedral Owns the Bazaar, a fresh take on the age-old dilemma: Automattic, a WordPress agency, and an open source ideology walk into a bar. Capping off his second post right here on The WP Minute, where he asks Where will the WordPress middle class go? Rebooting a concept that I wrote about a while back about the blue collar digital worker. Matt Cromwell and Lesley Sim have officially announced Glam That Plugin! Check out the announcement YouTube video where Lesley looks great and Matt…well he's Matt. The grab bag is back! And it's filled with threads! Kim Coleman co-founder of Paid Memberships Pro has an interesting thread on taking a product focus sabbatical. Matias Ventura added more commentary to the WCEU fireside chat with Mullenweg and Josepha Haden Chomposy. He also extended these thoughts around the admin experience in a Make WordPress post. Alan Sschlesser urges that theme.json is not the replacement we're hoping for in WordPress themes. Phil Crumm chops the head off of headless WordPress solutions. Stating that in terms of headless, “it's (WordPress) falling short.” Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today: Eric KarkovackDaniel SchutzsmithBirgit Pauli-HaackRaquel Landefeld

WordPress has made website building and design easy, giving everyone access to web development. With the ability to completely customize and leverage its theme and plugin ecosystem it's dominating the industry. Contributing to the opportunities with WordPress is Paid Memberships Pro, a complete WordPress Membership Plugin. Brand Manager, Patrick Rauland gives us an insight into growth marketing in the WordPress ecosystem and the role SEO and content marketing play in driving growth. Patrick reminds us of the powerful role of data in growth marketing and how we can leverage it to better support our buyers. 

"You shouldn't be the one to always take, you want to be the one to always give." —Mary JobIn this episode of Post Status Excerpt, David chats with special guest Mary Job. Mary is a remote, "nomad" worker in Africa who travels from city to city. She is an engineer with Paid Memberships Pro but also spends a large amount of time growing and stimulating the African WordPress community. Mary has helped start WP Africa, a site devoted to the community of WordPress users on the continent. She talks about challenges they face, compares the WordPress presence with Google in Africa, and looks forward to the day when there can be a WordCamp Africa.Also: Mary shares how she got involved in WordPress, and how appreciative she is of the giving nature of the WordPress community. David will have to figure out how to get Mary's invite to Matt.Browse past episodes from all our podcasts, and don't forget to subscribe to them on your favorite players. Post Status' Draft, Comments, and Excerpt podcasts are on Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, iTunes, Castro, YouTube, Stitcher, Player.fm, Pocket Casts, and Simplecast. (RSS)

In the News State of the Word 2021 happened this week. If you would like to hear the complete audio or read through the transcript from the live event check out the link over on the WPMinute. There is even a mega-thread of our favorite clips over on Twitter. GoDaddy covered the event as well including their own timestamps for the video stream. I have three takeaways from the event that I think are important: WordPress still wants more volunteers and contributorsGutenberg is bigger than WordPress The acquisition train is fueled by the influx of the larger tech economy Speaking of acquisitions: You may want some insight on how to approach selling your company. Check out Freemius' Gamechangers — where videos of some of the largest acquisitions in the WordPress space have occurred. The first interview in the series (from December 8th) is with Syed Balki from Awesome Motive. WPMinute Contributor Kim Coleman, co-founder of Paid Memberships Pro received 27 likes on her Twitter question on the Freemius account when they announced it: Is this the total list or are there any women in your series? I asked Vova for a comment leading into the inclusion of this article in today's episode: We are not happy about it either and take full responsibility for this mistake. We are going to rectify it. We already have Marieke from Yoast to join and are waiting to hear from additional female founders. The growth of WordPress Is Elementor the hero we asked for? Joost de Valk published the sixth iteration of his CMS market share analysis on his blog and found that the W3Techs tracked Elementor. It appears that much of the new growth for WordPress as a CMS is tied to Elementor since they are dependent on each other. Elementor sites cannot exist without WordPress, so they are tied to each other. But I think the conclusion is fair that of all those new sites being built with WordPress, a very large portion of them, is being built with Elementor. Events WordCamp US 2022 will be held in San Diego this September. No dates have been announced but you can sign up to be an organizer now. From Our Contributors and Producers WP Minute ecommerce correspondent Dave Rodenbaugh published his latest ecommerce minute discussing the issues with the supply chain. If you are waiting for products this week and want to understand the crisis better, go check out that episode. Can you still make a living building WordPress sites? This Tweet from Jack Forge got some traction on Twitter and many people responded about how WordPress is great for enabling people to make a decent living. There are some fantastic stories in that thread. Eric Karkovack does a recap of 2021 on SpeckyBoy. He covers the foundational shifts that we have seen in WordPress.

After appearing on the Post Status State of WordPress News roundtable, I felt like I had a bit more to say about my experience with WordPress news. WordPress news isn’t a heavily trafficked topic on the web. How does a publisher build more than just a side gig from putting out WordPress news? How do we define WordPress news? I asked Kim Coleman, co-founder of Paid Memberships Pro, to see if she had any questions around the topic and if she had any interest in recording a podcast episode about it. Thankfully she was willing to chat and share her questions and her opinions on how we do WordPress news. If you enjoy today’s episode, please say thanks to Kim on Twitter or consider becoming a supporting Producer here at The WP Minute! That's it for today's episode, if you enjoyed please share it on your social media, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser. Don't forget to share share share this episode with others and jump on the mailing list

Gutenberg, WordPress 3.8 Release, WooCommerce & Jetpack WordPress 5.8 is still marching along with modifications for release in July. Eighteen bugs and fixes were applied from Release 3 concentrating on polishing existing default themes, fixing bugs in the new block Widget screen, and squashing Editor bugs collected during beta. WPTavern posted a review of the Gutenberg 10 updates in the plugin. The Query and Query Loop blocks were renamed, hopefully clearing up all the confusion for end users. The Query Loop block has been renamed to Post Template to better represent its purpose within Query, whereas the Query block label now refers to it as Query Loop. I enjoyed Justin Tadlock's take on WordPress theme lock-in, in the block-era. “I do not necessarily see this as a Bad Thing. We have always had these little silos in the WordPress ecosystem, and they have mostly worked out.” WooCommerce News. The first release candidate is now available for WooCommerce 5. The planned release date is July 13. Jetpack launched a new mobile app. Automattic has launched a new mobile app for Jetpack, available on iOS and Android. The app features an array of Jetpack-specific features, including: Backups and restoresSecurity scanningActivity monitoringSite statsAnd more Security in the news Ithemes Security Pro 7 was released with significant improvements and a redesigned interface. Tony Perez writes on NOC about how we communicate #wordpress and #security. People focus on all the tools and configurations, and not enough on the actions they're trying to prevent. He covers his approach in this article about WordPress in the Enterprise. According to ehackingnews.com Over 800 million WordPress-linked records are leaked in this misconfigured cloud database associated with DreamHost, a popular WordPress hosting platform. A fix was made “within hours” of the discovery. Grabbag Ninja Forms celebrates 10 years! Congratulations to James Laws and Kevin Stover. https://twitter.com/jameslaws/status/1409589138257371141?s=21WPEngine is now offering Local 6.0 Pro free for everyone. As of June 29, 2021, everyone has access to Local Pro tools and features for free. This is another great tool for developing locally.Alex Standiford at WP Dev Academy released his new course that teaches how to build modern, scale-able WordPress plugins quickly. If you’re a developer looking to up your WordPress game, this course is for you. Just how competitive is the membership plugin space? Learn how Paid Memberships Pro has grown over the last 8 years in my interview with Jason Coleman on the Matt Report.

Probably just like you, the exploration for the secret ingredient to running a successful business is a tricky one. Speaking for myself, I can tell you that I'm constantly trying to learn and dissect what some of the most successful brands are in my space. How did she do it? What does the website look like? Productized service or digital product? Smash that like button on a secret formula to generating $5m in Facebook ad sales All of this with our blinders on. Sometimes, the real secret, is just staying in the game. Jason joined us eight years ago, right when he and his wife Kim were making the transition to full-time product sales, leaving custom client work behind. Now, Paid Memberships Pro has over 100,000 active installs according the WordPress.org directory and his business is getting a lot more focused on…doing what works. Has he considered convergent PMP into a hosted solution? What about outside acquisition? You'll have to listen to the episode to find out! Transcription This episode of the Matt report is brought to you by how to market your plug-in dot com a framework for the sleep deprive developer. If you ask yourself, how do I get more downloads for my plugin? What about more sales? Should I do this lifetime license thing? You need to pick up the book, how to market your plugin over app. How to market your plugin.com. Programming is about computer behavior. Marketing is about human behavior. Fortunately for us both a fairly predictable and you can learn more inside the book. How to market your plug-in dot com. This book will help you market while you're building your plugin. Instead of treating your marketing as a last resort. I can't tell you how many times. How many interviews I've had, where the developer has just fallen upon luck and chance that they have a business in front of them. People are downloading their plugin. People are buying their plugin, but they hit a certain point of plateau where they need to scale. They need to get the word out there and this book will help you do it. Check it out@howtomarketyourplugin.com. Thanks for supporting the show. This episode is also brought to you by media, ron.com media ron.com Ronald Ereka he's back. He creates WordPress plugins. In fact, one of his plugins I was searching for the other day. Totally forgot that he made it called highlight and share. He creates a highlight and share plug, and you can highlight sections of texts and share them with your network right on your WordPress website. Event tracking for gravity forms, simple comment editing and custom query blocks. I'm going to click into the event, tracking for gravity forms. Of course you'll need gravity forms, but you can download event tracking for free, right from either his website, media, ron.com or search for it on wordpress.org. It's got 30,000 plus active installs. Well at the time of this recording, it was, it was updated a week ago. But if you're looking to connect Google analytics, Google tag managers, to your gravity forms. Well to do a vent trackings, this plugin will do the trick. Check out media, ron.com for more of his plugins, reach out the Ronald you reca. If you have any other questions about building a WordPress plugin for yourself. Thanks for supporting the show. Probably just like you, the exploration for the secret ingredient to running a successful business is a tricky one. Speaking for myself. I can tell you that I'm constantly trying to learn and dissect what some of the most successful brands are doing in my space. How did she do it? What does the website look like? Product I service or digital product. Smash that like button on a secret formula to generate $5 million in Facebook ad sales. And all of this with our blinders on. Sometimes the real secret is just staying in the game. Today's guest first joined us eight years ago. Right? When he and his wife were making the transition to full-time product sales, leaving custom client work behind. Now paid memberships pro has over 100,000 active installs, according to the wordpress.org directory and his business is getting a lot more focused on doing what works. Has Jason considered converting, paid memberships pro into a hosted solution. What about outside acquisition? You'll have to listen to the episode to find out. You're listening to the Maryport. A podcast for the resilient digital business builders. Subscribe to the newsletter at maryport.com/subscribe or follow the podcast on apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts better yet. Share this episode on your social media. We'd love more listeners around here. Okay. Let's get into today's episode. With Jason. hey, Jason, welcome to the program. Hey, it's great to be here. I'm a big fan, a big listener, and it's good to just get to chat with you again. Um, I'm going to do this every couple of weeks. Like there's a thunderstorm today and I'm going to, you know, the thunder storm is gonna cancel this one too, and I'll have to reschedule for next week. so I last had you on eight years ago, when you were one of the founding. Interviewees of the Maryport podcast, a lot has changed. And a lot hasn't changed. Uh, for paid memberships pro and your business. Uh, and for WordPress. Chris lemma re recently wrote a post about, uh, the future success of WordPress, which we'll get into in a little bit and sort of how he sees hosts playing a role in the adoption of WordPress, uh, streamlining WordPress onboarding, even specific flavors of let's say membership sites, e-commerce sites, that kind of thing. But go back in your time machine and let me know, where were you mentally? Eight years ago with the business. And when we first interviewed. Yeah. Um, so that, that would have been 2013, which would have been a couple of years after paid memberships pro launched. And at that point PM pro was really a loss leader for our consulting business. So it was mostly just Kim and I, and we had a couple of contractors, um, you know, who helped out with random things. But we, you know, we had a membership plugin for WordPress and we parlayed that into, you know, 10 to $30,000, you know, gigs installing WordPress from membership sites and things like that. Um, and we were, we were doing that transition of like, Hey, how do we transition from a consultant company to a products company? We were just starting that around 2013 and, and also like figuring out our first hire. I remember how hard, like the first hire was, um, And now it's kind of like, you know, we're hiring all the time. It's like, it has to be a process where we're constantly, like we have relatively low turnover of employees and we've been like, grateful for that. But even that, like just growing and, you know, people go occasionally that, you know, we have to, as a process now, like hiring people as a process, it was like a huge deal. The biggest thing of the year, you know, in 2013. And now it's just another process. Yeah. Probably one of the most, uh, popular, free membership plugins that are out there. I know there's a lot of plugins out there that sort of skate by semi membership. You know, they're doing like log-in and access control, but certainly not to the degree of integration, ad-ons support general reach that you have memberships a hot space. Uh, when we've chatted a little while ago, I was curious of how do you. Competitively make the distinction between membership LMS. Like how do you fit yourself in the market so that you get the right customers and not the wrong ones? So you're arguably the most popular free memberships plugin. Um, you know, and there's some other plugins out there that are sort of like a third degree from a membership, like they do user profiles and they're also a membership. But a pure membership platform play that is you. How do you make the distinction amongst the third party competitors? The ones that have kind of sorta a membership plugin. And those have like an lms like a lifter lms a full-fledged learning management system where do you make the distinction with your marketing and your messaging? Yeah. So there's a ton of competition. And I remember one of our first, uh, kind of big web ventures for Kim and I was a wine website, like a wine tracking website, and that was another kind of niche. That like every week there was a new competitor and people like, what about this? What about this one here? Like, it's just part of business, like they're here. Um, and I feel like membership plugins are the same way. And maybe that's just because it's what I'm focused on. Any business is the same. Um, but yeah, there's a lot of membership plugins and they specialize, we like to call our homepage. We'll say that, you know, we're the most complete membership solution for WordPress. Um, and we really focus on. Members as like the core unit. And so you mentioned like LMS plugins, we integrate with LMS plugins. Um, you know, a lot of people who run membership sites want to also have courses. A lot of people who run core sites also want to have memberships. And so when we're talking to like a prospective user and trying to figure out if our solution is good for them, you know, we like to ask them like, what's the focal point of your business? Like, if it's. The members are the focal point of your business. Like you're an association or just, you know, in your mind, do you think about your members as like the important component and then how do I sell them things and how do I give them lessons? Like you might want to start with paid memberships. Pro is like the center component of your website and use like our courses add on or use an LMS that integrates with ours, you know, but focus on PM pro. And similarly, if you start with like a course and you really care about all the features that they have, like quizzes and progress, right. Um, you know, certificates and all the things that they do really well, like that's the most important part and you really just want to charge monthly for access to that. You could probably get by just using their membership add on. Um, and there there's so many different ways to like build these things. I really feel like that's, our job is to like find ways. To cut through all the options for the customer. Cause it's like overwhelming, they're overwhelmed with options and they just like, just tell me what I'm supposed to use. And we'd like to be the default choice, but you know, sometimes other solutions are better than ours in cases. So it's really like a conversation has to happen to figure that out. It seems like it's balancing. Being like the core engine I'll call it. I'll call it the engine of a membership for somebodies WordPress website. It's a fine balance to say that we're the engine, but you can also use lifter or you can use our ad-ons. Maybe you can even use another membership plugin, if somebody's crazy enough. So, how do you balance that? Uh, that messaging to say, look, we can act as the core component, almost like the routing. Of the commerce section, maybe even the permissions and access, uh, section. Of your membership site man, it's tough. Like, cause we early on, so like 2013, we would have been just getting into it. We had a plan called like do it for. Uh, so we offered for like $500 at the time, like, Hey, we'll install, paid memberships pro for you and do like a little bit of coding. And a lot of those little bit of coding were kind of these add ons that we've developed like, oh, integrate with, you know, event plugin integrate with BB press. Um, and so we, we built this footprint of integrations that kind of worked if a developer would wire it up for them. And the most popular ones were like, well, everyone keeps asking about this and they say, it's complicated. They don't know how to code, so we try to make it easier. And so, yeah, we kinda have that process of like, it's a platform where a press can do anything. Let's kind of have a, just that does it. Then when the just becomes popular, let's kind of streamline it into a plugin that still has some. Potentially like settings or it needs a developer to set up and then let's try to streamline it into something more user-friendly because as you go up that scale, like, it definitely becomes more and more to develop and maintain and support. Um, and we had ad-ons like our MailChimp add on early on was like more fully featured than the general MailChimp add ons that were out at the time. And we were like, Hey, let's build this in a way that you could use it even without paid memberships. But we didn't really market it that way. Um, but then it was kind of like, so we see this again. And again, like people will build a plugin. That's like one of our ad-ons, but in a general way. And it was like, it was as much work to build it for PM pro in the sense. And now I'm, you know, uh, not giving them credit for everything they have to do. And all the MailChimp solutions are kind of, you know, have surpassed our ads. Now, but at a time it was like, oh, like we could, so it's tempting to like, oh, we should just start an LMS business. Cause our little, you know, courseware plugin is pretty close to what they do, but we're kind of finding our space where like for the courses plugin that we built, we built it's launching soon. And it's um, you know, we tell people who want a course, like maybe you don't need a plugin. Maybe it's just a PDF or a page with content or a video. Like if your course is pretty straight forward, you don't have to conflict. But the, the plug-in that we have, we'll just add CPTs for like the basic structure of a course in the lesson and have a little bit of kind of progress tracking. And we felt like that's the bare minimum and we don't want to get into anything else. So if you want anything more than that, that same plugin will just integrate with learn dash lifter, um, learn, press, and like the most popular LMS. And that way we have kind of one plug and the maintain integration with all those LMS plugins, instead of like a bunch of different integrations went off with each one. So we're hoping that's easier to maintain, I'm just going to speak as a product maker and owner in a very small scale compared to what you're doing. But going back to my days with a conductor. I know one of the challenges is when you try to stay lightweight and you try to have like this modular approach. Like you could get into LMS, but that's another add on. Uh, the ad-ons and extending your core product. It can be another tricky thing because you have both, you have customers that request ad-ons Hey, it'd be great. If we worked with MailChimp convert kids, Salesforce, like all these other add ons that work. That customers are requesting. So you start looking at that as like market opportunity, and then you have the ones that you build and like, oh, wouldn't it be great to again, have that LMS section. Um, Is there a process that you work with internally? To reign that in. Because I know from building conductor. Creating ad-ons is a, is like, It's another micro product that you have to support in the sustain and look longterm. For example, when we were building conductor, we were building out Genesis templates. Um, before it became studio, press. So it was one of those things where. It was. Before, you know, it was like six months to a year to two years and like, oh God, like. This add on, hasn't been touched. It's no longer. Really doing what it was supposed to be doing, but we don't really have that many people using it. Uh do you have a balance to that is there a way to work through that methodically Yeah. Um, we try, I don't know. Yeah, it's a challenge. I don't know if we handle it. Well, a couple things that we do differently that maybe some other companies are coming around to as well. Um, but definitely like we have one big bundle. Um, like one price for everything. And so we don't have a marketplace. Like we have more, there are third party plugins, but they're like outside, you know, we don't have a marketplace where we sell the third already plugins, which is a good thing and a bad thing. So like it's bad in the sense that having a marketplace really does encourage developers to get involved because they're going to get paid. And I remember back in the day of like, I made a Jigoshop plug. Uh, for Braintree integration. And I think it sold like one copy per month, but like it just the fact that there was a marketplace encouraged me to kind of like generalize it and push it out there. Whereas I wouldn't have done that otherwise. So it encourages involvement, but what happens then is it's really hard to manage all these different people. You don't really have control over the add-ons that are important. And we saw companies like EDD and WooCommerce did this too, where they bought up a bunch of the most popular ones to kind of bring them in house. So we started with that. We were like, Hey, we kind of get it. Important to us and we, we bring it in house. Um, and we just try to like tell the developer community like, oh, we're working on, of course this plugin, you probably shouldn't or like, you know, if you want to help, this is what it looks like. It's all open source. Um, the other thing we do with that with integrations is I always try to make those plugins available for free and in the.org repository. So our rule of thumb is if it's an integration with another service or. We're not going to charge for, we're going to make it free and.org. And that incentivizes like both us and the other party to kind of maintain the plugin, the integration plugin, because sometimes it's awkward. Like if they're selling it for $50, but you know, you're not. And so you're like, wait, why am I helping to maintain like the thing you make money on? But I don't, or like, It's open source. So I could take your code or if I really feel like you're not doing it well, I'm going to make my own version. And so that's awkward when like, you know, who's plugged into you buy ours or theirs, or it doesn't encourage us to work together. Whereas like upfront, you know, when I reached out to integration partners, I'm like, Hey, we're going to make it free. We're going to make in.org. And the business model is not to sell this integration. It's, you know, the support, both our platforms. And in some ways that's leaving money on the table because it's a little bit opposite of how. The market has been, you know, how things have been in the past or what they expect. And it feels kind of right where if you're like, Hey, I don't use MailChimp. I use convert kit. So I'll just buy the convert kit one, you know, I don't have, instead of like, I'll pay $300 and I get all of them, but I only need one, one of the ad-ons. So, um, I guess, I mean, if it's free, it's free, but like, so like people are kind of trained to pay. It's it's such a great value. If they're like, Hey, for $50, I solve exactly the problem you have. Like that, like that business transaction is so much better than kind of like supporting the platform and all the crazy things you might do, you know? So it's, so we give up the opportunity to sell something like really direct to just say, but it it's better for the unuser and that, you know, we may we're the incentives are in alignment for everyone to maintain that integration. Yeah. And that's the most important we feel like at the software level is good. Like the business will work its way out. So I'll pull from the hint of Chris Lemon's article and I'll, I'll have that linked up in the show notes. But what is your opinion on web hosts being in the perfect position to. Well, not only own the customer, but be able to own the experience. So if they own. A web hosting customer who maybe isn't even using WordPress right now. No. Oh, okay. I've got the static site. I've got this other thing that I'm using. Uh, and I'm going to launch a WordPress site. I can click a button launch, a WordPress site. And what I feel is like what Chris and many other folks are leaning into in the hosting space is we'll have these ready, built. Websites for you. So in the case of membership sites, Uh, you know, they'll want to click of a button and you'll have all your membership plugins ready to go. Ready to host. Uh, without all of the fuss of going too well, folks like you or searching the directory and knowing which pieces of the puzzle they have to put together as the end user. And, um, you know, controlling that experience for, you know, for the better of the customer, it's less stress for the customer, less head-scratching. Uh, but it could eventually take money out of your pocket from some never having to search for paid memberships pro because they clicked a button. They got. Uh you know uh, another membership plugin powering their website so your thoughts on the hosting market creating these experience for customers I think it makes sense, you know, this kind of, uh, you know, um, what do you, bigger businesses are buying up the smart businesses and consolidation that's happening in the space. Makes sense, because from, uh, from my perspective, um, There's a couple of things. One is like, as our business grows, we kind of need more middle management. We need more kind of structure. Um, you know, I, I sometimes joke like, oh, the next, you know, four hires are like, you know, like a lawyer, an accountant and an HR person. And it's like, not really stuff that like, you see, like, Producing in the company. Um, and so like it's for companies of our size, it's like, oh, instead of doing that, you know, just, you know, sell yourself a bigger company and adopt, you know, their management team. So that's enticing, like from a business perspective. Um, but then also like hosting, like a hosted version of a product makes a lot of sense. Um, we capture all these customers and a lot of them already have a website or they're transitioning, but some of them don't and it's like kind of weird to be like, okay, well, like go build a website and then come back to me. Um, or like, we start to like help them earlier in the process. And we're like, you know, Hey, we could take it's really then tempting the business opportunity of like instead of $300 a year, take like a hundred dollars a month and give them like a standard hosting package. It makes our support a little bit easier in the sense that like we know exactly. You know how they're set up. We kind of cancel a lot of issues. Um, but then we have all these hosts, like hosts have fake. Whenever people say, just do that. I'm like, that's actually really hard. Like, you know, I'd have to like, You know, help support people's email and, uh, you know, cashing on their server and like when they want to do crazy things and if they get hacked and the security, and I was like, we'd have to figure all that out. And the host I've already figured that out. So it makes sense to partner with them. So that's like our perspective. And then I think on the host side, like hosting has become commoditized. So they need things to differentiate themselves from their competition and they need kind of products. People like both the products themselves, but also I think the personnel is important too. Like we need people who can like think from a product perspective, um, to build solutions for the end-users. Like, I think. Some of the hosts. I mean, they had some really great people inside, but they need more of those people, you know, thinking in that, that way. And I'm in alignment with, with Lama that, you know, a lot of end-users don't, they're not buying hosting, they're not buying WordPress or paid memberships pro they're like, you know, build me a, uh, you know, a trade association website or build me, you know, like a website for my business guru business, or build me a newsletter subscription website. And if we can connect with the customer at that experience, you know, It's a, it's a more direct sale. And part of that, like a huge part of that stack is the host and, you know, you know, they fill it with the product. So it all makes sense to me, I guess, So just lots of competition coming at you everywhere you have other free. Plugins competing with you in the WordPress repo. Now you have potentially have web hosts coming with pre-packaged membership plugins. You have standalone membership. Software as a service solutions that are out there already. Tons of competition. Have you ever just thought about like picking up your toys from this playground and going and building your own playground and doing the hosted route? Uh and going that maybe more traditional software as a service model with paid memberships pro Yeah. Uh, so still now committed, like our goal is to be the default membership platform for WordPress sites. Um, like if you are going to do memberships on WordPress, like we should be in the consideration. Like we should be one of the ones that you think about using. Um, and when, like I said, we're not going to always be the perfect fit, but we're good. And we're, we're pretty tied to WordPress. Like it is tempting, but like I said, to kind of, you know, build a hosted solution because. There's like when you do the math in a spreadsheet, there's kind of money there. And then it's kind of a simpler experience for the customers. Um, but to do that, well, we'd have to kind of joint venture with at least joint venture with a hosting company or someone who knows how to handle that. I think, um, which is like a little daunting. And like, whenever we really toy with those ideas, I feel like I'm taking my eye off the ball. You know, it's kind of like the, the core business we have. Is isn't stable enough that, you know, to take all that attention away and try to like build basically competing business. Um, so we're like really focused on WordPress and I feel like we're like, has a spot, like definitely like the competition, you know, like Stripe itself as a competitor. Like when we built Stripe integration, we were like probably the first membership plugins. Um, I almost said like e-commerce player. I don't know. Like we really jumped on strike really early. Um, probably when they were like beta labeled, but we built tripe integration and like Stripe, just handle payments and subscriptions. And like, if you wanted to cancel your subscription, we built a GUI for that. If you wanted to see your invoices, we had to gooey for that and we kind of managed everything, but now Stripe has like, um, it's called like Stripe payments or billing. I forgot how they brand it, but it like, they have more of that UI on the stripes. Um, and you can envision a plugin that kind of is way more bare bones than ours. Um, that just everything's in Stripe. And like, so like a Stripe straight up Stripe, WordPress membership, plugin, um, could compete with us where people just use Stripe. They don't even have to use a WordPress plugin, you know, they just put the button on their site. Um, so there's just, but anyway, yeah, there's, there's competition like that. And there's other competition of like all-in-one solutions, but there's always going to want to be a type of site, especially ones that are being built by agencies. That need more control and need more flexibility, want more ownership of their data and how things work. One, to be able to scale up in a certain way and kind of. We're going to just keep trying to target that user both like on the DIY side, you know, so it's like a lot of stuff is easy to set up, you know, just out of the box and follow our instructions and our videos. Um, and then the beauty of WordPress is, is flexible and you can make it, do whatever you want. So it's like, ah, I got a really cool idea to integrate with this thing and I can get to the code it's open source and we can have a developer do it. So we're always going to be focused on that, that user and. We're tempted and we build proof of concepts and we think about it all the time, but we're kind of focused actually on like the WordPress experience for now. Let's shift gears just a little bit, instead of talking about only the challenges. Uh, assess where you are. With the success of your product. Through the lens of what you've done with marketing, messaging, content, social. What have you done really well there. And I'm also thinking of. I know what it's like to operate a product, not even just with like my own stuff, but what we do at, at Casos is. We're always at that stage, like, man, what? Just one more, one more feature. If we just add this one more feature, we'd have X more sales or X more downloads or many more customers, and then you get that feature built in. You're like, oh, One more feature. I just want to add. One more feature to this list. When a lot of us should take a step back and say, look, I've got a solid product. I mean, you've been proving it now for eight plus years. Uh, maybe we should be focusing more on messaging, marketing, outreach, distribution, that kind of thing. So where are you with that? Uh mental tug of war as a owner and product create. So, I guess like the pat myself on the back, we did do a great job of like content marketing, you know, Kim, myself, you know, Travis and other team members that helped, like, since 2013, we were just constantly blogging. And the method works is like, when we get a question, like we're like, oh, let's answer that question and make a blog post where we answer it and put it out on the website. Um, and there was good tips in that area where like, you know, We would always try to generalize the questions, like solve a very specific problem, but yet don't say like, you know, doing X, Y, Z with paid memberships pro it's just doing XYZ. Um, yeah, it kind of increases the range of people who like one of our best performance. Blog posts is like how to name your membership level. And so if you're not using WordPress or paid members for anything, you just started trying to figure out, do I call them my tribe or my peeps? Or like, you know, like Kim did a bunch of research on like what the most common words are and kind of ways to brainstorm it. Um, so that, I mean, that post gets like, I don't know, like a few dozen, a hundred visits a day. And so it's posted like that, that kind of drove traffic. And we, we played the long game with developers in terms of like, I remember talking with agencies and developers, like our solution is the best you should use it. And they're like, yeah, sure. And then like a year later at a, at a conference, like you're still not using our plugin. And it's like, oh yeah. I mean, to do that. And after a while, you're like, we've kind of, we've kind of survived into our success, you know, but marketing could be better. Like we were focused on it. We're focused kind of on a lot of stuff, but marketing general, we just hired like, uh, Patrick Rolin to help out with marketing and we're hitting, you know, we're going off to a good start. I'm trying to figure out. And there's lots of little things like. We, you know, we struggle with like who our audiences, because like we're a platform and it's like, who uses your website or your, your software? And they're like all kinds of people. And you're like, you know, the marketers and the business people say like, well, just focus on one, you know? And it's like, well, how do I do that while also keeping them, you know, a platform because WordPress did that. Well, automatic did that with WordPress and WooCommerce did that, but full commerce, like they, you know, I was like, we want to still keep a platform. But there are things we could do. Cause I was sitting here just thinking about like, we really are like probably like the easiest way to just charge for access to a post page or category with WordPress and like our homepage we'll get into the technical stuff and the, you know, the kind of important stuff. And I was like, oh, there's a customer that just wants to charge $5 for access to a page. And like our homepage doesn't sell that really well to that customer. So we're figuring it out, both like. How do we take our levels and make them products and know who to target audience of all those products are and kind of sell that better. How do we, we also like there's kinds of all this data collected and we're going to do like, um, you know, tagging and kit or we're, we're switching to convert kit, but MailChimp has tags and other ones too, where it's kind of like, Hey, if you read this blog post, if you kind of click this button on our site, if you read this email, okay, we can guess that, like, you don't even have a WordPress site yet. And we should just send you our affiliate link for liquid web, um, you know, or something like that. They were like, you know, oh, you're, you're importing from something else. So let's kind of show you. Our tools for importing from our competition and stuff like that. Um, so kind of gathering more data so that we can send more specifically targeted messages, uh, is something that we're working on and that that'll probably help us get to the next level in terms of competing with the other membership. How much do you look at the success of your customers? Uh, membership sites. And how does that weigh into the overall success of paid memberships pro. And again, I'll preface this with a couple of things. So at Casos, one of the things I'm always challenged with was, well, if you don't. If you never create a podcast and then you'll never be successful with a podcast because you haven't found the time to commit to the podcast. So I can't help you be successful as a podcaster. If you can't. Manage, uh, the time commitment you, you need to put into creating at least one episode a month. I recently spoke to Dave Rodenbach, recaptured.io, sort of the same thing. If his customers aren't selling. Uh, product through their e-commerce store, largely in his world. If you don't have a good product or you don't have a good price or a good experience, and you're not going to buy in, how can we reclaim and help you reclaim sales? If you're not selling any product? How do you measure that in the marketing world of membership sites, digital products, digital access to content. Um, that seems even. Harder of a uh, of a challenge because of the just the wide breadth of that marketplace Yeah. I mean, that is an issue. I know, um, you know, we get like churn stats and we share some of them and I forget exactly where it is, but it's. W I think we retain like 60% of people who sign up pay this year, or six only 60% will pay next year. And people will be like, oh, SAS industry standards or something is like higher. Um, and it's like, so we've got to, we got to do better. There's stuff we could do better, but I'm like, how many of those just are not in business anymore? Like, you know, like you can't get that customer. Like they don't, they're not making money anymore. They're not, you know, no matter what you're going to do, like, you know, their business failed. Um, so that's definitely an issue. There's a couple of things we could do is like one is like help them. So one thing that's exciting is an update that's coming out for paid memberships pro, which like almost every other e-commerce related WordPress plugin did is how we integrate with Stripe in particular called Stripe connect so that our Stripe account is kind of linked to theirs. Um, so that when we get a percentage of the, you know, it's like a half a percent or something of what comes through, um, we're launching this and, um, so. That aligns you with your customers. So it's like, oh, the more money they make, the more money we make. And it's kind of exciting once it gets to scale is that, oh, we can just like put out a seminar for free that helps people do better and be more successful with their business because it's going to benefit us in the end. Um, so that's exciting. The other thing we try to do is, um, potentially focus on customers where that's less of an issue. Like I never got into the, what do they call it? Kind of like the entrepreneur or the kind of like hustle porn or, um, You know, like I'm not a fan of selling in that way where it's like, I know you don't have a business now, but you know, it's really easy. And like, you can have a business. I think if you, yeah. I mean, I like to joke about, so some of those, like here's a car I bought my mom. Um, but yeah. So I think like not marketing to them is like a first step. And instead, like there's, especially in the membership space, like there's associations that like, yeah, we have 5,000 members. We've had 5,000 members every year for the past 20 years. Like never changes and like, we're just going online. So it's kind of like, you can find those businesses that are already successful. Um, and I was just saying this to him. Another, like a presentation for like GoDaddy's a webinars series that was targeted at agencies. And I think for consulting, it's important to like, I mean, if someone wants to give you money to build a website from scratch that may or may not work, like take their money, set their expectations and try to do a good job. But if you focus on customers that, you know, already have a business already have, um, you know, some kind of a relationship with a potential customer, like to have a mailing list or, you know, um, You know, so, so we will try to focus our marketing on those marketing, on those kinds of customers that already have a business that's working, um, which should help that. Like it's when sometimes when I'm. Uh, when people are. Are are, are complaining and griping because something's difficult about setting up a website, which I, I tell you, I relate to you by the way. Cause it's like, I do this for a living. I wrote a book on WordPress, but like I was helping a friend every once in a while. I don't do it for paid, but I'll help friends set up websites sometimes. And I'll just be surprised at how hard it is for me. It's hard for me. It takes a lot of time. But when people gripe about the effort that's involved, I'm like, did you realize like you're starting a business and it's not easy. Like, I don't know where you got, like, just wait until you, you have your own angry customers or like. Other stuff, you know, you got to deal with taxes and all the random stuff and in part of business. , Speaking of business, not being easy recently talked about this on the WP minute podcast. Uh, WP engine did a report that the WordPress economy is like $600 billion. Uh, right around that, that mark. Lots of talk recently with acquisitions, um, you know, smaller developers picking up even smaller developer plugins, hosting companies like nexus purchasing every plug and that they can get their hands on. I'm sure this is not. Done, uh, automatic acquiring, um, Day one journal, like so much acquisition happening. In this space. Have you ever thought that? Well, maybe we can build a bigger business with PMP. If we went that route, we were able to go. To nexus and joined them with a membership plugin or wp engine that kind of thing what are the cards hold for acquisitions or investments in that space Uh, yeah, we have thought about like acquiring, um, other plugins products and, you know, it's kind of sparing some of that potentially is that the programmers are in demand. Um, and so. It feels, uh, like I feel bad about it, but I see some products that are, yeah, I've actually, I see products that people are side projects that people are doing. And I have a saying that like when they get to a thousand dollars a month, Sometimes it's really tough. And they're like, this isn't enough. You know, I think I'm going to stop. And I'm always like, no, a thousand dollars a month. Like you're halfway to $10,000 a month. Like you're not halfway to $2,000 a month. Like all that work you did to like collect any money whatsoever and build up to a thousand. Like usually if you have a product that's going to fit like your, at the time, it took you to get to a thousand dollars a month. You're going to get the $10,000. Um, so that's me like pumping up other entrepreneurs and trying to push them at the same time. I'm like, man, if it doesn't work out that guy's really sharp. And like, if he he's, he's, he's kind of shown that he can think product minded and build something. And like, if he can't make enough money to make a living, like, Hey, let me like give you a salary and kind of give you a job, you know, and you can build cool stuff for us. So I, yeah, I've kind of had that thought, um, of like, oh, like, Product people, if it's not working out their side gig, like when they look for, you know, a salary job, like, Hey, we get like a really smart developer that proves that they can ship. Um, and so I think there's some of that mindset at every scale, you know, I'm sure like, you know, something, some of the size of automatic would just by people or by business for the people behind it, you know? Um, and that's part of liquid, but like I said, hosting companies want product people, um, and people who can handle that to kind of, you know, maintain things. Um, and then. If you ask me, like any business idea, like, have you considered, like, it's almost funny, like, yeah. I consider everything, man. Like I love the staff. I probably have a spreadsheet that models it. And like, I'm like, I'm always talking and like, um, you know, like I can't wait to get back to like the conference circuit and like, you know, having drinks with Chris lemma late at night. Cooking up schemes of, you know, like, I feel like at one point I said, like, I was like, oh, can I just like sell my company to, and then work on machine learning. I was like nerding out about machine learning. And he was like, I have an idea for a machine learning thing. And it was like, yeah. So like, have I talked to Chris Lama about like quitting my job and like doing machine learning stuff for him? Like that happened once. Um, yeah, but we haven't really ever been serious about it. I did take a month earlier in this year where I was like, Hey, I'm going to have kind of informal talks, you know, with different people that just see. What might happen. And I was like, I gave myself a deadline of a month and made that clear. Um, and at the end of the month where like, no, like the current plan of like, you know, hire really great people, kind of get them handover the responsibilities that Kim and I have so that we don't have to spend as much time on kind of like maintaining what we have and we can push out a new directions. Like I like being my own boss. I like having control and I think we still fit and we it's good to have independent businesses in the WordPress space. Um, Yeah, but like, I mean, this space is valuable and all these companies are valuable. So it's, it's kind of exciting from that sentence. I mean, you know, a market is really growing booming even is when you see. I saw recently a small product that was announced in January of this year. So 2021. Um, already being sold. I mean, it has a nice website, has a nice name, nice brand. You know, it looks good, but it probably has less than a hundred customers. If that may be, I don't know, unless it's really doing much better than I thought it would be. Already for sale. And like in the back of my mind, I already know that somebody's going to buy that. Uh, there was, uh, on startups or the rest of us. Uh, Rob walling. Had I think he tweeted something or somebody sent him an email. I forget where it was, but somebody who was doing like 80,000 ARR in their business sold for one point something million. And it's almost like if you're a product maker, developer, this is almost like your way in. You know, to get acquired. So it's like, it's almost like the absolute best sort of resume. So if you can build like a micro product, get some traction and then turn to a business that you would actually like to work for. And there is some synergy between your little product and their big product. You could even sell that to them. As like a signing bonus, almost like here, I've already proven this. And I've got a customer base that comes with me and I can develop it for you. Uh it's an interesting world for the small product creator uh at the end of the Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, it's analogous to like how not, you know, Programmers and people who can build products on demand, like people who can, you know, build engaging podcasts are in demand. And there's like a big gap between like building it and then making money for it and, you know, running a business. I mean, I'm spoiled that, like I have Kim as a partner who is like COO of the company and like get stuff done and can handle, you know, a lot of the, the business end and the accounting and stuff like that. And like, we get help for a bunch of individual things, but it's like, if I was like, just me by myself as like, I'm, I'm a pretty creative person. I can like build stuff and think strategically and stuff, but like actually like keeping the business running and not falling apart, I would have been lost like years ago without someone like him. So. Um, it's hard. Yeah. To make that leap from building something cool that people can use to like making enough money on it, to make it your data. But it's still really hard to make a compelling podcast. So I'm with you like people and there's demand like, you know yeah. Instead of finding something and hoping they can build a podcast, you know, the resumes they've already, you know, shipped a podcast. Jason Coleman everybody. Jason, where can folks find you to say thanks. Yeah. So I'm on Twitter, Jason underscore Coleman. Um, and my blog is the real Jason coleman.com. And yeah, we got a courses out on that's shipping in a week or two, and we have a big, like a 2.6 update, the paid memberships pro, which is wrapping up some, some features and, um, uh, it's got better Stripe integration, you know, that's going to be good there. Fantastic stuff. Everyone else. matterport.com. airport.com/subscribe. Join the mailing list. Don't forget to tune into your weekly dose of WordPress news in five minutes or less@thewpminute.com. ★ Support this podcast ★

Probably just like you, the exploration for the secret ingredient to running a successful business is a tricky one. Speaking for myself, I can tell you that I’m constantly trying to learn and dissect what some of the most successful brands are in my space. How did she do it?What does the website look like?Productized service or digital product?Smash that like button on a secret formula to generating $5m in Facebook ad sales All of this with our blinders on. Sometimes, the real secret, is just staying in the game. Jason joined us eight years ago, right when he and his wife Kim were making the transition to full-time product sales, leaving custom client work behind. Now, Paid Memberships Pro has over 100,000 active installs according the WordPress.org directory and his business is getting a lot more focused on…doing what works. Has he considered convergent PMP into a hosted solution? What about outside acquisition? You’ll have to listen to the episode to find out! Transcription This episode of the Matt report is brought to you by how to market your plug-in dot com a framework for the sleep deprive developer. If you ask yourself, how do I get more downloads for my plugin? What about more sales? Should I do this lifetime license thing? You need to pick up the book, how to market your plugin over app. How to market your plugin.com. Programming is about computer behavior. Marketing is about human behavior. Fortunately for us both a fairly predictable and you can learn more inside the book. How to market your plug-in dot com. This book will help you market while you’re building your plugin. Instead of treating your marketing as a last resort. I can’t tell you how many times. How many interviews I’ve had, where the developer has just fallen upon luck and chance that they have a business in front of them. People are downloading their plugin. People are buying their plugin, but they hit a certain point of plateau where they need to scale. They need to get the word out there and this book will help you do it. Check it out@howtomarketyourplugin.com. Thanks for supporting the show. This episode is also brought to you by media, ron.com media ron.com Ronald Ereka he’s back. He creates WordPress plugins. In fact, one of his plugins I was searching for the other day. Totally forgot that he made it called highlight and share. He creates a highlight and share plug, and you can highlight sections of texts and share them with your network right on your WordPress website. Event tracking for gravity forms, simple comment editing and custom query blocks. I’m going to click into the event, tracking for gravity forms. Of course you’ll need gravity forms, but you can download event tracking for free, right from either his website, media, ron.com or search for it on wordpress.org. It’s got 30,000 plus active installs. Well at the time of this recording, it was, it was updated a week ago. But if you’re looking to connect Google analytics, Google tag managers, to your gravity forms. Well to do a vent trackings, this plugin will do the trick. Check out media, ron.com for more of his plugins, reach out the Ronald you reca. If you have any other questions about building a WordPress plugin for yourself. Thanks for supporting the show. Probably just like you, the exploration for the secret ingredient to running a successful business is a tricky one. Speaking for myself. I can tell you that I’m constantly trying to learn and dissect what some of the most successful brands are doing in my space. How did she do it? What does the website look like? Product I service or digital product. Smash that like button on a secret formula to generate $5 million in Facebook ad sales. And all of this with our blinders on. Sometimes the real secret is just staying in the game. Today’s guest first joined us eight years ago. Right? When he and his wife were making the transition to full-time product sales, leaving custom client work behind. Now paid memberships pro has over 100,000 active installs, according to the wordpress.org directory and his business is getting a lot more focused on doing what works. Has Jason considered converting, paid memberships pro into a hosted solution. What about outside acquisition? You’ll have to listen to the episode to find out. You’re listening to the Maryport. A podcast for the resilient digital business builders. Subscribe to the newsletter at maryport.com/subscribe or follow the podcast on apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts better yet. Share this episode on your social media. We’d love more listeners around here. Okay. Let’s get into today’s episode. With Jason. hey, Jason, welcome to the program. Hey, it’s great to be here. I’m a big fan, a big listener, and it’s good to just get to chat with you again. Um, I’m going to do this every couple of weeks. Like there’s a thunderstorm today and I’m going to, you know, the thunder storm is gonna cancel this one too, and I’ll have to reschedule for next week. so I last had you on eight years ago, when you were one of the founding. Interviewees of the Maryport podcast, a lot has changed. And a lot hasn’t changed. Uh, for paid memberships pro and your business. Uh, and for WordPress. Chris lemma re recently wrote a post about, uh, the future success of WordPress, which we’ll get into in a little bit and sort of how he sees hosts playing a role in the adoption of WordPress, uh, streamlining WordPress onboarding, even specific flavors of let’s say membership sites, e-commerce sites, that kind of thing. But go back in your time machine and let me know, where were you mentally? Eight years ago with the business. And when we first interviewed. Yeah. Um, so that, that would have been 2013, which would have been a couple of years after paid memberships pro launched. And at that point PM pro was really a loss leader for our consulting business. So it was mostly just Kim and I, and we had a couple of contractors, um, you know, who helped out with random things. But we, you know, we had a membership plugin for WordPress and we parlayed that into, you know, 10 to $30,000, you know, gigs installing WordPress from membership sites and things like that. Um, and we were, we were doing that transition of like, Hey, how do we transition from a consultant company to a products company? We were just starting that around 2013 and, and also like figuring out our first hire. I remember how hard, like the first hire was, um, And now it’s kind of like, you know, we’re hiring all the time. It’s like, it has to be a process where we’re constantly, like we have relatively low turnover of employees and we’ve been like, grateful for that. But even that, like just growing and, you know, people go occasionally that, you know, we have to, as a process now, like hiring people as a process, it was like a huge deal. The biggest thing of the year, you know, in 2013. And now it’s just another process. Yeah. Probably one of the most, uh, popular, free membership plugins that are out there. I know there’s a lot of plugins out there that sort of skate by semi membership. You know, they’re doing like log-in and access control, but certainly not to the degree of integration, ad-ons support general reach that you have memberships a hot space. Uh, when we’ve chatted a little while ago, I was curious of how do you. Competitively make the distinction between membership LMS. Like how do you fit yourself in the market so that you get the right customers and not the wrong ones? So you’re arguably the most popular free memberships plugin. Um, you know, and there’s some other plugins out there that are sort of like a third degree from a membership, like they do user profiles and they’re also a membership. But a pure membership platform play that is you. How do you make the distinction amongst the third party competitors? The ones that have kind of sorta a membership plugin. And those have like an lms like a lifter lms a full-fledged learning management system where do you make the distinction with your marketing and your messaging? Yeah. So there’s a ton of competition. And I remember one of our first, uh, kind of big web ventures for Kim and I was a wine website, like a wine tracking website, and that was another kind of niche. That like every week there was a new competitor and people like, what about this? What about this one here? Like, it’s just part of business, like they’re here. Um, and I feel like membership plugins are the same way. And maybe that’s just because it’s what I’m focused on. Any business is the same. Um, but yeah, there’s a lot of membership plugins and they specialize, we like to call our homepage. We’ll say that, you know, we’re the most complete membership solution for WordPress. Um, and we really focus on. Members as like the core unit. And so you mentioned like LMS plugins, we integrate with LMS plugins. Um, you know, a lot of people who run membership sites want to also have courses. A lot of people who run core sites also want to have memberships. And so when we’re talking to like a prospective user and trying to figure out if our solution is good for them, you know, we like to ask them like, what’s the focal point of your business? Like, if it’s. The members are the focal point of your business. Like you’re an association or just, you know, in your mind, do you think about your members as like the important component and then how do I sell them things and how do I give them lessons? Like you might want to start with paid memberships. Pro is like the center component of your website and use like our courses add on or use an LMS that integrates with ours, you know, but focus on PM pro. And similarly, if you start with like a course and you really care about all the features that they have, like quizzes and progress, right. Um, you know, certificates and all the things that they do really well, like that’s the most important part and you really just want to charge monthly for access to that. You could probably get by just using their membership add on. Um, and there there’s so many different ways to like build these things. I really feel like that’s, our job is to like find ways. To cut through all the options for the customer. Cause it’s like overwhelming, they’re overwhelmed with options and they just like, just tell me what I’m supposed to use. And we’d like to be the default choice, but you know, sometimes other solutions are better than ours in cases. So it’s really like a conversation has to happen to figure that out. It seems like it’s balancing. Being like the core engine I’ll call it. I’ll call it the engine of a membership for somebodies WordPress website. It’s a fine balance to say that we’re the engine, but you can also use lifter or you can use our ad-ons. Maybe you can even use another membership plugin, if somebody’s crazy enough. So, how do you balance that? Uh, that messaging to say, look, we can act as the core component, almost like the routing. Of the commerce section, maybe even the permissions and access, uh, section. Of your membership site man, it’s tough. Like, cause we early on, so like 2013, we would have been just getting into it. We had a plan called like do it for. Uh, so we offered for like $500 at the time, like, Hey, we’ll install, paid memberships pro for you and do like a little bit of coding. And a lot of those little bit of coding were kind of these add ons that we’ve developed like, oh, integrate with, you know, event plugin integrate with BB press. Um, and so we, we built this footprint of integrations that kind of worked if a developer would wire it up for them. And the most popular ones were like, well, everyone keeps asking about this and they say, it’s complicated. They don’t know how to code, so we try to make it easier. And so, yeah, we kinda have that process of like, it’s a platform where a press can do anything. Let’s kind of have a, just that does it. Then when the just becomes popular, let’s kind of streamline it into a plugin that still has some. Potentially like settings or it needs a developer to set up and then let’s try to streamline it into something more user-friendly because as you go up that scale, like, it definitely becomes more and more to develop and maintain and support. Um, and we had ad-ons like our MailChimp add on early on was like more fully featured than the general MailChimp add ons that were out at the time. And we were like, Hey, let’s build this in a way that you could use it even without paid memberships. But we didn’t really market it that way. Um, but then it was kind of like, so we see this again. And again, like people will build a plugin. That’s like one of our ad-ons, but in a general way. And it was like, it was as much work to build it for PM pro in the sense. And now I’m, you know, uh, not giving them credit for everything they have to do. And all the MailChimp solutions are kind of, you know, have surpassed our ads. Now, but at a time it was like, oh, like we could, so it’s tempting to like, oh, we should just start an LMS business. Cause our little, you know, courseware plugin is pretty close to what they do, but we’re kind of finding our space where like for the courses plugin that we built, we built it’s launching soon. And it’s um, you know, we tell people who want a course, like maybe you don’t need a plugin. Maybe it’s just a PDF or a page with content or a video. Like if your course is pretty straight forward, you don’t have to conflict. But the, the plug-in that we have, we’ll just add CPTs for like the basic structure of a course in the lesson and have a little bit of kind of progress tracking. And we felt like that’s the bare minimum and we don’t want to get into anything else. So if you want anything more than that, that same plugin will just integrate with learn dash lifter, um, learn, press, and like the most popular LMS. And that way we have kind of one plug and the maintain integration with all those LMS plugins, instead of like a bunch of different integrations went off with each one. So we’re hoping that’s easier to maintain, I’m just going to speak as a product maker and owner in a very small scale compared to what you’re doing. But going back to my days with a conductor. I know one of the challenges is when you try to stay lightweight and you try to have like this modular approach. Like you could get into LMS, but that’s another add on. Uh, the ad-ons and extending your core product. It can be another tricky thing because you have both, you have customers that request ad-ons Hey, it’d be great. If we worked with MailChimp convert kids, Salesforce, like all these other add ons that work. That customers are requesting. So you start looking at that as like market opportunity, and then you have the ones that you build and like, oh, wouldn’t it be great to again, have that LMS section. Um, Is there a process that you work with internally? To reign that in. Because I know from building conductor. Creating ad-ons is a, is like, It’s another micro product that you have to support in the sustain and look longterm. For example, when we were building conductor, we were building out Genesis templates. Um, before it became studio, press. So it was one of those things where. It was. Before, you know, it was like six months to a year to two years and like, oh God, like. This add on, hasn’t been touched. It’s no longer. Really doing what it was supposed to be doing, but we don’t really have that many people using it. Uh do you have a balance to that is there a way to work through that methodically Yeah. Um, we try, I don’t know. Yeah, it’s a challenge. I don’t know if we handle it. Well, a couple things that we do differently that maybe some other companies are coming around to as well. Um, but definitely like we have one big bundle. Um, like one price for everything. And so we don’t have a marketplace. Like we have more, there are third party plugins, but they’re like outside, you know, we don’t have a marketplace where we sell the third already plugins, which is a good thing and a bad thing. So like it’s bad in the sense that having a marketplace really does encourage developers to get involved because they’re going to get paid. And I remember back in the day of like, I made a Jigoshop plug. Uh, for Braintree integration. And I think it sold like one copy per month, but like it just the fact that there was a marketplace encouraged me to kind of like generalize it and push it out there. Whereas I wouldn’t have done that otherwise. So it encourages involvement, but what happens then is it’s really hard to manage all these different people. You don’t really have control over the add-ons that are important. And we saw companies like EDD and WooCommerce did this too, where they bought up a bunch of the most popular ones to kind of bring them in house. So we started with that. We were like, Hey, we kind of get it. Important to us and we, we bring it in house. Um, and we just try to like tell the developer community like, oh, we’re working on, of course this plugin, you probably shouldn’t or like, you know, if you want to help, this is what it looks like. It’s all open source. Um, the other thing we do with that with integrations is I always try to make those plugins available for free and in the.org repository. So our rule of thumb is if it’s an integration with another service or. We’re not going to charge for, we’re going to make it free and.org. And that incentivizes like both us and the other party to kind of maintain the plugin, the integration plugin, because sometimes it’s awkward. Like if they’re selling it for $50, but you know, you’re not. And so you’re like, wait, why am I helping to maintain like the thing you make money on? But I don’t, or like, It’s open source. So I could take your code or if I really feel like you’re not doing it well, I’m going to make my own version. And so that’s awkward when like, you know, who’s plugged into you buy ours or theirs, or it doesn’t encourage us to work together. Whereas like upfront, you know, when I reached out to integration partners, I’m like, Hey, we’re going to make it free. We’re going to make in.org. And the business model is not to sell this integration. It’s, you know, the support, both our platforms. And in some ways that’s leaving money on the table because it’s a little bit opposite of how. The market has been, you know, how things have been in the past or what they expect. And it feels kind of right where if you’re like, Hey, I don’t use MailChimp. I use convert kit. So I’ll just buy the convert kit one, you know, I don’t have, instead of like, I’ll pay $300 and I get all of them, but I only need one, one of the ad-ons. So, um, I guess, I mean, if it’s free, it’s free, but like, so like people are kind of trained to pay. It’s it’s such a great value. If they’re like, Hey, for $50, I solve exactly the problem you have. Like that, like that business transaction is so much better than kind of like supporting the platform and all the crazy things you might do, you know? So it’s, so we give up the opportunity to sell something like really direct to just say, but it it’s better for the unuser and that, you know, we may we’re the incentives are in alignment for everyone to maintain that integration. Yeah. And that’s the most important we feel like at the software level is good. Like the business will work its way out. So I’ll pull from the hint of Chris Lemon’s article and I’ll, I’ll have that linked up in the show notes. But what is your opinion on web hosts being in the perfect position to. Well, not only own the customer, but be able to own the experience. So if they own. A web hosting customer who maybe isn’t even using WordPress right now. No. Oh, okay. I’ve got the static site. I’ve got this other thing that I’m using. Uh, and I’m going to launch a WordPress site. I can click a button launch, a WordPress site. And what I feel is like what Chris and many other folks are leaning into in the hosting space is we’ll have these ready, built. Websites for you. So in the case of membership sites, Uh, you know, they’ll want to click of a button and you’ll have all your membership plugins ready to go. Ready to host. Uh, without all of the fuss of going too well, folks like you or searching the directory and knowing which pieces of the puzzle they have to put together as the end user. And, um, you know, controlling that experience for, you know, for the better of the customer, it’s less stress for the customer, less head-scratching. Uh, but it could eventually take money out of your pocket from some never having to search for paid memberships pro because they clicked a button. They got. Uh you know uh, another membership plugin powering their website so your thoughts on the hosting market creating these experience for customers I think it makes sense, you know, this kind of, uh, you know, um, what do you, bigger businesses are buying up the smart businesses and consolidation that’s happening in the space. Makes sense, because from, uh, from my perspective, um, There’s a couple of things. One is like, as our business grows, we kind of need more middle management. We need more kind of structure. Um, you know, I, I sometimes joke like, oh, the next, you know, four hires are like, you know, like a lawyer, an accountant and an HR person. And it’s like, not really stuff that like, you see, like, Producing in the company. Um, and so like it’s for companies of our size, it’s like, oh, instead of doing that, you know, just, you know, sell yourself a bigger company and adopt, you know, their management team. So that’s enticing, like from a business perspective. Um, but then also like hosting, like a hosted version of a product makes a lot of sense. Um, we capture all these customers and a lot of them already have a website or they’re transitioning, but some of them don’t and it’s like kind of weird to be like, okay, well, like go build a website and then come back to me. Um, or like, we start to like help them earlier in the process. And we’re like, you know, Hey, we could take it’s really then tempting the business opportunity of like instead of $300 a year, take like a hundred dollars a month and give them like a standard hosting package. It makes our support a little bit easier in the sense that like we know exactly. You know how they’re set up. We kind of cancel a lot of issues. Um, but then we have all these hosts, like hosts have fake. Whenever people say, just do that. I’m like, that’s actually really hard. Like, you know, I’d have to like, You know, help support people’s email and, uh, you know, cashing on their server and like when they want to do crazy things and if they get hacked and the security, and I was like, we’d have to figure all that out. And the host I’ve already figured that out. So it makes sense to partner with them. So that’s like our perspective. And then I think on the host side, like hosting has become commoditized. So they need things to differentiate themselves from their competition and they need kind of products. People like both the products themselves, but also I think the personnel is important too. Like we need people who can like think from a product perspective, um, to build solutions for the end-users. Like, I think. Some of the hosts. I mean, they had some really great people inside, but they need more of those people, you know, thinking in that, that way. And I’m in alignment with, with Lama that, you know, a lot of end-users don’t, they’re not buying hosting, they’re not buying WordPress or paid memberships pro they’re like, you know, build me a, uh, you know, a trade association website or build me, you know, like a website for my business guru business, or build me a newsletter subscription website. And if we can connect with the customer at that experience, you know, It’s a, it’s a more direct sale. And part of that, like a huge part of that stack is the host and, you know, you know, they fill it with the product. So it all makes sense to me, I guess, So just lots of competition coming at you everywhere you have other free. Plugins competing with you in the WordPress repo. Now you have potentially have web hosts coming with pre-packaged membership plugins. You have standalone membership. Software as a service solutions that are out there already. Tons of competition. Have you ever just thought about like picking up your toys from this playground and going and building your own playground and doing the hosted route? Uh and going that maybe more traditional software as a service model with paid memberships pro Yeah. Uh, so still now committed, like our goal is to be the default membership platform for WordPress sites. Um, like if you are going to do memberships on WordPress, like we should be in the consideration. Like we should be one of the ones that you think about using. Um, and when, like I said, we’re not going to always be the perfect fit, but we’re good. And we’re, we’re pretty tied to WordPress. Like it is tempting, but like I said, to kind of, you know, build a hosted solution because. There’s like when you do the math in a spreadsheet, there’s kind of money there. And then it’s kind of a simpler experience for the customers. Um, but to do that, well, we’d have to kind of joint venture with at least joint venture with a hosting company or someone who knows how to handle that. I think, um, which is like a little daunting. And like, whenever we really toy with those ideas, I feel like I’m taking my eye off the ball. You know, it’s kind of like the, the core business we have. Is isn’t stable enough that, you know, to take all that attention away and try to like build basically competing business. Um, so we’re like really focused on WordPress and I feel like we’re like, has a spot, like definitely like the competition, you know, like Stripe itself as a competitor. Like when we built Stripe integration, we were like probably the first membership plugins. Um, I almost said like e-commerce player. I don’t know. Like we really jumped on strike really early. Um, probably when they were like beta labeled, but we built tripe integration and like Stripe, just handle payments and subscriptions. And like, if you wanted to cancel your subscription, we built a GUI for that. If you wanted to see your invoices, we had to gooey for that and we kind of managed everything, but now Stripe has like, um, it’s called like Stripe payments or billing. I forgot how they brand it, but it like, they have more of that UI on the stripes. Um, and you can envision a plugin that kind of is way more bare bones than ours. Um, that just everything’s in Stripe. And like, so like a Stripe straight up Stripe, WordPress membership, plugin, um, could compete with us where people just use Stripe. They don’t even have to use a WordPress plugin, you know, they just put the button on their site. Um, so there’s just, but anyway, yeah, there’s, there’s competition like that. And there’s other competition of like all-in-one solutions, but there’s always going to want to be a type of site, especially ones that are being built by agencies. That need more control and need more flexibility, want more ownership of their data and how things work. One, to be able to scale up in a certain way and kind of. We’re going to just keep trying to target that user both like on the DIY side, you know, so it’s like a lot of stuff is easy to set up, you know, just out of the box and follow our instructions and our videos. Um, and then the beauty of WordPress is, is flexible and you can make it, do whatever you want. So it’s like, ah, I got a really cool idea to integrate with this thing and I can get to the code it’s open source and we can have a developer do it. So we’re always going to be focused on that, that user and. We’re tempted and we build proof of concepts and we think about it all the time, but we’re kind of focused actually on like the WordPress experience for now. Let’s shift gears just a little bit, instead of talking about only the challenges. Uh, assess where you are. With the success of your product. Through the lens of what you’ve done with marketing, messaging, content, social. What have you done really well there. And I’m also thinking of. I know what it’s like to operate a product, not even just with like my own stuff, but what we do at, at Casos is. We’re always at that stage, like, man, what? Just one more, one more feature. If we just add this one more feature, we’d have X more sales or X more downloads or many more customers, and then you get that feature built in. You’re like, oh, One more feature. I just want to add. One more feature to this list. When a lot of us should take a step back and say, look, I’ve got a solid product. I mean, you’ve been proving it now for eight plus years. Uh, maybe we should be focusing more on messaging, marketing, outreach, distribution, that kind of thing. So where are you with that? Uh mental tug of war as a owner and product create. So, I guess like the pat myself on the back, we did do a great job of like content marketing, you know, Kim, myself, you know, Travis and other team members that helped, like, since 2013, we were just constantly blogging. And the method works is like, when we get a question, like we’re like, oh, let’s answer that question and make a blog post where we answer it and put it out on the website. Um, and there was good tips in that area where like, you know, We would always try to generalize the questions, like solve a very specific problem, but yet don’t say like, you know, doing X, Y, Z with paid memberships pro it’s just doing XYZ. Um, yeah, it kind of increases the range of people who like one of our best performance. Blog posts is like how to name your membership level. And so if you’re not using WordPress or paid members for anything, you just started trying to figure out, do I call them my tribe or my peeps? Or like, you know, like Kim did a bunch of research on like what the most common words are and kind of ways to brainstorm it. Um, so that, I mean, that post gets like, I don’t know, like a few dozen, a hundred visits a day. And so it’s posted like that, that kind of drove traffic. And we, we played the long game with developers in terms of like, I remember talking with agencies and developers, like our solution is the best you should use it. And they’re like, yeah, sure. And then like a year later at a, at a conference, like you’re still not using our plugin. And it’s like, oh yeah. I mean, to do that. And after a while, you’re like, we’ve kind of, we’ve kind of survived into our success, you know, but marketing could be better. Like we were focused on it. We’re focused kind of on a lot of stuff, but marketing general, we just hired like, uh, Patrick Rolin to help out with marketing and we’re hitting, you know, we’re going off to a good start. I’m trying to figure out. And there’s lots of little things like. We, you know, we struggle with like who our audiences, because like we’re a platform and it’s like, who uses your website or your, your software? And they’re like all kinds of people. And you’re like, you know, the marketers and the business people say like, well, just focus on one, you know? And it’s like, well, how do I do that while also keeping them, you know, a platform because WordPress did that. Well, automatic did that with WordPress and WooCommerce did that, but full commerce, like they, you know, I was like, we want to still keep a platform. But there are things we could do. Cause I was sitting here just thinking about like, we really are like probably like the easiest way to just charge for access to a post page or category with WordPress and like our homepage we’ll get into the technical stuff and the, you know, the kind of important stuff. And I was like, oh, there’s a customer that just wants to charge $5 for access to a page. And like our homepage doesn’t sell that really well to that customer. So we’re figuring it out, both like. How do we take our levels and make them products and know who to target audience of all those products are and kind of sell that better. How do we, we also like there’s kinds of all this data collected and we’re going to do like, um, you know, tagging and kit or we’re, we’re switching to convert kit, but MailChimp has tags and other ones too, where it’s kind of like, Hey, if you read this blog post, if you kind of click this button on our site, if you read this email, okay, we can guess that, like, you don’t even have a WordPress site yet. And we should just send you our affiliate link for liquid web, um, you know, or something like that. They were like, you know, oh, you’re, you’re importing from something else. So let’s kind of show you. Our tools for importing from our competition and stuff like that. Um, so kind of gathering more data so that we can send more specifically targeted messages, uh, is something that we’re working on and that that’ll probably help us get to the next level in terms of competing with the other membership. How much do you look at the success of your customers? Uh, membership sites. And how does that weigh into the overall success of paid memberships pro. And again, I’ll preface this with a couple of things. So at Casos, one of the things I’m always challenged with was, well, if you don’t. If you never create a podcast and then you’ll never be successful with a podcast because you haven’t found the time to commit to the podcast. So I can’t help you be successful as a podcaster. If you can’t. Manage, uh, the time commitment you, you need to put into creating at least one episode a month. I recently spoke to Dave Rodenbach, recaptured.io, sort of the same thing. If his customers aren’t selling. Uh, product through their e-commerce store, largely in his world. If you don’t have a good product or you don’t have a good price or a good experience, and you’re not going to buy in, how can we reclaim and help you reclaim sales? If you’re not selling any product? How do you measure that in the marketing world of membership sites, digital products, digital access to content. Um, that seems even. Harder of a uh, of a challenge because of the just the wide breadth of that marketplace Yeah. I mean, that is an issue. I know, um, you know, we get like churn stats and we share some of them and I forget exactly where it is, but it’s. W I think we retain like 60% of people who sign up pay this year, or six only 60% will pay next year. And people will be like, oh, SAS industry standards or something is like higher. Um, and it’s like, so we’ve got to, we got to do better. There’s stuff we could do better, but I’m like, how many of those just are not in business anymore? Like, you know, like you can’t get that customer. Like they don’t, they’re not making money anymore. They’re not, you know, no matter what you’re going to do, like, you know, their business failed. Um, so that’s definitely an issue. There’s a couple of things we could do is like one is like help them. So one thing that’s exciting is an update that’s coming out for paid memberships pro, which like almost every other e-commerce related WordPress plugin did is how we integrate with Stripe in particular called Stripe connect so that our Stripe account is kind of linked to theirs. Um, so that when we get a percentage of the, you know, it’s like a half a percent or something of what comes through, um, we’re launching this and, um, so. That aligns you with your customers. So it’s like, oh, the more money they make, the more money we make. And it’s kind of exciting once it gets to scale is that, oh, we can just like put out a seminar for free that helps people do better and be more successful with their business because it’s going to benefit us in the end. Um, so that’s exciting. The other thing we try to do is, um, potentially focus on customers where that’s less of an issue. Like I never got into the, what do they call it? Kind of like the entrepreneur or the kind of like hustle porn or, um, You know, like I’m not a fan of selling in that way where it’s like, I know you don’t have a business now, but you know, it’s really easy. And like, you can have a business. I think if you, yeah. I mean, I like to joke about, so some of those, like here’s a car I bought my mom. Um, but yeah. So I think like not marketing to them is like a first step. And instead, like there’s, especially in the membership space, like there’s associations that like, yeah, we have 5,000 members. We’ve had 5,000 members every year for the past 20 years. Like never changes and like, we’re just going online. So it’s kind of like, you can find those businesses that are already successful. Um, and I was just saying this to him. Another, like a presentation for like GoDaddy’s a webinars series that was targeted at agencies. And I think for consulting, it’s important to like, I mean, if someone wants to give you money to build a website from scratch that may or may not work, like take their money, set their expectations and try to do a good job. But if you focus on customers that, you know, already have a business already have, um, you know, some kind of a relationship with a potential customer, like to have a mailing list or, you know, um, You know, so, so we will try to focus our marketing on those marketing, on those kinds of customers that already have a business that’s working, um, which should help that. Like it’s when sometimes when I’m. Uh, when people are. Are are, are complaining and griping because something’s difficult about setting up a website, which I, I tell you, I relate to you by the way. Cause it’s like, I do this for a living. I wrote a book on WordPress, but like I was helping a friend every once in a while. I don’t do it for paid, but I’ll help friends set up websites sometimes. And I’ll just be surprised at how hard it is for me. It’s hard for me. It takes a lot of time. But when people gripe about the effort that’s involved, I’m like, did you realize like you’re starting a business and it’s not easy. Like, I don’t know where you got, like, just wait until you, you have your own angry customers or like. Other stuff, you know, you got to deal with taxes and all the random stuff and in part of business. , Speaking of business, not being easy recently talked about this on the WP minute podcast. Uh, WP engine did a report that the WordPress economy is like $600 billion. Uh, right around that, that mark. Lots of talk recently with acquisitions, um, you know, smaller developers picking up even smaller developer plugins, hosting companies like nexus purchasing every plug and that they can get their hands on. I’m sure this is not. Done, uh, automatic acquiring, um, Day one journal, like so much acquisition happening. In this space. Have you ever thought that? Well, maybe we can build a bigger business with PMP. If we went that route, we were able to go. To nexus and joined them with a membership plugin or wp engine that kind of thing what are the cards hold for acquisitions or investments in that space Uh, yeah, we have thought about like acquiring, um, other plugins products and, you know, it’s kind of sparing some of that potentially is that the programmers are in demand. Um, and so. It feels, uh, like I feel bad about it, but I see some products that are, yeah, I’ve actually, I see products that people are side projects that people are doing. And I have a saying that like when they get to a thousand dollars a month, Sometimes it’s really tough. And they’re like, this isn’t enough. You know, I think I’m going to stop. And I’m always like, no, a thousand dollars a month. Like you’re halfway to $10,000 a month. Like you’re not halfway to $2,000 a month. Like all that work you did to like collect any money whatsoever and build up to a thousand. Like usually if you have a product that’s going to fit like your, at the time, it took you to get to a thousand dollars a month. You’re going to get the $10,000. Um, so that’s me like pumping up other entrepreneurs and trying to push them at the same time. I’m like, man, if it doesn’t work out that guy’s really sharp. And like, if he he’s, he’s, he’s kind of shown that he can think product minded and build something. And like, if he can’t make enough money to make a living, like, Hey, let me like give you a salary and kind of give you a job, you know, and you can build cool stuff for us. So I, yeah, I’ve kind of had that thought, um, of like, oh, like, Product people, if it’s not working out their side gig, like when they look for, you know, a salary job, like, Hey, we get like a really smart developer that proves that they can ship. Um, and so I think there’s some of that mindset at every scale, you know, I’m sure like, you know, something, some of the size of automatic would just by people or by business for the people behind it, you know? Um, and that’s part of liquid, but like I said, hosting companies want product people, um, and people who can handle that to kind of, you know, maintain things. Um, and then. If you ask me, like any business idea, like, have you considered, like, it’s almost funny, like, yeah. I consider everything, man. Like I love the staff. I probably have a spreadsheet that models it. And like, I’m like, I’m always talking and like, um, you know, like I can’t wait to get back to like the conference circuit and like, you know, having drinks with Chris lemma late at night. Cooking up schemes of, you know, like, I feel like at one point I said, like, I was like, oh, can I just like sell my company to, and then work on machine learning. I was like nerding out about machine learning. And he was like, I have an idea for a machine learning thing. And it was like, yeah. So like, have I talked to Chris Lama about like quitting my job and like doing machine learning stuff for him? Like that happened once. Um, yeah, but we haven’t really ever been serious about it. I did take a month earlier in this year where I was like, Hey, I’m going to have kind of informal talks, you know, with different people that just see. What might happen. And I was like, I gave myself a deadline of a month and made that clear. Um, and at the end of the month where like, no, like the current plan of like, you know, hire really great people, kind of get them handover the responsibilities that Kim and I have so that we don’t have to spend as much time on kind of like maintaining what we have and we can push out a new directions. Like I like being my own boss. I like having control and I think we still fit and we it’s good to have independent businesses in the WordPress space. Um, Yeah, but like, I mean, this space is valuable and all these companies are valuable. So it’s, it’s kind of exciting from that sentence. I mean, you know, a market is really growing booming even is when you see. I saw recently a small product that was announced in January of this year. So 2021. Um, already being sold. I mean, it has a nice website, has a nice name, nice brand. You know, it looks good, but it probably has less than a hundred customers. If that may be, I don’t know, unless it’s really doing much better than I thought it would be. Already for sale. And like in the back of my mind, I already know that somebody’s going to buy that. Uh, there was, uh, on startups or the rest of us. Uh, Rob walling. Had I think he tweeted something or somebody sent him an email. I forget where it was, but somebody who was doing like 80,000 ARR in their business sold for one point something million. And it’s almost like if you’re a product maker, developer, this is almost like your way in. You know, to get acquired. So it’s like, it’s almost like the absolute best sort of resume. So if you can build like a micro product, get some traction and then turn to a business that you would actually like to work for. And there is some synergy between your little product and their big product. You could even sell that to them. As like a signing bonus, almost like here, I’ve already proven this. And I’ve got a customer base that comes with me and I can develop it for you. Uh it’s an interesting world for the small product creator uh at the end of the Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, it’s analogous to like how not, you know, Programmers and people who can build products on demand, like people who can, you know, build engaging podcasts are in demand. And there’s like a big gap between like building it and then making money for it and, you know, running a business. I mean, I’m spoiled that, like I have Kim as a partner who is like COO of the company and like get stuff done and can handle, you know, a lot of the, the business end and the accounting and stuff like that. And like, we get help for a bunch of individual things, but it’s like, if I was like, just me by myself as like, I’m, I’m a pretty creative person. I can like build stuff and think strategically and stuff, but like actually like keeping the business running and not falling apart, I would have been lost like years ago without someone like him. So. Um, it’s hard. Yeah. To make that leap from building something cool that people can use to like making enough money on it, to make it your data. But it’s still really hard to make a compelling podcast. So I’m with you like people and there’s demand like, you know yeah. Instead of finding something and hoping they can build a podcast, you know, the resumes they’ve already, you know, shipped a podcast. Jason Coleman everybody. Jason, where can folks find you to say thanks. Yeah. So I’m on Twitter, Jason underscore Coleman. Um, and my blog is the real Jason coleman.com. And yeah, we got a courses out on that’s shipping in a week or two, and we have a big, like a 2.6 update, the paid memberships pro, which is wrapping up some, some features and, um, uh, it’s got better Stripe integration, you know, that’s going to be good there. Fantastic stuff. Everyone else. matterport.com. airport.com/subscribe. Join the mailing list. Don’t forget to tune into your weekly dose of WordPress news in five minutes or less@thewpminute.com.

In today’s episode, Joe talks to Kim Coleman, the co-founder of Paid Memberships Pro - the most complete WordPress membership plugin. She has her hand in all aspects of the development, management, and marketing for the product and the team. She oversees frontend development for the core open source plugin and over 75 Add Ons.     They discuss the value of MVP in growing a business, catering to customer needs, and building and testing new features through the community. They also touch on the importance of formulating the right content for branding, and membership pricing and discount schemes.    Episode Resources: Paid Memberships Pro Paid Memberships Pro WordPress.org Kim Coleman’s Twitter Leave an Apple podcast review or binge-watch past episodes Send questions to yo@wpmrr.com for the next Q&A pod Visit the WPMRR website   What to Listen For: 00:00 Intro 00:46 Welcome to the pod, Kim! 04:12 What has changed over the years? 07:02 The biggest concerns are the desire for the developers to refactor some features 11:11 MVP on the site’s current workload and paid memberships 13:55 Deciding between adding as a core part of the plugin or an add-on plugin 17:32 Limiting what the plugin is responsible for in WordPress 22:46 The struggle to get content from your customer when building a site 27:51 Allowing the community to test newly built products and features 30:07 Pricing: during product launch and how it evolved over the years 37:32 Turning experiments into blog content and knowledge share 40:43 People buy because of urgent technological issues they cannot solve on their own 42:31 Running a company and the family together with your partner 45:37 Homeschooling kids during the pandemic 49:13 Find Kim online!

No one is a future teller - but with the right process and approach, you can come close! Having a reliable and effective approach to testing products can help you establish a successful future for your business... while avoiding disasters. Jason is CEO of Stranger Studios and Paid Memberships Pro. He is co-author of Building Web Apps with WordPress, and has been building websites for over 20 years.

Business and family-focused topics from Jason and Kim. Topics include new gear for podcasting, developing a courses extension and integrations for Paid Memberships Pro, Vaccines and taking naps, and Cohort-style membership sites and niches. (more…)

It's easy to overlook WordPress' capability to expand in parallel with a growing online business. From starting as a simple blog to grow awareness, all the way to fueling a digital e-commerce engine powered by WooCommerce. There's a certain flexibility — almost luxury — business owners have when the first brick in their foundation starts with WordPress. This flexibility doesn't come without a cost, however. Keeping the infrastructure supported and optimized over the years isn't something for the feint of heart. Even if you're technical in nature, following the decisions made by all of the code touching your site can be a costly endeavor. Today's guest, Evan Medeiros founder of The Trade Risk a financial media company, has seen both sides of the equation. He started blogging to grow an audience, used Paid Memberships Pro to start a membership, and now leverages WooCommerce to sell other digital downloads. We talk about this eight year journey of how he grew the business and how WordPress has held up during the flight. Check out the thetraderisk.com and send my brother a tweet to say thanks @evanmedeiros on Twitter. ★ Support this podcast ★

My guest today created a plugin that allows people to create a membership site on top of WordPress. It’s called Paid Memberships Pro. I want to find out how he came up with this product as a result of consulting. I also want to find out what event in his personal life was the breaking point that led to Paid Memberships Pro. Jason Coleman is the founder of Paid Memberships Pro, member management and subscriptions plugin for WordPress. Sponsored byToptal – Toptal is a global network of top talent in business, design, and technology that enables companies to scale their teams, on demand. Toptal serves thousands of clients, including Fortune 500 companies and innovative startups, delivering expertise and world-class solutions at an unparalleled success rate. With elite freelancers in over 100 countries, Toptal connects the world’s top talent with leading companies in days, not weeks. Plus, every new engagement begins with a no-risk trial period, so clients only pay if satisfied with the work. Get started hiring with Toptal today. HostGator – Ready to take your website to the next level? Whether you’re a first-time blogger or an experienced web pro, HostGator has all the tools you need to create a great-looking website or online store. A wide range of options includes cloud-based web hosting, reseller hosting, VPS hosting and dedicated servers. Founded in 2002, HostGator is the perfect web partner for business owners and individuals seeking hands-on support. Visit www.hostgator.com/mixergy to see what HostGator can do for your website. More interviews -> https://mixergy.com/moreint Rate this interview -> https://mixergy.com/rateint

As much as we like to think Open Source is all about giving and not getting, it isn’t a sustainable model. Peace, Love, and WordPress are great, but we still need to eat. So how are plugins really funded? We continue this series on funding open source with Russell Aaron. He has built and maintained several plugins on his own while an employee with a company. Russ says he supports his plugins “on his own dime,” so you’ll want to watch this episode for sure.Funding Open Source: The SeriesWatch Chris Badgett tell his story of how LifterLMS was funded on this episode.Jason Coleman gives insight into how Paid Memberships Pro was built and how it used the Open Source philosophy to grow in this episodeWPblab SponsorsServerPressThank you for being a preroll sponsor, ServerPress! ServerPress is the maker of DesktopServer, WPSiteSync, and so much more! serverpress.com. (It works with WooCommerce now!)KinstaIf you are tired of unreliable or slow hosting check out Kinsta.com, who takes managed WordPress hosting to the next level. Powered by Google Cloud, all their plans include PHP 7.3, SSH access for developers, one-click staging area, 20 global data centers, free SSL, free CDN and 24×7 expert support who will also migrate your site free of charge. demo.Kinsta.comAbout Russell AaronBorn and raised in Nevada, Russ is no stranger to hard work and the hustle. He started coding in MySpace “pimping out tables” for the “About Me” section. He then started learning some CSS and going to WordPress Meetups.He worked at a mortgage company and built plugins to work with the API to display rates on the website. He ended up selling that plugin to local real estate professionals and other loan shops. He knew these people personally.Back in the day, he was asked to help organize WordCamp Las Vegas so he put his Gravity Styles plugin on hold to work on it. Serendipity rewarded him. Ben Fox urged him to build the plugin. He said, “if you don’t build it, I will.” Pippin Williamson sat down at Russ’ laptop and a few minutes later, he had the plugin ready.Read more about Russ on his website and say hi to him on Twitter.Why Build Gravity Styles?When you’re creating a product it is important to solve an actual problem. He hated styling forms. So, he saw Suzette Franck made all of her forms pink. So he asked her if he could use her CSS. “Sure” she said. And Russ was off building Gravity Styles.“I hate styling Gravity Forms.” Russell AaronHow Long Before Gravity Styles Was Solvent?It was always solvent. Russ believes that you should only work on side projects after you feed your family and have a roof on your head.“Please keep a roof over your head.” Russell AaronDo the WorkDon’t be afraid to walk up and shake someone’s hand. Build relationships. Those are the most valuable tool anyone has. Also, don’t be afraid of guerrilla marketing.“Stop talking and start sweating.” Russell AaronFor example, he used DesktopServer, built a local version of a website that was fully operational and had content. He would go to that business (someone he knew) and say something like, “Hey. I built this for you. Would you like to have a website setup in an hour for your business?” Then he’d help them with hosting or whatever, got the cash, and moved on.“If you don’t have the passion to do this it doesn’t matter if you’re Bruce Wayne; you’re not going to get anywhere.” Russell AaronAdvice for Plugin Developers“They gave me hosting and I did something with it.” Russell AaronBe curious.Be passionate.Have a mentor then be a mentor.Solve a problem with your plugin.Hire or ask a professional to code it.Be accountable.Do the work.Build relationships.Don’t be a taker; be a giver.Use the tools you have.Go to Meetups and Conferences.Make friends.Do all of this after you’ve paid for your food and rent.Tool or Tip of the WeekThis Tool or Tip of the week is brought to you by Fat Dog Creatives. If you’re a service-based business serious about growth, Rhonda Negard is your rebranding and web design thinker, a strategic design specialist. Check out her website at FatDogCreatives.comRuss recommends getting a Chromecast. Use it to play videos from WordPress.tv while you work (keep learning), YouTube, or at social gatherings.Jason recommends Small.Chat. Even the free account allows you to integrate a chat bot on your website to your Slack channel. Respond in real time in a way that works with your team.Bridget recommends the DOSS SoundBox. The bass is awesome. Shows the best of Miles Davis which she is currently enjoying — especially Kind of Blue. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We’ve all heard, “free as in beer,” but what does it even mean? You know you have a valuable solution, product, or service, but how should it be priced? What is your product business model? Is it all free, freemium, or premium only? Do you finance with the equity in your home, an SBA loan, or exposure?Business models are Jason Coleman‘s favorite topic. We are lucky enough to be joined by him for 45 minutes on this episode. Remember, the last 15 are the Tool or Tip of the Week.Don’t miss this episode if you want to continue the conversation on what really funds open source. (Hint: it’s not open source fairies.) There were so many quotables, you just have to watch!WPwatercooler SponsorsServerPressThank you for being a preroll sponsor, ServerPress! ServerPress is the maker of DesktopServer, WPSiteSync, and so much more! https://www.serverpress.com. (It works with WooCommerce now!)Beaver BuilderThe best drag and drop page builder. $99 for unlimited sites. Try today. Used by Over 1M Sites. Professional Designs. 100% Responsive Templates. Theme Compatible. Highly Customizable. Content Page Templates. Live, Front End Editing. Web Developer Friendly. https://www.beaverbuilder.comKinstaIf you are tired of unreliable or slow hosting check out Kinsta.com, who takes managed WordPress hosting to the next level. Powered by Google Cloud, all their plans include PHP 7.3, SSH access for developers, one-click staging area, 20 global data centers, free SSL, free CDN and 24×7 expert support who will also migrate your site free of charge. https://demo.kinsta.comJason Coleman – Entrepreneur, Husband, AuthorJason and Kim Coleman were high school sweethearts and formed their businesses together. Currently, Jason is the CEO of Stranger Studios and Paid Memberships Pro. He’s also a published author. They both have college degrees and knew that business building was their path. You can read Jason’s blog here.(Side note: Jessalyn interviewed Kim Coleman at WCUS in 2017.)Jason Coleman worked in the 2.0 app area and built quite a bit of proprietary software. Soon after he found WordPress. He had an eCommerce plugin that he didn’t license under GPL and saw that as a missed opportunity. Around 2011, 2012 Jason niched in the membership website market. Because the work was repeatable, he started charging more.“Don’t combat the big guys in the space they’re winning.” Jason ColemanSo many of us in WordPress are accidental freelancers or hobbyists or employees. Jason’s passion is not only to help his local community, but to help WordPress developers set themselves up for success at Day 1. Be on the lookout for his presentation at WordCamp Orlando in 2019 on WordPress.tv. (His slides and spreadsheet resources are here.)What are the WordPress Product Business Models?It feels like there are many business models. But with WordPress products you have three: premium, freemium, and free. You can also have a free product and charge only for support. That’s the way PMP went for quite a while. But it’s important to set goals. Make sure your goals are achievable and realistic.Premium-only plugins don’t have the competitive advantage of being listed in the WordPress Plugin Directory. This was the opening in the market that Jason Coleman saw as a huge opportunity. There were many premium plugins for membership, but none in the free/freemium space.Currently, PMP has a freemium model. Check it out in the directory; don’t forget to check out their add-ons, too.Supporting Open Source with Agency WorkMuch like the story of LifterLMS, PMP was subsidized and supported by agency work. You have to plan in order for your WordPress product to become self-sustaining. That plan must include profit. Make projections with a percentage and stick to it. He believes 30% profit is reasonable.Freelancers have an advantage. When doing client work, WordPress developers are used to building something and standing by it. Not many people stand by something they have built. It’s the pride in craftsmanship that is an advantage.“A lot of freelancers move into products because they have the skill to [support something they built].” Jason ColemanHow Long Before PMP Was Profitable?Like most businesses, Paid Memberships Pro was self-sufficient and in the black by year three (2015). They reached a point where their forecasts (huge fans of spreadsheets) required they dive in to PMP 100%. To do this they paused their agency work for three months.When Should You Raise Your Prices?Using your goals, decide when it makes sense. This is one of the reasons why Jason Coleman loves spreadsheets so much. You can tweak prices to see when you meet revenue and growth goals. Don’t worry about the people who will be upset. They will always be upset.“There will be backlash no matter what you charge.” Jason ColemanInstead of focusing on current customers in your projections, focus on the future customer. Mature businesses worry about churn, where most startups need to focus on future customers. Don’t forget about your current customers. Be sure to grandfather in their pricing. Loyalty, after all, is very important.Tool or Tip of the WeekThis Tool or Tip of the week is brought to you by Fat Dog Creatives. If you’re a service-based business serious about growth, Rhonda Negard is your rebranding and web design thinker, a strategic design specialist. Check out her website at FatDogCreatives.comJason Coleman recommends the distributor plugin by 10up. This allows you to syndicate content to one central site. This is good for people who publish all over the place.Jason Tucker recommends the Peak-a-View app. This tool allows you to safely hand your phone to a kid or client and allow them to only view one album. There was a big write up on it at 9to5mac.com.Bridget recommends Sarah Beth Yoga on YouTube. It’s organized by focus (bedtime yoga, morning yoga), type, and by minutes (10 minute, 15 minute, etc.). Bridget is finally doing 20 minute yoga. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week's theme is health! Although cliche, we talk about why it's important for your business that you stay healthy, how to take care of your brain - not just your body, and a few tips to help you start creating healthy habits for all of us who are sitting at our desks all day. Hear the full episodes in the links below: E10 – 5-ish ways to overcome your screen addiction E47 – Working out so it will all work out E31 – How to take a 3-week vacation from your business E53 – Bilbo on how to deal with haters (Jason Coleman, Paid Memberships Pro)

Hoy hacemos un monográfico de Paid Memberships Pro, un plugin gratuito para crear tu Membership Site.

Hoy hacemos un monográfico de Paid Memberships Pro, un plugin gratuito para crear tu Membership Site.

Starting a business is hard. Internet trolls are inevitable, but they shouldn’t keep you from crossing the bridge to success.   That’s why in today’s episode we’re going to be talking about the emotional aspects of navigating business relationships - with clients or customers.   Jason also covers building membership sites, how to determine your prices, and how to even raise your prices with your existing client base in such a way they understand. We learned a lot and hope you do too!   Episode resources:   Follow Jason on Twitter! PaidMembershipsPro.com Leave a review!

Puede ocurrir que quieras tener tu propia academia online pero no tengas el dinero suficiente o que no quieras invertir hasta tener la certeza de que tu proyecto va a funcionar. Hoy te traigo una forma de crear tu sitio de enseñanza online de modo sencillo y a bajo costo con WordPress y Paid Memberships Pro.

This week on the WP-Tonic podcast, our guest had to reschedule because she was sick, so Jonathan Denwood and Kim Shivler spoke about Membership Websites. In the past, the two broke down requirements for planning and implementing a WordPress Learning Management System. In this episode, they applies the same format to discuss requirements for planning and implementing a WordPress Membership Website. The discussion covered several popular WordPress membership plugins including MemberPress and Paid Memberships Pro pointing out the features of the different plugins and focused on the importance of proper planning to make sure you select the right plugin for your requirements. Would you also please add the following before the transcript portion of the blog post:

En el episodio 76 de WordPress Semanal te hablaré de las ventajas de crear un membership site con el plugin Paid Memberships Pro. Escuchar en iTunes Escuchar en iVoox Escuchar en Spotify Plugin de la semana: Muestra una barra de notificación en tu WordPress Con el plugin WordPress Notification Bar puedes crear y mostrar una […] La entrada 76. Membership site con Paid Memberships Pro es una artículo de Gonzalo Navarro.

Jason Coleman, CEO and Developer of Paid Memberships Pro talks about what he did to get started, some of the challenges of breaking into the WordPress plugin scene, how talking to others helped him set revenue expectations, and offers great advice on how to handle the inevitable negative feedback that comes with supporting 50,000 users. […] The post Episode 1: Jason Coleman and Paid Memberships Pro appeared first on How I Built It.

Ep 173 Jason Coleman, founder and lead developer of Paid Memberships Pro. Listen as Nathan and Jason talk about his e-commerce membership plug-in and the numbers for his business. YOUR $100: Remember to subscribe to the show on itunes then text the word "nathan" to 33444 to confirm that you've done it to enter to win $100 every Monday on the show. Do this now. Stop reading this and do it! Click here to join the top tribe and instantly learn how Nathan made his first $10k at 19 years old: bit.ly/1SynoAg Top Entrepreneurs join Nathan Latka daily inspired by, Art of Charm, Pat Flynn, John Dumas, Entrepreneur on Fire, Chalene Johnson, Lewis Howes, School of Greatness, HBR Podcast, the StartUp podcast, Mixergy, Andrew Warner, AskGaryVee, and the great hosts of BiggerPockets! 3 Key Points: Despite expecting to rake in 360K+ in 2016, Jason’s business doesn’t rely on paid acquisition or a sizeable number of employees. Paid Memberships Pro is quite independent. Because of the type of service they provide, Paid Memberships Pro has a hard-to-measure churn rate. (Churn is dependent of the type of service or product being sold.) Without many employees or expenses to run his business, Jason and his wife bring in almost all of the revenue from the business as profit. Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:00 – Nathan’s introduction to today’s show 01:32 – Jason joins the show. 02:09 – Paid Memberships Pro is an e-commerce membership plug-in for WordPress. 02:31 – Jason’s business has about 3-5K paying customers. 03:15 – The membership for the service is 200$ a year for premium service. They project about 360K+ in revenue for 2016. 04:25 – Because of the kind of service that Paid Membership Pro provides, churn rate is difficult to measure. 06:08 – The business has a few contractors but not many employees. 06:54 – About 40K sites use the service and 4K are paying customers. 08:05 – Jason doesn’t do paid acquisition – the business’s biggest expense is the developers working on the service. 08:26 – They make about 10-20K a month. Jason and his wife take in about 15K a month from it. 09:12 – Paid Membership Pros’ competitors include Restrict Content Pro and Easy Digital Downloads. 10:27 – Jason beatboxes. 11:32 – Famous Five Resources Mentioned:   Edgar – Nathan uses Edgar instead of other scheduling tools for Twitter because Edgar cycles through content over and over (buffer/others you have to re-input content over and over – time consuming). In the last several months, Edgar has driven Nathan over 3728 clicks that he didn’t have to work or pay for. Here isNathan’s Edgar Content Calendar Paid Memberships Pro – Jason’s WordPress business Biography – Jason’s personal description on his website The Singularity is Near – Jason’s favorite business book Slack – Jason’s favorite online tool Bryan Johnson – CEO Jason follows Bio Jason Coleman is the founder and lead developer of Paid Memberships Pro. The membership plug-in for WordPress that over 40,000 entrepreneurs and organizations use to get paid. Famous 5 Favorite Book?— The Singularity is Near – by Ray Kurzweil What CEO do you follow?— Bryan Johnson What is your favorite online tool?— Slack Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— Sometimes. If you could let your 20 year old self know one thing, what would it be?—Focus on one thing at a time and fail fast.   Listen to The Top if you want to hear from the worlds TOP entrepreneurs on how much they sold last month, how they are selling it, and what they are selling - 7 days a week in 20 minute interviews! Join the Top Tribe at http://NathanLatka.com/TheTop The Top is FOR YOU if you are: A STUDENT who wants to become the CEO of a $10m company in under 24 months (episode #4) STUCK in the CORPORATE grind and looking to create a $10k/mo side business so you can quit (episode #7) An influencer or BLOGGER who wants to make $27k/mo in monthly RECURRING revenue to have the life you want and full CONTROL (episode #1) The Software as a Service (SaaS) entrepreneur who wants to grow to a $100m+ valuation (episode #14). Your host, Nathan Latka is a 25 year old software entrepreneur who has driven over $4.5 million in revenue and built a 25 person team as he dropped out of school, raised $2.5million from a Forbes Billionaire, and attracted over 10,000 paying customers from 160+ different countries.   Oprah gets 60 minutes or more to make her guests comfortable to then ask tough questions. Nathan does it all in less than 15 minutes in this daily podcast that's like an audio version of Pat Flynn's monthly income report. Join the Top Tribe at http://NathanLatka.com/TheTop

Jason Coleman is the founder of Stranger Studios and the creator of Paid Memberships Pro, a membership plugin for WordPress. He is the co-author of Building Web Apps with WordPress. Jason enjoys playing Minecraft and Super Mario Maker with his kids. Kary Oberunner‘s podcast with Kirk is here: How to tell your friends their Digital Fly© is down […] The post Creating and Pricing A WordPress Plugin with Jason Coleman – 075 appeared first on Art Of Value.