From Idea to Launch: Creating a Premium Plugin Extension

Marcus:
Well, hey everyone. Welcome to another Biz Chat. I’m Marcus, and I’m here today with my Do the Woo Co-host Katie Keith from Barn2 Plugins. How are you doing today, Katie?

Katie:
Great, thanks.

Marcus:
How are you? I’m doing pretty well. Today’s topic of discussion is going to kind of focus around plugin products and plugin sales and all of that. So I think you’re going to join the hot seat a little bit, but we also have Maarten Belmans with us today from Studio Wombat. How are you doing today, Maarten?

Maarten:
Hey, good, thank you. Thanks for having me on the show today.

Marcus:
Absolutely. I’m excited to have you with us and to pick your brain a little bit. But before we get into some of the meat of that, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and how Studio Wombat got started?

Maarten:
Okay. My journey started in 2016 when I left my varied comfortable job in Belgium to go traveling to Australia for a year. And then it was a fairly unique story, but I think now with all the Indy hackers around, it’s not so unique anymore. So I did that with my partner. We traveled for a year and I enjoyed it so much to have that freedom that I started to think about shaping my life around travel. How can I keep doing this without having other stuff get in the way? And then very quickly I started freelance here, but then clients are nice, but you still have deadlines and you still have to answer a lot of emails, take calls and all that sort of stuff. So I started to dig in a little further to be completely free, a kind of organism. I tell the way that I want to and general the chance to travel.

And then I stumbled upon WordPress and the plugin and teams ecosystem, and I started to look into it and what people were doing. I quickly found out that there’s a whole ecosystem of sellers doing their thing, making awesome products. And so I started to learn PHP because I came from a different background, but if you’re a programmer, it’s not too difficult to switch languages. So I thought myself PHP and the inner workings of WordPress, and that’s kind of how it started. I made a very simple plugin. I put it up on the repo. Pretty soon people were asking, Hey, can it do X or Y or Z? And that’s how I found out that there’s a market for premium plugins where you add more features. And that’s kind of how I rolled into it. And then a year later in 2017 or at the end of 2017, I officially launched Studio Wombat and I started with three small WooCommerce plugins and now I have six, a few add-ons. And that’s kind of my journey in a nutshell. I love

Katie:
The idea of changing it and planning it around your lifestyle. So your kind of lifestyle goals came first and then you identify WordPress and particularly plugins would meet that?

Maarten:
Yes, exactly. So for me, jumping into WooCommerce was really a business decision at first because I looked at WordPress and then I just thought, where can I make money? And that’s e-commerce, because I do think that people in e-commerce understand a little bit more that you have to spend some money to make money. And that’s how I decided to just dig into WooCommerce and see how it all works.

Marcus:
You said that you were doing freelance work and some other work before Studio Wombat and Studio Wombat was a bit of a side hustle for you. And I think somewhere I read through some of your timeline and stuff somewhere in 2019. You said it moved from being a side hustle to your main thing. How did you kind of decide when it was time to let go of the rest and focus solely on Studio Wombat? Was it hitting some sort of revenue threshold that you had set out for yourself, or was it just a time thing you needed to be able to have the time to put into building your plugin business? What kind of led you to kind of shift gears and fully embrace the side hustle as your main thing?

Maarten:
For me, it was purely monetary. I knew that I needed a certain income to be able to live in Belgium because I had to pay rent, I had to put food on the table. So it was very much about money. And when I hit the threshold, I would be able to gradually let some clients go. And then finally, as you said, make the switch in 2019 or full-time. And I think, I dunno what the goal was that I said to myself anymore, I think it was 15US dollars because I live in a country that’s heavily taxed, so I lose quite a lot of that. And so it’s very hard for me to just jump in and have one or two years of runway and just jump in something full time without having another income because I know everything that I earn is taxed heavily. And living in Belgium itself is quite expensive too. So I really didn’t have a choice. So I decided to keep working on it as a side project, which meant that I worked a lot. I worked sometimes 15 hours per day, which is, I wouldn’t do that again. That’s too much really. But that was the path that I chose to take in.

Marcus:
Yeah, I think you’ve talked about it some Katie before, but how is that with you? And I know that I believe that you still have the occasional client thing here and there, but for the most part have moved over to the plugin business. Was it similar for you? Did you have some threshold for moving from client work websites to fully product business?

Katie:
Yeah, we were very lucky that within about six months of launching our first plugin, we were able to stop taking on new client projects. I can’t actually remember what the threshold was. It wasn’t like a goal we’d set. We just decided we can afford this now it’s going well enough and it will keep growing that we can afford it. But the client business was still bringing in a reasonable amount through passive income. It was something quite a lot like 10,000 a month or something from hosting and support plans and things like that. So that was kind of enough to almost live on ish with what the plugins were bringing in. And we still have quite a loss of clients even years later. So it would be seven years now since we started selling plugins. And we’ve still got these terrible websites that we built long, long ago that we still look after.
And so that brings in a trickle of income. And sometimes I think we shouldn’t be doing this at all because it’s a distraction, but you build relationships with clients, it’s not always a business decision. If you’ve been working with somebody and looking after their website for many years, somehow it doesn’t feel right if there’s someone you get on with to tell them, oh no, I’m a product person now. So we still have quite a number of clients, but when they get to the point that they need a new website, like a big project, then that’s the point that I say, no, we can’t do this anymore and recommend somebody to them to do that for them instead.

Maarten:
And I think it’s great to keep some clients on board just because you get some feedback and they’re the ones actually running a website or e-commerce shop. So I think that’s a good thing to keep some clients around and just ping pong ideas if you need to.

Katie:
Yeah, definitely. One of our clients that we still have now gave us the idea for what have been all of our biggest products, so I can’t just fire him. He paid us to build a plugin that lists his blog posts in a searchable table, and we released that as a free plugin. Just like what Maarten said, you released a free plugin and then the feature requests start coming. So I’m a big believer that with getting into products, you just need to get something out there and then you start to get feedback and ideas and valuable insider information about what people want. So from that client project and free plugin, we launched a WooCommerce table plugin, which has been our biggest plugin of all time. Another offshoot of it was a document library, which is our current biggest selling plugin and all from this one client. So it would feel very mean to not look after his website anymore.

Marcus:
So Maarten, the Studio Wombat site says that you focus on quality, not quantity by offering. And you mentioned this already by offering just six plugins at the moment. It sounds like you’re able to focus on perfecting those besides development time. How do you keep from launching six more plugins tomorrow? Wouldn’t that almost certainly generate more revenue for you?

Maarten:
Yeah, probably. But then that doesn’t really differentiate me from a lot of other shops, so I try to take that different approach where I really talk to my customers. So I am doing a lot of my own support just and I can talk to customers, find out their needs with my plugin, find out where they’re stuck, what I can do better. And usually it takes me one or two years of projecting a plugin before I feel that I can move on to something else I might have. In the meantime, I might have started building something else, but it’s not a focus. It becomes a focus if I feel that the one plugin that launched last is matured enough so that I can split my focus onto other work. But yeah, probably if I would split my time more and develop more plugins, that could probably be beneficial for my profit. But yeah, it’s a different way of working. And I’m also a small company, so I think it’s better for my own sanity if I could just focus on less plugins at a time.

Katie:
Yeah, I think that’s very wise because I have often done the opposite and then come to regret it. So when you’re working in WooCommerce particularly, there’s so many gaps and when you are working in it, you find the gaps quite regularly, either yourself or your customers are reporting it. And there’s all these different ways to find gaps in WooCommerce. And so I’ve always been tempted to fill all those gaps with very, very niche plugins. So we’ve currently got 23 premium plugins, and I did a recent 80 20 rule analysis on my business and discovered that as you would expect, a few plugins are making the vast majority of the revenue. And I realized we need to be focusing on our most successful plugins and putting, as Maarten said, really perfecting them, spending a very long time putting the features in that they need and things like that instead of racing through and filling every gap that we find.

And I also think I’ve always been impressed that Maarten has always thought big and gone for quite a significant plugins, not just one little feature, but a plugin that adds quite a lot of functionality and maybe have some competition in the market as well. Whereas I’ve often been attracted to plugins that are completely unique in the market, particularly when we were getting started, all our early plugins had no competition, and only as we’ve grown do we feel that we couldn’t actually get a foothold in the market where there is competition. And so I need to stop doing those little plugins. And one thing we’re doing at the moment is actually trying to sell some of them. So currently five of our premium plugins and two free ones are up for sale because they don’t kind of fit into that bigger picture. So I think a lot of companies that are a different place in their journey can do well from small plugins because that’s a really good opportunity to say rank in Google straightaway because if your idea is unique, then you can get right to the top of Google and get all the sales for that.
But I feel that I’ve done that for too long and need to think bigger and learn from that. So I love Maarten’s approach to really perfect plugins and do each one properly.

Marcus:
Yeah, that was actually going to be a follow up too. I know that I’ve seen that you’ve put some plugins up for sale, getting rid of some of them from your lineup, and I think I saw in one of your transparency reports, Maarten, that you also removed at least one plugin from the.org repository. Talk us through kind of your mindset about figuring out when it’s time to maybe let one go.

Maarten:
So yeah, I did remove a plugin from the repository because it didn’t generate enough sales and people were expecting more and more for free. So it was generating too much support overhead and not enough profit in return. So it was a quick decision really. And while I’ve always launched my plugins on the repo, I kind of came back from that and I’m now deciding if the repo is the right way to go. And because I now have removed one plugin and nothing happened, like sales for the plugin are still similar as they were before on the repo. So then the question is what’s it doing on the repo other than generate extra work and some customers that are ungrateful because they want everything for free. So it’s a tough decision because I do think that the repo is a very good marketing engine, especially if you are just starting out. It’s beneficial to start on Google but also have the repo with you because it’s still free traffic. But I do think at some point you outgrow it because it becomes a lot of work and you just don’t have the time because you want to focus on paid customers. So yeah, it’s a difficult balance I think. But I’m kind of coming back from the repo now and I’m starting to think that launching every plugin on the repo is not necessary for success.

Marcus:
No, that’s interesting. Speaking of the support, I know that you just touched on how support is a big part of what you do with the limited plugins. Your support response time is incredible, just under four hours from what I saw on the website, I come from a support background with Sky Verge. Tell us a little bit about how you handle support on your end to get the response time so low.

Maarten:
Well, if you want low response times, you have to do a lot yourself. So I did support for a long time before I hired somebody to help me with it, and now we’re kind of splitting the workload and I still go in there from time to time just to see what are the really technical tickets or if I know a customer, I will reply to them just to maintain that relationship or if I feel like I can get some more information out of the issue that the customer has or what they might want next for the plugin, I’ll also jump in and reply. So I keep doing a lot of support and since I develop my own plugins, it’s always going to be the fastest. I can do probably 20 tickets in an hour and they will be finished too. There will be a reply.

So that’s really the best thing to do for me. But yeah, it takes a lot of time, so you want to have to put in that time. But other than that, what I also did is I keep perfecting documentation, so I keep going back to the same documentation. If a customer has a question that is in the documentation and they didn’t find a reply, I will rewrite it. I will find a different way to say the same thing. And now I’m also experimenting with AI just to see if it can help with lowering that burden on support and also just give a quicker answer to my customers.

Katie:
It’s interesting what you say about being able to do 20 tickets an hour because that highlights the most difficult thing that I have found in outsourcing your support and getting help with it because I too, as the founder, very, very fast at responding to tickets at what I think is very high quality. I know the product so well, I know our documentation, I wrote it after all. And so I can provide good responses very quickly, but then as soon as you start hiring out people to do it, whether they’re in-house or not, you find that that’s not what you receive. Typically, and I’ve talked to many other WordPress product companies, the average ticket when you delegate support might take half an hour to do. They’re not doing 20 tickets an hour or anything like that. And as a founder, that’s really frustrating because you don’t understand why they’re not as fast as you, but you kind of have to just learn to accept that it’s one of the inevitable consequences of growing.

For example, at Barn2, we handle 22,000 support tickets last year. So clearly I can’t do all the support myself, and I would love to, I really enjoy support, particularly pre-sales because it’s an excellent touchpoint with your customers where you can really learn their motivation, how they see your products, and constantly when I do step into support and talk to customers, I’m finding opportunities to improve the documentation, improve the products, improve our sales pages. I learned so much from doing the support, but it’s not realistic. And so you have to get help and as part of that, you just have to accept that nobody is as fast as you.

Maarten:
Yeah, and I was going to add that I fully agree with you there. It’s very frustrating in the beginning to find a support agent because you are used to your own speed of doing things, and it’s like you said, you have to come to terms with it. And for me, it took like six months where I was very frustrated with how things were going, and then I realized that it’s just all in my head and I have to, my expectations need to be different, and now everything’s going well. I’m very happy with the support guide and it’s all known off my shoulders, so it’s perfect really. But I still go in there and I do a lot of support, but it’s on my agenda to lower my burden on support for this year because I’m doing too much and I’m spread a little bit too thin, especially if I’m developing new plugins. So I’m going to have to let it go this year and do less support

Marcus:
Knowing that you can do it so much faster and so much more in depth is the trap though, of being the plugin owner because your time is valuable and there are other things that you have to do. And so I think personally, I think the balance is figuring out how to make support a part of what you do and then when it’s time to move on to something else, make sure that you move on to something else.
You’ve written transparency reports, and I’m going to throw this one to Katie after you too because she’s done this the last, at least last year, but probably the last couple years in some events and stuff. You’ve written transparency reports the last few years that show the numbers of plugins sold, revenue growth, support, volume and so on. I love reading these, but why do you feel like sharing those stats with everyone and what do you learn by doing them?

Maarten:
It keeps me accountable because that’s the one time of the year or when it’s spread over several weeks when I write a post. But that’s the one time of the year where I actually dive into these numbers and go look at them because I’m always so busy doing other stuff. So it’s really just a great way to dive deep into the numbers and then have that record through five years when I can, in five years time, I’ll be able to see how have we grown, what have I done and where should I have improved? So I just think that for myself, it’s a great record to have it too and to do it publicly hopefully that shows my customers that I’m in this for the long run because for a long time I’ve been a very small and a very new company and people don’t really like to put their money into new stuff, but they don’t know it. So for me, that transparency is part of showing my customer that they can trust me. It’s kind of my Trustpilot profile on my own website.

Marcus:
I like that. What about you, Katie? I know you’ve done some of the same why they need to make it public?

Katie:
My first experience of transparency reports was when Pippin Williamson, the previous owner of Sandhills, which is Easy Digital Downloads AffiilateWP, et cetera, he used to do year-end review transparency reports every year, which were incredibly transparent, the most transparent thing I’ve ever seen actually, because he talks about profits as well as revenue, and it was so useful to get an idea of scale. And even though we were only a small proportion of them in terms of revenue at the time, I found it really interesting to learn about the scale and how we compared to another company. And also things like comparing our profit margin, even though they were much bigger, our margin was actually better and I was like, oh, we are actually not making that much less money than a massive company because we’ve got better margins. Isn’t that interesting? And things like that.

So I first encountered it from that side of things, and I wanted to share the same with my own business, and I’ve never shared as much as Pippin because of course when you do a transparency report, it’s your choice how much you want to share. And I have never shared profit because I feel that whether our profit is low or high, there might be negative consequences in some way of sharing it, whether that’s within our customer base, our team or whatever. So I will share revenue but not profit, and when I have shared revenue, it has actually opened doors and brought more opportunities to me. I think it allows people to compare, and if you are above a sort of reasonable level, it makes people take you seriously. So the first time I started sharing profit on interviews and websites like Indie Hackers and that sort of thing make you share profit, sometimes people in the WordPress community who’d heard of but not communicated with started reaching out to me suggesting collaborations and partnerships asking my advice, and I realized that people were taking me more seriously because I had shared revenue, and I found that really interesting.

And as Maarten said, it can also help to reassure your customers because if they can see that you are a financially stable company and not just doing it as a tiny sideline or something like that, then they can trust with their money with you and that you will continue to look after the software that they’re buying from you.

Marcus:
If I’m a plugin company and I’m thinking about doing the same, is there a point at which it might be detrimental maybe to post those? Should I go see what Studio Wombat and Barn2 and Sandhills, which is where it went to Awesome Motive, those reports. Should I go look at those reports first and compare myself and say, well, I’m not doing as well as those, maybe I should keep that to myself. Or do you think that there’s a downside to posting those if you had a certain size? Or do you think transparency is transparency and you should lean into that no matter what your size is?

Maarten:
I think there is a downside to it because your competition is also reading, so they do get a good view of what you’re doing and where you’re at in your journey, but it outweighs the positives for me. So it has never been an issue. But Katie, I will never share exact numbers. I did that at the very beginning when built in public formed a big thing, but I’ve stopped doing that because I noticed that a lot of people, they like to read those numbers, but they will never share anything back. So that felt kind of like that wasn’t a right balance and I didn’t feel good about it, so I decided not to share detailed numbers. And I think now I’m like the way that my reports are set up now, I think it’s mostly beneficial to everyone and hopefully it even sparks creativity in somebody else that wants to start a WordPress business because there’s still room for more people to join in. And like Katie said, it’s a good way to point your business and yourself on the map. People get an idea of how big you are and it opens doors. So all these advantages, they don’t really outweigh the disadvantage of your competition reading those reports and then maybe moving into the same things that you are doing and just copying what you’re doing.

Katie:
I follow a lot of people on Twitter who are just getting started in their plugin journey and they often share their revenue, and it’s really lovely to see the benefits of people sharing smaller amounts of revenue and meeting those initial milestones because the community is so supportive of them and everybody celebrates those early milestones together. And things like earning your first $500 is a really exciting thing and we should all celebrate that, not look down on them for being a small new company. It’s interesting what Martin said about competitors seeing your revenue and so on, because I think we need to acknowledge that Maarten and I have very similar companies in that we both have multiple products. So when we share revenue, we’re actually sharing revenue for our combined plugin sales across all products, and we are never actually telling you what revenue we get on a specific product.

I will reveal some things like what is our biggest selling plugin, but you can’t infer the actual sales of that plugin from that. And I might share something like lifetime sales of a plugin over five years or something. But again, you can’t actually infer the monthly revenue from that. And that is intentional for me because that might be useful for competitors to know what products are most worth competing with, and I don’t feel the need to do that because the community doesn’t need that level of detail. And so I see that as disadvantaging me without a clear benefit to the community. So if I was a single product company, then I would think a lot more carefully about whether to share revenue and the implications of that than perhaps marketing or I have to do.

Marcus:
Makes sense. I think probably the takeaway there might also be transparent that does help you put yourself on the map, but maybe depending on what you sell, how many plugins you sell, how well you did, maybe there’s a version of what you share that makes more sense than what say, studio One bed or Barn two or somebody shares, maybe it’s just crafting what it is that you want to share in your transparency report for the year. Your transparency reports also show Martin, and I think that this is probably the same for you, Katie, just anecdotally that your biggest sales months are generally November mostly due to Black Friday. Have you played with ways to mimic those sales in other months or is it just a matter of who’s looking for deals at what times? Because we’re past Black Friday now, now we’re in January or February time, it seems like it’d be slower. Are there things that you’ve toyed with to try and, I don’t know, get some of that same kind of interest and engagement in your plugins? Other times in the year

Maarten:
When I do my discount during Black Friday, I have a banner on top of the website and I specifically say that that’s the only discount that we will do during the year, and I kind of want to hold myself to that because I don’t want to devalue my product like the whole year. It just price hit differently. I don’t feel comfortable doing that, but I also find that there’s more traffic during Black Friday. I really think people are just shopping around and just going to a lot of websites and suing articles maybe and clicking through, I dunno, but traffic increases and I don’t think that there is any other time of the year where it increases that much. I don’t think I would get the same results I am, however positive that if I were to do a sale, I’m going to get more profit out of it at any time of the year because people are, they just love a sale.
I think that’s really the bottom line of it. If they see that your products set a discounts, they will purchase way faster rather than reading all your documentation first or finding different content or comparing plugins, they will just, that trigger to buy is so much faster. So whenever I do a sale, I’ll have more profit in the end. I’m very sure of that, but I haven’t brought myself to do it yet because it does take a bit of work and it feels like I’m doing a disservice to the customers that buy on Black Friday because I specifically accept that it’s the only time that I’ll do a discount. So yeah, it’s a bit of a hurdle that I have to get over because maybe I should do a discount during Christmas and New Year’s too. I think it would be beneficial for profit numbers.

Katie:
I work with Ellipsis to create my marketing strategy and they very strongly advise me not to do any sales except for Black Friday because it trains customers to think that they can get a discount to all times of year and therefore never to pay full price. So we followed that advice and we only do Black Friday. And then as Maarten said, we go on about how it’s the only sale that we do all year. I know that there are peaks and troughs at different times of year, but I think we need to learn those, analyze them and accept them. Fewer people are working at Christmas, so we are not going to make as much money as Christmas at Christmas as we do on Black Friday when everybody’s buying plugins. And if you do plugin sales for a few years and compare with other companies in the industry, then you can see that there are very clear patterns.

And cashflow wise, I don’t think that you should be doing sales just to fill the gaps. You should instead be able to afford to have those peaks and troughs as the year goes on and you know that the quiet periods will be made up by the busy periods in terms of your sales. So I don’t think that’s a reason to do lots of sales. And to give you a bit of evidence behind that, we have trialed Halloween sales and Christmas sales, and we barely made any more money than usual when we did a Christmas sale because I think people just aren’t working then, so they’re not going to be buying plugins even if they’re cheaper. And Halloween was kind of interesting. We made a few thousand dollars extra more than we normally would during that period, but it was nothing compared to the increase you get during Black Friday, and it was a bit of work to do it, so we decided not to bother anymore after doing that twice in a row. And it’s so close to Black Friday as well. Halloween, it feels a bit strange to be doing a sale right before your big sale. So I’d say don’t bother and just accept that different times of year generate different levels of sales.

Maarten:
Yeah, I agree with that. I think doing a discount just to try and make a month okay is probably not the right attitude to start doing that discount.

Marcus:
Yeah, that makes sense. I want to get technical with the sales for just a moment. It looks like you’re using Paddle Maarten for purchasing licenses of your plugins. What made you decide on that and not going through something like the WooCommerce dot com marketplace?

Maarten:
So I’d hate to admit this now, but when I started I was quite cheap, so I didn’t feel like purchasing EDD, and that was also at the time where EDD was waiting for the version three update and there was nothing happening. It seemed for a moment there that the product wasn’t going anywhere. Freemium didn’t exist yet, which is probably what I would go with today, but that didn’t exist when I started Ask. And WooCommerce never really felt like a good option to start selling digital products. Yeah, you would need a lot of extra plugins, and as a programmer, it just screams overhead to me. So that didn’t really felt like a choice for me, and I loved a solution that would handle EU VAT for me because that’s quite a messy undertaking here in and Petal does all of that for me at a good price. I think their market is 5% of each sale, which I think is okay. They do licensing, they do invoicing, they do the EU VAT and Nightmares. So I think you get a lot in return, but if I were to start again today, I would probably look into three years because that is the only solution today that is really targeted to WordPress sellers and also takes care of the GAT headache.

Marcus:
Katie, correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think you sell your plugins through the WooCommerce dot com marketplace either. Do you have your own WooCommerce system or something like that? I’m curious. One, I guess just to kind clarify how you’re selling yours, and two, just curious for both of you after you’re done, Katie, how do you find your audience? Like the WooCommerce dot com marketplace has a built-in audience because people are going to WooCommerce dot com, they’re looking for WooCommerce extensions, so there’s that automatic kind of distribution channel the way that the WordPress dot org repo is, or for free and freemium products. I guess, how do you find your audiences if you’re not using one of those distribution channels and you’re kind of siloed on your own sites? To some degree?

Katie:
When we first started selling plugins, we were able to get an audience by focusing on really, really niche ideas. For example, our first plugin was called WooCommerce password protected categories. So it’s super specific. And while there’s competition for that now, at the time there was nothing in the market that existed. So we published some blog posts around keywords to do with WooCommerce password protected categories, and we went straight to the top of Google and we started getting sales within a few days. We were quite lucky that our domain wasn’t brand new, it was the same website we were using to sell our client services, our WordPress web design agency website. So it had some domain authority, although it was much lower than it is now. And that helped of course, and choosing really niche keywords helped so that by going so specific, we were able to get an audience for that very specific area of the market.

And of course, WooCommerce and WordPress are so huge that a small corner of the market can actually translate into reasonable sales. So that was a really good way to get started selling on our own platform. Now, there is no perfect way to sell WordPress plugins. Unfortunately. We use easy digital downloads, which we’ve done quite lot of customizations on, and it’s quite a lot of work development and maintenance wise for us. I think something like FIUs is a good option, as Martin said, but there isn’t a perfect solution for selling your plugins, and it’s frustrating that no one’s come up with anything better with all the licensing and all of that. So we do it ourselves. And then as we’ve grown, we’ve got more confident with our content marketing and are able to target more competitive keywords and things like that that will get an even greater market as we release new plugins.

But in your question, Marcus, there’s a bit of an assumption that you are either selling independently or using the WooCommerce dot com marketplace, and those two things are not mutually exclusive. So as one of our future projects, we’re intending to try putting a plugin, probably one of our biggest WooCommerce plugins on the WooCommerce dot com marketplace to see how that does sell, because as you say, that does get you a captive audience, which we’re not currently capturing. So people go onto WooCommerce dot com and search for extensions and you will not find a band to plugin there. And I’d like to change that and see what impact it has. I wouldn’t have done it a couple of years ago, and this is the reason we never had, because a while back, they had really, really bad terms that you just wouldn’t touch with a barge pole in terms of they could just sort of take the right to use your plugin and big bad things would happen if you ever withdrew your plugin from the marketplace.
And it was quite nasty. And also, they wanted 70% of your revenue from the marketplace, which I wouldn’t have considered, but now they’ve improved their terms, the terms were a lot friendlier and worth considering. And also they’re only taking 30%. Now we pay our affiliates 30% anyway. I know that that is a figure that I’m comfortable with sharing in terms of profit share to people who are generating sales. For me, it’s a bit of technical work for us to do because we’ll need to integrate our plugins with the WooCommerce dot com licensing system in addition to our own Easy digital downloads one. And we obviously don’t want to be doing manual updates in two locations, so we need to do some automations and it’s a bit of a project, but I do think it’s worth an experiment to see if it does capture that additional market.

Marcus:
Yeah, that’s interesting. The plugin that I created that kind of spurred this episode, this conversation isn’t a WooCommerce extension, and so part of what I’m trying to figure out with it is where to find the audience, how to get eyeballs on the plugin so that people know it exists and want to be able to use it. So I was curious with having WooCommerce has that or Woo, has that built-in distribution channel? So I was curious about leveraging that as we start to get down to the end here and wrapping up. Martin, I just want to ask you, what’s on the roadmap for this year? Do you have any big plans? Is it slow and steady? What are your plans for 2024?

Maarten:
I’m going to sponsor WordCamp Europe, which is a first for me, and I’m excited, but also scared because it’s probably going to bring about lots of extra work. So we’ll see how that goes. And I plan building a few new plugins because yeah, one way to grow my business is by offering more plugins and making sure that they work well together, which I think is a big missing piece. In the WooCommerce world. There are too many plugins and they all don’t work together and customers get frustrated. So I kind of want to change that by just offering a bundle that works seamlessly well together. So yeah, this year is going to be product focused more, whereas last year was very content and marketing focused. I’ll probably return back to product this year and then outsource the marketing portions to people that are way better at doing that than myself.

Marcus:
Katie did a really great writeup last year about sponsoring one of the big camps. I think it was WordCamp Europe. Are you planning on doing the same, letting people know how your sponsoring experience went?

Maarten:
Yeah. I’m open to it. Yeah, I like building in public, so that includes talking about my experience at Workforce.

Marcus:
Awesome. Where can people find out more about you and Studio Wombat if they want to learn some more about your plugins and what you have to offer for WooCommerce?

Maarten:
They can visit StudioWombat.com, which is where I sell all my plugins, and they can even go through the contact forum if they want to get in touch with me, and we go from there. I am also trying to be active on Twitter, but at the same time I’m realizing that it’s also a lot of extra time wasted, so I’m not sure how I should divide that and not to waste too much time.

Marcus:
Yeah, I think there’s a whole Wiz chat episode at some point about utilizing social media for your businesses, and yeah, it can be a time waster for sure, but there’s a lot of value to be gotten there as well. Thank you so much, Maarten, for joining us. Thank you, Katie, for being somewhat in the hot seat this week and sharing your experiences about running a plugin business as well. Thanks to both of you for being on.

Maarten:
Thanks for having me.