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Episode 10: Business Models for WordPress Products – Part 3

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Welcome to Episode 10 of Mastermind.fm! This week our intrepid masterminds Jean and James continue the series on business models for WordPress that began in Episode 8. This is part 3 of 4, so look for them to wrap this one up next week.

Episode 8 began this series with talk of free and premium business models. Episode 9 continued the conversation looking at the freemium model and productized services. This week we focus on a larger variety of models including monetizing through support alone, the Addon Model, the Addon Marketplace, addon development for core products other than your own, and the pure Marketplace model.  A brief rundown:

Business Models for WordPress Products Part 3

Paid support for a free core product and plugins

  • Examples: Paid Memberships Pro
  • Issue of note for this model: support usually is required mostly in beginning stages, but as customers become familiar with the product they tend to stop paying
    • Also user perspective is frequently that the product is buggy and they are resistant to wanting to pay for perceived bugginess
  • PMP has moved on from this model
  • They generally agree that this doesn’t seem like a very viable model, but they also concede that they don’t know all the different ways it may be put to use. They wrap this section up by stating that they’d love to hear from anyone that has this model working for them so that they can give it its due respect.

Addon model

  • Monetize by selling addons for a free core product
  • Examples: Ultimate Member, Advanced Custom Fields, WP RSS Aggregator
  • WP RSS Aggregator: Jean produced the core plugin, but then began receiving many feature requests
    • Built in feature requests as separate addons
    • “The goal in business is not to find more customers for your products, but to find more products for your customers” -Seth Godin
  • Improving revenue is made possible by:
    • Having tiers for site licensing based on the number of sites you want to install on
    • Selling bundles of addons
  • This model lends the added advantage of testing the marketability of the plugin in the WordPress repo first

Addon Marketplaces

  • Similar to Addon model in that you monetize by selling addons for a free core product
  • Different in that addons sold are in an open market in which developers outside the company can create and sell addons side by side with yours
  • Example: Ninja Forms
  • Important to establish a guide for collaborating developers
  • Recommend selling only in one place for a more unified customer experience. One place for official, supported addons that the customer can count on.
  • Support for all addons is handled by the company except in specific fringe cases that require developer modification
  • Revenue sharing with collaborating devs
  • Primary drawback is that it requires some amount of brand protection if collaborating dev is nonresponsive to customer requests for support when a ticket has to be passed along to them or something in their addon breaks

Addon Development for existing core product

  • You have no core product of your own, but you monetize by developing addons for existing products
  • Examples:
    • Skyverge dedicated to making addons for Woocommerce
    • Shop Plugins- EDD, Woo, primarily commerce related plugins in general

Marketplaces

  • Examples: Creative Market, Envato, Mojo
  • Monetize by providing an open market for developers to sell their products
  • This model provides a ready made audience for your content if you’re a developer, so it’s very lucrative to developers just entering the WordPress space
  • Downside to developers is giving up a larger portion of your revenue
  • Downside to the model is a reputation that many products sold in your marketplace may not be supported. Companies like Envato are moving to remedy this by featuring only authors who do offer support.

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