[4] 2 Years, 77+ Different Products?! An Inside Look at Pippin Williamson's WordPress Plugins Business
Okay. Let's do this. Hello, bootstrappers. Welcome to Bootstrap Web, the show for business owners like you and me who believe that to get to where we're going, we have to learn by doing. I'm Brian Casel, I'm also casjam on Twitter.
Brian Casel:Today, you're going to hear my interview with Pippin Williamson of pippensplugins.com. Pippen has built quite a name for himself in the WordPress community, And so I invited him on to talk about his business, selling WordPress plugins. Lots of WordPress plugins, actually. 77 of them to be exact. And actually, that's only the beginning.
Brian Casel:He's, involved in quite a few different things. So I find Pippen's business very interesting because it's unconventional in a lot of ways. We're at this time right now where everybody's talking about minimum viable products, customer development, email auto responders, tracking metrics, and things like that. But here's a guy, Pippin, who doesn't really do any of that stuff, or at least he doesn't really focus on it very much. Pippin's just a developer who is passionate about WordPress, and clearly he's passionate about teaching everything that he knows.
Brian Casel:He puts out these in-depth tutorials on his blog, and screencasts, and all sorts of things. So, you know, by by building his audience and building his reputation in the WordPress community as someone who not only knows his stuff, but but really cares about, each and every one of his users, that reputation and and his audience, that that's what really has propelled his business. So we talk about all of that in the interview, we really, kind of cover a lot of ground, so stay tuned for that, in a minute. But first, let's see what's on my radar this week. You guys have to check out this this, blog post from Derek Sivers.
Brian Casel:He is the founder of CD Baby, and, he just launched a a brand new startup called, Wood Egg. And the concept is is pretty unique. It's basically a collection of travel guides, these these travel books, focusing on 16 different countries. And they're written by, like, a mix of locals and and travel experts. And so, you know, he and a new set of of 16 books are released every single year, so they have, like, updated editions.
Brian Casel:Right now, they have the the twenty thirteen editions. So anyway, Derek just put out a a post on his blog called Fragile Plan versus Robust Plan. And I thought it was a really great read, you guys gotta check it out. It's really an interesting case study about how Derek's operation for this new startup, came together. And what I think is interesting about it is he stayed true to his idea for the startup.
Brian Casel:The idea that he wants to put out 16 different books every single year, about 16 different countries, and actually travel to those countries every year. You know, he stayed true that was the original concept and he stayed true to that throughout. But as he started to build the build the the startup, he quickly realized that his plan for executing his idea was flawed. It relied too much on himself to do all of the legwork. I think in the beginning, he was actually planning to travel to 16 different countries, every single year and update the guides, or actually write new guides.
Brian Casel:And
Brian Casel:then so that kind of became unsustainable. And then he began outsourcing it, and even that kind of ran into some hurdles with some of the outsourced writers and travelers kind of flaking out and things like that. And then he ultimately solved the issue by creating a bulletproof system. So basically his initial plans were too fragile, meaning too many pieces can fell, causing the entire operation to fall apart. But then he tweaked it and evolved it, and he built his system so that it bypasses all of those pitfalls and turned it into a really robust plan.
Brian Casel:He kinda came up with a system of 200 questions that need to be answered in every single one of these books. And then that just makes it easy to just insert these answers and then edit them all together. So anyway, there's a lot more to it than that. You guys just really have to check out this blog post because I think it's a really interesting case study and and really takes you kinda behind the scenes of of his thinking every step of the way. So, you can check that out at sivers.org/robust.
Brian Casel:Okay. So let's let's get into the main event, my interview with Pippen Williamson. All right. So I am here with Pippen Williamson. Pippen, welcome.
Pippin Williamson:Hi, Brian. How are doing?
Brian Casel:Good. So thanks for joining me today. Thanks for taking the time. Good to talk to you again. We've been working together for a few years now.
Pippin Williamson:Yeah, it's a pleasure to be back on the show again.
Brian Casel:Yeah, that's right. Second
Pippin Williamson:or third time that we've talked on a podcast of some form or other.
Brian Casel:Yeah, exactly. About a year or so ago, Dave Vankoviak and I had the Freelance Jam podcast and we had you on that, so that was cool. So for those in the audience who don't know you, and I think there might be some non WordPress people out there. So, kinda introduce yourself. Tell us about what you do.
Pippin Williamson:Sure. My name is Pippin Williamson. I live in Hutchinson, Kansas, and I'm a WordPress plugin developer. So I write plugins for WordPress, both free and commercial that I release through a variety of mechanisms. My main project right now is easy digital downloads, which is an ecommerce plugin for WordPress for selling digital goods.
Pippin Williamson:I run a personal site at pippinsplugins.com, which usually consists of tutorials, plugin releases, my own personal thoughts on development. It's usually pretty developer oriented, but there's sometimes there's stuff on there for non developers as well.
Brian Casel:Very cool. And one of the reasons I wanted to bring you on today is just because you have so many different things going on. Mean, they're all very tied into WordPress and specifically WordPress plugins. But you've got a load loads of plugins released. Then you've got easy digital downloads and that's kind of got a whole ecosystem of plugins in itself.
Brian Casel:You've got your blog where you're putting out tons of educational tutorials and things like that, which I think on top of that has membership component and we'll kind of touch on that as So a lot to kind of dig into here. Let's start with the plugins, because I think people know you as Pippin. I mean, your name on Twitter is Pippin's Plugins. They know you as the plugin developer. So how many plugins have you released?
Brian Casel:Or how many of them are actively available for use right now?
Pippin Williamson:Sure. In terms of total number that I've released, it's kind of an iffy number just because sometimes plugins die, plugins get taken down, etcetera. Right now I did a quick count and I think there's 77 that are available that I've written, and most of those are from wordpress.org or my own personal site on Pippin's Plugins. So of those, 37 of those are free to download from wordpress.org on my profile. And on wordpress.org, I actually go by the name of Mordoc.
Pippin Williamson:It's an old name that I created a long time ago and I've never changed it. So there's about 37 on wordpress.org and then through my own site and a couple others, there are about 33 commercial plugins. Gotcha. And then we'll we'll talk on easy on easy digital downloads and the globe. But but that adds whole different numbers to the game.
Brian Casel:Gotcha, right. So yeah, your plugins are available in a number of places. And we'll touch on all those a little bit later on. I do wanna get into wordpress.org and having plugins, having so many plugins on wordpress.org versus having them on your own site. And you've also come from I don't know if you still have some plugins on CodeCanyon.
Pippin Williamson:I do still have some on there.
Brian Casel:Okay, cool. So we'll kinda talk about that here in a little bit. But, so, I mean, that is just a sheer number of plugins. When I think of a plugin developer or someone who makes a living off of selling plugins, many times it's one plugin or maybe one or two plugins, like a free version and a premium version. Have 77 different active plugins.
Pippin Williamson:One of the things that I personally love about plugins that I think they're why I have so many is not because I have 77 different products. A plugin can be two lines of code or it could be 10,000 lines of code. There's no limit or minimum of what a plugin can be. So a lot of the plugins that I have on wordpress.org, I wrote in five minutes, maybe ten or fifteen minutes. They're very, very simple plugins that do a very simple task.
Pippin Williamson:And then there's a lot of other plugins that are much larger that do something much more significant. For example, I have a membership plugin that is for selling subscriptions and delivering premium content through your WordPress website. That is a much, much larger plugin that is that I've written over the course of two years. So there's some plugins that are written in five minutes, there's some that are written in two years or five years. So there's a lot of variation in the size of plugins.
Pippin Williamson:So I don't necessarily think that the number of plugins has a, I don't know, a drastic mark or indication on the kind of products that I put out. If I was to get rid of all of my plugins or at least just think about which are the ones that are my main products, my main plugins, it's probably less than 10.
Brian Casel:Right. So the vast majority of them are kind of you you you built them at one point and now they're just they're just kinda self sustaining. They're so simple that they just kinda run themselves. They they do the utility that they provide.
Pippin Williamson:Yeah. Exactly. I built them, I let I push them out, I release them so other people can use them. There's a whole variety of them. So like a really quick example is a plugin that in your WordPress dashboard, there's a comments menu.
Pippin Williamson:And I always thought it was a little annoying that you can't hover over the comments menu and immediately click on pending or approved or spam comments. So I wrote a little plugin that adds a sub menu. That plugin has absolutely zero support, I do nothing to maintain it, it just sits there and gets used occasionally. So a lot of these small plugins, I write them because I find a need that I'm trying to fulfill for myself. It's something that I want to do, and so I will write it for that reason and I'll release it.
Pippin Williamson:Or I will be writing a tutorial since I try to release quite a few tutorials on my PIPN's plugin site, I will write a a plugin specifically for the tutorial that illustrates how to do something.
Brian Casel:Right.
Pippin Williamson:And then I'll release that as well.
Brian Casel:Very cool. And, you know, I definitely wanna dive into your tutorials, and I also wanna touch on how you handle support. But Sure. With 77 different plugins, how are you coming up with these ideas for so many I mean, really, yeah, they're all plugins for WordPress and some of them can be very simple. But in a lot of ways, they are their own unique products.
Brian Casel:These are like really 77 different products that serve a different need, targeting a different kind of pain point. So how do you come up with these ideas? I mean, is it just one of those things where you're looking around the WordPress dashboard? Hey, that's annoying, I could fix that. Or are you hearing feedback from customers?
Brian Casel:How does that happen?
Pippin Williamson:All sorts of different places. Sometimes it's feedback. A user just says, hey. I would love to be able to do this or this irritates me or what about this sort of feature? And then sometimes that will turn into a plugin.
Pippin Williamson:A lot of times, and I think the majority of times, at least the small plugins come about from something that I noticed myself while I'm either using WordPress, I'm building something for WordPress, or I'm supporting a WordPress product. For example, I have four I have eight plug ins on my wordpress.org profile that are all extensions of another plugin. There's a plugin called b b press, which some people will be familiar with, that is a a form system inside of WordPress so that you can create a community discussion board. Excuse me. I use b b press for all of my support ticketing systems.
Pippin Williamson:So anytime that somebody has a support question, it goes through my b b press install. Well, there were some features of b b press that I felt were missing when it came to a support system. So I wrote add on plugins for BB Press that added these features. For example, I wrote one called BB Press notices that allows you to display a site wide notice at the top of your forms. I wrote one called private replies that allows people to leave a reply on the form that is private between the moderator and the poster.
Pippin Williamson:I wrote one that allows moderators to leave notes for other moderators that the users don't see. So here's eight plugins that all add on to an existing plugin, and all of them came about as a personal need because I was using BBpress as a support system, and I wanted to tweak its default behavior. So that's where a lot of plugins come from situations like that.
Brian Casel:Gotcha. So you kinda they come out of your own need. So how do you, I mean, you have a number of free plugins and a number of paid plugins. I mean, how do you distinguish between the two? How do you decide, okay, this this plugin is gonna be premium, this plugin is gonna be free?
Pippin Williamson:If it is if it is a small plugin that does a very simple task, it is almost always going to be free. I used to release small plugins on CodeCanyon. So for example, like, I released several widgets that they allow you to list recent items from a custom post type or display a list of authors on your site. And those were commercial products at the time. If I was to rewrite those, they would all be free.
Pippin Williamson:Now I generally base my decision on what the plugin does. If it provides a set of features that are valuable to another user and valuable in the sense like this is absolutely worth shelling out some cash for, then it could be a commercial product. But there's a lot of plugins that are super simple that really, whether whether they could be commercial or not, I personally like to release them for free. I I actually enjoy my free plugins much more than I enjoy my commercial plugins. I like the I like the mentality of giving back to the community in some way or other, and free plugins is one of the ways that I do that.
Brian Casel:Very cool. Yeah. And I definitely wanna kinda dive into that a little bit. Does the level of support kind of play into your decision whether or not to put something out for free or as a paid product? I can imagine that your more complex plugins with lots of features, they obviously bring with them a lot more questions and support.
Brian Casel:Does that play into it?
Pippin Williamson:It plays into it a little bit. I find that most of my plugins actually have very little support for them in terms of the free ones. Most of the small plugins that I release get a support question a month, maybe two or three. And that's really not hard to deal with. I mean, a couple of questions a month is very, very simple.
Pippin Williamson:Now if you have a plugin that starts to get thirty, forty, 50, a hundred, three hundred questions a month, then that's something that even if it you don't necessarily create a commercial version of the product, you could commercialize support for it.
Brian Casel:Gotcha. Yeah. And so are you ever kind of surprised with how poorly a plugin has performed or how well it has performed? I mean, with these ideas kind of coming out of nowhere and not necessarily coming from feedback from users or or things, I'm I'm sure there must be kind of like surprise hits in there. Right?
Pippin Williamson:Absolutely. The very first plugin I ever wrote surprised a living daylights out of me. I wrote a plugin called Font Uploader that allowed you to upload dot TTF files and and dot OTA files, so font files, to your website and apply them to text elements on your page. And it was really kinda cool. At the time, it was the very first plugin I'd ever written, and I decided to throw it up on CodeCanyon and just I had never sold anything, I'd never even released a plugin before, but I decided to throw it up and see how it did.
Pippin Williamson:And it actually took off really, really well and is one of my single best selling plugins of all time.
Brian Casel:That's awesome.
Pippin Williamson:And so that really surprised me because I threw it up there and I was like, it might make me $50 a month. Maybe if really lucky. But I wasn't trying to make money off of it at the time by any means. And I ended up releasing a free version of it as well, and I think it's my second most downloaded plugin, maybe third. It's sitting at about 50,000 downloads.
Brian Casel:You think that's because it's so unique? Like there aren't other plugins doing the same thing?
Pippin Williamson:It's kind of unique. Now at the time it was very unique. There were no other plugins doing that. Excuse the cough. If you wanted to put custom fonts on your site, you had to have a developer do it or you had to use something that was not very user friendly.
Pippin Williamson:There were a couple of other technologies called like Kufon and there was a couple others that I really didn't like. And there's a variety of reasons, but that's a different subject. But so I think it was successful because it was unique and it provided the average user the ability to do this and to customize their fonts. The plugin actually came out of a client project that I was working on because they wanted the ability to do it. They were an I don't wanna use the word average, but they a non developer user, they just wanted to be able to populate content on their site and customize the fonts.
Pippin Williamson:So I built it for them then, and what's kind of ironic now is that I hate the plugin. It's one of
Brian Casel:my I'm sure we could say that about a lot of a lot of work that, you know, are are first I mean, imagine, like, you know, looking at the first website you ever created.
Pippin Williamson:Sure. Sure. I've I have since I have rewritten the plugin since I originally wrote it, so it's not not nearly as as low quality as it used to be. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Mean, that's it.
Pippin Williamson:General, I'm not super fond of the plugin, and yet it's one of my best performing.
Brian Casel:It's funny how that works. I mean, it is interesting how working with clients, especially as web designers and WordPress web developers. Yeah, I I can see how working with clients and having all these really unique requirements in these project specs can lead to ideas for for products, whether it's a simple plugin or or an entire CMS or something like that.
Pippin Williamson:I have a I have a collection of probably 10 different plugins that have all come from one specific client. And it's simply because while building out their site, they wanted some specific features. They have a very large network of sites. It's a kind of it has some social aspects to it. And so we built out these these features, for example, like, to allow users to follow other users, to view their profiles, to upload images to a public gallery.
Pippin Williamson:Features like these were all things that they really wanted to do, and I ended up building them all out into separate plug ins. And then some of those plug ins have been released, some of them have had tutorials written about them, etcetera. But I find that client projects like that is where a lot of work came from. Now I don't do very much client work anymore, so that's not as much the case, but it still does happen from time to time.
Brian Casel:Very cool.
Pippin Williamson:Going back to the surprise for a second, I was to go on the flip side, so like Font Uploader really surprised me because it did really, really well. I wrote a plugin about a year ago for a simple event calendar. At the time of writing it, I felt like every single event calendar plugin out there was really convoluted and was too heavy. If you wanted a really powerful event system, they worked really well for you. But if all you wanted was a really simple calendar to display on your page with a few events, I didn't think there was anything that worked well for that.
Pippin Williamson:So I wrote one and I was writing it and thinking this is going to be amazing. This is going to work so well, it is going to sell hundreds of copies like immediately. And it did nothing. And since then, it has actually done quite well for itself. But it was interesting to me because I had done a whole bunch of user surveys and like I'd asked a whole bunch of people like, Is this something that you'd be interested in?
Pippin Williamson:So I got a general feel from the community that says, Yes, we would love this. This would be really cool. And then it went almost nowhere. And it caught me off guard. It surprised
Brian Casel:It's funny how that works. The market just kind of works in mysterious ways sometimes and I think that goes to show you're doing customer development and asking for the opinions of people, I think a lot of people can be very supportive, really their wallets. When they speak with their wallets, I mean, that's what really matters. And when it comes down to it know?
Pippin Williamson:Sure. And that particular plugin also was kind of cool for me. I mean, did not enjoy the fact that I felt like it flopped. But it has gone to show that just because something doesn't succeed overnight or right away doesn't mean that you should get rid of it. I seriously considered taking the plugin down and saying like, Oh, well, it didn't do anything, we're not gonna release it.
Pippin Williamson:But I left it up And now it's actually one of my better selling plugins.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That's great. I mean, sometimes it's just like that that slow trickle. And then once you get enough users, then they start talking about it and they start recommending it.
Pippin Williamson:Exactly. Yep.
Brian Casel:Nice. Okay. So let's, let's talk a little bit about, easy digital downloads. Correct me if I'm wrong, is that kind of your primary product, like project and product these days?
Pippin Williamson:Oh, yeah. By far.
Brian Casel:What is Easy digital What is easy easy digital downloads?
Pippin Williamson:Easy digital downloads, or abbreviated as EDD, is a WordPress e commerce plugin for selling digital goods. So there's a lot of e commerce plugins out there, well, five or six well known top notch ones, but they all sell physical products. So you have shipping, you have everything that goes along with keeping track of physical products, stock control, etc. But I didn't feel like any of them focused on selling digital goods, Selling music, selling music albums, selling ebooks, selling software, selling WordPress plugins, selling WordPress themes. I didn't feel like any of them handled that very well, I decided to build what's called easy digital downloads for building just that.
Pippin Williamson:So it is an ecommerce plugin purely focused on digital goods.
Brian Casel:Gotcha. And the way that it works is that the core plugin is available for free, and then there are a whole a whole lot of add ons for easy digital downloads. Can you talk a little bit about how that works and and how did you come to that decision to set it up that way?
Pippin Williamson:Sure. So Easy Digital Downloads is free to download from wordpress.org, just like any of the other plugins that are on there. You can install it. You can use it. You can use it as much as you want.
Pippin Williamson:It's completely free. It is fully functional out of the box as a free plugin and is actually quite well featured in terms of what it can do. You can run a full shop with the plugin exactly as is. We have then built a series of extensions that are sometimes free, sometimes commercial, that provide more niche features. So by default, for example, EDD allows you to process payments through PayPal, but not everybody likes to use PayPal.
Pippin Williamson:So if you, as a merchant, want to accept payments via credit cards through a processor like Stripe or Braintree or WePay or a whole variety of others, such as maybe like authorize.net, then we have extensions that allow you to do that. So you will purchase an extension to add that more niche feature to your store. And then there's other there's tons of other extensions as well. There's audio player extensions, there are extensions for watermarking PDFs, for all sorts of things. In total, we have 129 extensions We released for release a couple extensions every single week.
Pippin Williamson:Now I say we, and I don't really mean myself or my team. EDD has a community of developers around it. So I think we have somewhere around 10 to 15, at least 10 to 15 different developers that have released extensions. So some developers will release one extension, some developers will release five extensions, some developers will write a dozen or more. And so we have all these different extensions written by a whole bunch of different people.
Pippin Williamson:And then some of them are free, some of them are commercial. At this time of the 01/1929, I think 18 of those are free to download. A free extension is usually one where somebody said, I just wanna tweak this just a little bit, but it's just a minor thing. So I'm just gonna go ahead and release this as a free extension on wordpress.org. And then about a 110 of those are commercial extensions that range anywhere from $6 all the way up to 83.
Brian Casel:Okay. Yeah. I was gonna ask, you know, what what are some of the price points for these? So, you know, 6 to 83. And then, so for the commercial plugins that other developers do, is there some of revenue share between you and the developer?
Brian Casel:So
Pippin Williamson:we run easydigitaldownloads.com as a marketplace. So we sell extensions written by other people for EDD. So if somebody comes to me, like, let's say, Brian, let's say you come to me and you've written an extension and you want to sell it, we will host the extension for you and then do a revenue sharing split
Brian Casel:where we have to fix all the bugs that I put into it.
Pippin Williamson:Enough. Every extension goes through a review process, so we would give you ample time to do that too.
Brian Casel:Cool.
Pippin Williamson:But you you would never send me something that has bugs in it. No. No way. Not Brian.
Brian Casel:Of course not.
Pippin Williamson:Well okay. So then we will host it, and then there's a revenue sharing. So we as the site, since we're managing the hosting of the extension, managing the sales, and managing some marketing for it, we will take a small commission cut from each sale, and then the rest goes to the author of the extension.
Brian Casel:Gotcha. Is that is is is it, like, a flat commission across the board, or do you negotiate it differently with different developers?
Pippin Williamson:It's we have a standard commission rate, which is is a seventy thirty split where we, the site, take 30% for a hosting fee. Hosting plus managing some support. So, like, we will we'll manage the initial support funnels for the extension, some marketing, etcetera. And then there are special cases where we might have collaborated on the extension. So we'll do like a fifty fifty split, or maybe it's an extension that we just really, really want to sell through our site.
Pippin Williamson:So maybe we'll offer someone a higher commission rate or things like that. So there are special situations, but in general, we have a standard seventy thirty split.
Brian Casel:Gotcha. Great. So I do wanna kinda move on into your your blog. I mean, that is a major component about who you are and what you do. Think that probably powers, for the most part, your approach to marketing.
Brian Casel:Is that right? So maybe talk a little bit about your blog. Sure. It's very educational and you focus a lot on tutorials. So how does that work?
Pippin Williamson:My blog, pippinsplugins.com, started out purely as a tutorial site. I wanted to write tutorials focused purely on plugin development. I felt like there was a lot of WordPress sites out there that put out tutorials for theme developers and occasional plugin development tutorials, but there was no one that focused a 100% on plugin development. So that's what I decided to do. It's been around for about two years now.
Pippin Williamson:I think I launched it in December, maybe 2011.
Brian Casel:And were you developing plugins first or did you start blogging first and then you you eventually
Pippin Williamson:I was developed I was I was blogging on a different site before I started developing plugins, but Pippin's plugins came after I was doing plugin development.
Brian Casel:Gotcha.
Pippin Williamson:So I try to it's primarily a tutorial site with tutorials about plugin development. Sometimes it's here's specific tip to use in your plugin development. Sometimes it'll be an entire tutorial that walks you through how to write a plugin from step one to finish. And then I do actually blog on it as well. I don't usually consider my site a blog, but I do blog on it where I'll put out my personal thoughts on things.
Pippin Williamson:Sometimes it's more in the form of a rant than anything because I'll get irritated at something and maybe it's a bad development technique that I found that's caused problems. And so I will write up a tutorial or maybe call it an editorial in this case that explains why something is or is not a good practice perhaps.
Brian Casel:It seems like you've really committed to this blog and writing these tutorials. Mean, how often are you blogging? I'm seeing like at least one in-depth tutorial with video screencasts and everything, at least once a week, right?
Pippin Williamson:I don't think it's once a week anymore. It used to be. It used to be once a week. It's definitely slowed down in the last six months. I would say I probably put out an average of maybe a post a week now, but sometimes it's a really simple little tutorial, sometimes it's an in-depth one, and sometimes it might just be a post about a new plugin or a review on another plugin.
Pippin Williamson:Are you I would like to do more with it though.
Brian Casel:So, I mean, are you kind of I mean, what are you doing in terms of committing the time? I mean, I know that it's not as often as it used to be, it seems like it's a lot, still get your newsletter every week, or every so often. Are you really scheduling it into your calendar and planning these tutorials? And how long does each tutorial and screencast take you to produce?
Pippin Williamson:Well, it really depends on the on the tutorials. So recently, I've been working on a tutorial series, for plugin development one zero one, and each one of those usually takes about two hours from start to finish. I'll take maybe ten minutes or so to plan the tutorial out, take thirty or forty five minutes to record it, usually because I screw up a couple times, and then about thirty or forty five minutes to to process it and upload it to the site. I don't do a lot of video editing, so almost all of the screencasts that go onto the site are mostly raw. Heard people criticize it before, I've heard people say this is great.
Pippin Williamson:Because I consider it very much my personal site, I don't really believe in doing really rigorous video editing. I'm not trying to put out a perfect video every time. I leave all of my mistakes in the video. So there's quite a few videos on my site that actually have me going for about ten minutes thinking, I have no idea what's going on. Well, guys, let's see if we can work out and figure out what happens.
Pippin Williamson:And I've had a lot of people say that they actually like that because it shows a real situation where as a developer, you will run into a problem and you have no clue whatsoever why it's happening. And so that happens in live recording. And so I think it's better to just show that.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Was gonna say that that sounds awesome. I mean, one thing that I'm really trying to do a lot here on Bootstrap Web is get into these case studies to see what it's like behind the scenes. What are we how are we doing the work? And in your case, that's exactly what you're doing on your blog with your screencasts, showing how you're working through problems.
Brian Casel:That's awesome.
Pippin Williamson:Yeah, I think it works really well. Especially it makes people more human for one. I think it makes tutorials more approachable. A lot of times tutorials are produced in a way that's like, well, this is perfect from step one to step 10, we did this perfectly. And that's very rarely the case with a project.
Pippin Williamson:I have written perfect code maybe once in my life and it was because there was one line of code.
Brian Casel:Right.
Pippin Williamson:And it was pretty hard to get wrong.
Brian Casel:And I think that Sorry. Go on.
Pippin Williamson:Nope. Nope. I'm done.
Brian Casel:No. Well, I I think that kind of leads nicely into the next question that I had is how does your blog and your tutorials convert into sales of your plugins? So my sense of it from from following you for a while and and seeing how how you work, I think that people, they just follow along with you and they start to build that trust over time. And like you said, having the mistakes included in the video, it's very personal. So they have that personal connection with you.
Brian Casel:Do you think that kind of leads to more developers of looking to your plugins before they look elsewhere?
Pippin Williamson:I think it definitely has. I don't do a lot of direct marketing. I'm sure that if I talk to a real marketer about how I sell my plugins, they'd probably cringe. Because I don't. I do very little, I guess what I would call just direct marketing.
Pippin Williamson:I don't do a lot of advertising, I don't do things like that. I put my plugins up for sale on my site and I talk about them. I write a lot of tutorials that say this is how I built this in this plugin or here's a challenge that I faced while building plugin x, y, or z, or here's something that you can do to extend this other plugin. So, like, for example, I have my membership plugin, which is called Restrict Content Pro, and I've written a whole series of tutorials on just how to modify and customize various aspects of it. And I think consistently talking about the work that I'm doing in the tutorials does a couple of things.
Pippin Williamson:Number one, it gives it more exposure because obviously the more you put it out there, the more people see it. It brings things down to earth, down into reality. For example, I did a post not too long ago about some horrible mistakes that I had made a year or two ago in some development. I had written some pretty dangerous code that had some pretty bad vulnerabilities in it. And I explained how I discovered it, how I realized what had happened.
Pippin Williamson:And oh, by the way, here's this plugin, that's where it came from. And yeah, I sell it in my shop. But I had taken the time to go through and explain, here's what the problem was and here's how we fixed it. And I acknowledge the fact that we had this. So that's one example of where writing about like these tutorials are not just about some imaginary scenario.
Pippin Williamson:Here's a real plugin that you can connect this to. Here's something that we actually experience. And that's how I do a lot of my I don't know that I would call that marketing, but when it comes to my tutorials, I mention plugins in them a lot that I've written, whether they're free plugins or ones that I'm selling, because that gives them exposure, it gives somebody an actual connection that says, well, I can this, that's cool. And then do do some, I guess, some more marketing like post and tutorials on my site where like, for example, I wrote one that was a tutorial on how to set up like an a la carte tutorial shop. So if you wanted to sell tutorials or you wanted to sell articles on your site based on an a la carte purchasing system where somebody can purchase access to one specific post, I wrote how to do that using a couple of my plugins.
Pippin Williamson:So there'll be definitely tutorials like that that are more geared towards, here, let me show you how you can do this in this product.
Brian Casel:Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, I I can definitely see how how all these things can lead to sales. I do think that the approach of just education, putting out valuable content, building You are building a personal brand, and people are connecting with that.
Brian Casel:I think that's really a very true form of marketing these days. The days of just relying heavily on paid ad campaigns and things like that, I think it really is transitioning to a much more content educational driven approach.
Pippin Williamson:I absolutely agree. Now I think it comes down to that's not necessarily marketing to numbers. I mean, I'll be perfectly honest with you. If I gave my plugins to like a real marketer, I'm sure that they could quadruple my revenue easily. But I'm not really super concerned with that.
Pippin Williamson:I believe much more in personal brand. And I think connecting with people, connecting directly with customers and users the personal level is, I think I have established myself as that's kinda how I run my business, and I really like that. I like getting to know users. I have some customers, quite a few of them actually, that I know them by name, I know them by their face because I've talked to them dozens of times over various plugin projects. I have some users that have decided to purchase every single plugin that I've ever released simply for those reasons.
Pippin Williamson:Yeah. And then and yeah. So I think that that personal connection with with users is is definitely a form of marketing.
Brian Casel:Yeah. For sure.
Pippin Williamson:It's one that works really well.
Brian Casel:And I think that's that's really huge in the WordPress ecosystem, you know, because there are so many different products and companies. And then of course, there are so many free plugins available for WordPress. Support is always the big question mark. How responsive are they on support? Even as you look at some of the bigger companies, they have millions of customers.
Brian Casel:You look at them and it's like, well, they're so big. If I file a ticket today, when am I really gonna get an answer? You know?
Pippin Williamson:I had I actually had a experience with that, like, three days ago. I put a ticket into a multi I don't I don't know how many million dollar company they are, but they're huge, huge. They're known all over the globe, and it took five days to get a response. And the response was basically, hi. We'll try and help you soon.
Pippin Williamson:And and it was, like, a serious problem. Like, I can't even use their service right now.
Brian Casel:Right.
Pippin Williamson:And, unfortunately, it's a service that I rely on every single day.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, it's tough. And, yeah, when you do establish yourself through your blog, through your videos, through Twitter, through showing up at word camps and speaking, yeah, you do build that brand of Pippin truly cares and truly wants to help each person who is using his plugins, whether they're free or not. And that does kind of lead me into another section here that I wanted to talk about it. And that is wordpress.org.
Brian Casel:So you mentioned that you what have did you say? 37 plugins freely available on on wordpress.org right now?
Pippin Williamson:Yes.
Brian Casel:That's awesome. I mean, so I mean, for for plugin developers who are maybe a little bit early on in their career or they're just considering contributing plug ins to wordpress.org, I mean, what would you say are the benefits of doing that? I mean, of course, you know, giving back to the community, and there's certainly a value in that. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Pippin Williamson:Yeah. Wordpress.org is really cool for several reasons. Number one, by simply putting your plugin out there, you are potentially exposing it to millions of users. Now because you host your plug in on wordpress.org, does that mean you're gonna get millions of downloads? No.
Pippin Williamson:Very few plug ins on wordpress.org actually reach a million downloads. I think there's a grand total of maybe 10 that have. There's very, very few of them. But you are potentially reaching these millions and millions of WordPress users that we have that are searching the plug in repository every single day. I actually use wordpress.org as a way to drive traffic to some of my commercial plugins.
Pippin Williamson:I will release a free plugin on wordpress.org and then sell a paid upgrade to it on my own site. And I have several plugins that do that. And there's a lot of traffic that comes from wordpress.org. You can almost think of it in some ways as like a trial. So somebody says, I'm gonna try this and I'm gonna see if this works well.
Pippin Williamson:Then, yeah, I'll go and upgrade to the full version. But it's not a trial. It is actually a fully functional plugin. And that's one of the requirements we have on wordpress.org is your plugin must function 100% on its own completely for free, otherwise you can't host it. But I really like wordpress.org.
Pippin Williamson:I like hosting there. If I look at my site stats, wordpress.org is probably responsible for 50% of my referrals. It's more I don't know if it's 50% of my referrals, it is my second largest referrer,
Brian Casel:I'm at sure. And it is kind of like a for those plugins where you have a free version and then a premium version, talking about building a business and making a living off of doing this. Of course, with this model, we're basically looking at a freemium type model. In a way, it's kind of like freemium on steroids because Or it's like an easier way to approach doing freemium because being on wordpress.org does bring all that traffic. And it's not only those actually at wordpress.org.
Brian Casel:Keep in mind, it's all of those self hosted blogs. People can search the repository right from within their own blog.
Pippin Williamson:I don't think there's any public stats available, but I would speculate that the vast majority of plugin installs actually come from within a WordPress dashboard, not from wordpress.org itself. I mean, they both look into the same place. I mean, if you search plugins if you search the plugins install from your from your WordPress dashboard, it's actually searching wordpress.org. So they're the same thing. It's just the method that you're using to search it.
Brian Casel:Right. So how about support on on wordpress.org or for plugins that are available on on on.org? I mean
Pippin Williamson:It really it really depends on the plugin. Some plugins have a lot of support. Some plugins don't have any at all.
Brian Casel:And do you make a commitment to always answering all the questions that come in?
Pippin Williamson:I I I personally try to answer every single question that comes through. There are a lot of plugin developers that don't for various reasons. Sometimes just because they say, I'm sorry, can't take the time to support it. I don't have the time to do it. Some people just ignore it.
Pippin Williamson:Some people don't know that people are asking questions. So there's a variety of reasons why people won't answer questions. Sometimes they're just not good at support. I personally try to answer every single question that comes through on all the plugins, and it's not that many. I would say on average, across my 37 plugins, I have about five questions a day come through wordpress.org.
Pippin Williamson:Yeah.
Brian Casel:I mean, I could see how how that could add up after a while. But you know what? In in the end, again, it kinda comes back to you're consistent everywhere you are. People are contacting you and getting in touch with you through wordpress.org, through your blog, in person, on Twitter, they know that you're a guy who puts out premium support no matter what the product And
Pippin Williamson:that's the impression that I try to put out. So I like to think that I succeed. I know you don't succeed every day.
Brian Casel:And not everybody's gonna be happy. And I'm sure that there are a lot of free plugin downloaders of those free plugins who expect premium support and Mhmm.
Pippin Williamson:There's a lot of expectations that users will have sometimes. Sometimes they're accurate, sometimes they're unjustified. But one of the things that people do need to be careful of on wordpress.org, if you are distributing your plugins there and you've put your plugins up okay. So I think there's two kinds of plugins on .org. There are those that people have just released because they wrote it and they're like, hey, you know what?
Pippin Williamson:I'll make it available for everyone. And then there are those plugins that people have written because they're actually trying to put out a product, they want people to maybe sign up for some other system that they have to purchase a premium product, etcetera. So those are the kind of two main types that you have. People have to be careful with support because if you do not answer your support on wordpress.org, which can be challenging, it is an immediate bad face to your plugin. So if you're using it as a as a marketing tactic to get more people to your to your product, take wordpress.org support pretty seriously.
Pippin Williamson:Because if somebody's browsing the repository or they're browsing the plugin directory from within their WordPress dashboard, the support tickets that they see and the reviews that they see on that plugin is their very first impression of your plugin. So it could be an awesome plugin, but if you have people that are unhappy with it simply because you haven't answered support questions, while that might be unjustified, it's still what new users are going to see.
Brian Casel:Yeah, for sure. That's a great point. So, we're we're going a little bit long here, but I just have one or two final questions here. So we are midway through 2013 here. Clearly, you've had a lot of success in this business and in the community for WordPress and building your name as a developer.
Brian Casel:But like everyone, I mean, something must be challenging you. What would you say is your biggest challenge right now this year, and what are you doing to work through it?
Pippin Williamson:I think my biggest challenge right now is is actually support. So we've been talking about support quite a while through this, and right now, easy digital downloads is to the point where the support load is pretty heavy for us to manage it. I think we do an average of 10 to 15 tickets a day. And when you do 10 to 15 tickets a day and you think about the average time it takes to answer a ticket, it might take you five minutes to answer it. By the time you actually resolve a ticket, it's a couple hours per ticket usually.
Pippin Williamson:And how
Brian Casel:many people are working with you? Do you have someone else there helping you?
Pippin Williamson:There are five there's five people that help with the support team on easy digital downloads. All of them are part time at the moment. I'm the only person that I would consider full time. I mean, it's it's kind of my pet project. Then I've got these five other contractors that do help.
Pippin Williamson:Some of them a couple hours a day, sometimes it's an hour a week, sometimes it's thirty minutes for a week. So that helps a lot. This last week was kind of interesting because it was my first experiment to see how it would work. I stepped away from support 100% for a week. And it was cool because the support team that I have stepped up to the plate and they took it really, really and they managed all the tickets.
Pippin Williamson:I did answer a few tickets throughout the week, but not that many. But support is definitely, it's a challenge because if you want happy customers that continue to purchase your product, you need to provide good support. And so along with just personally believing that we should provide good support, we need to as a business as well. And I think it's very valuable. But you also have to be careful that if you're providing top notch support, there's a line, at some point you're giving too much support and you're gonna start losing money on it.
Pippin Williamson:And so that's a challenge. So I would say managing support and keeping up to date with that is one of the bigger challenges for sure.
Brian Casel:Yeah, and kind of scaling it up as you get more and more customers.
Pippin Williamson:Scaling for sure.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So what's up next? Where do you see your business headed in the next six months to a year?
Pippin Williamson:Well, I think it's gonna be pretty stable in terms of what's going on right now. I don't really plan to do a whole lot that's new. In the past I've always done a big new project every six months or so. And right now I'm really focusing on easy digital downloads and I want to keep focusing on it for a while. I mean, don't have any intention of shutting the project down anytime soon, that's for sure.
Pippin Williamson:But right now I'm really trying to narrow my focus down. I mean, a lot of plugins out there, I have my focus kind of spread out. And so some of those plugins are getting decommissioned, some of them are just kind of being pushed to the sidelines. And I'm really trying to focus my plugins business down onto about five plug ins. There's easy digital downloads and then all of its whole ecosystem of extensions and such, which I really consider one plug in.
Pippin Williamson:It's one big project. And then my membership plugin is my other main focus. And then there's two or three other smaller commercial plugins that I want to keep as a focus.
Brian Casel:Gotcha. So those
Pippin Williamson:are my main things. That and and just keeping the site running. So I don't really have anything new that's coming out. I don't think anyway. I mean there's always new stuff.
Pippin Williamson:I mean there's new development, there's new features built into plugins, things like that. But I don't have a new product line pushing out anytime soon.
Brian Casel:Sure. Very cool. So, Pippin, thank you very much for for taking the time. It was a great chat. I I know that I I definitely learned a lot and and even things that I didn't really know about you.
Brian Casel:So very cool.
Pippin Williamson:It's been a pleasure, Brian. Thanks.
Brian Casel:Awesome. And where can users kind of or the audience, where where can people connect with you?
Pippin Williamson:Sure. The easiest place is pippinsplugins.com. That will get you to anywhere else that you wanna look for me, whether it's easy digital downloads, whether it's my Twitter or Facebook. And then the other main place would just be Pippin's Plugins on Twitter.
Brian Casel:Awesome. Well, Pippin, thanks a lot, and we'll talk soon.
Pippin Williamson:Thanks so much, Brian. Alright. See you. Have a great one. Bye.
Brian Casel:Okay. So, great conversation with Pippin as always. And here are a few takeaways that I took from that conversation. Number one, Pippen provides awesome support no matter which channel it is, even for his free plugins. So when it comes to support, he really sets the bar pretty high and he never compromises on that.
Brian Casel:And that's what his reputation is built on and that's the foundation for his entire business. The second takeaway, Pippin built his personal brand through highly educational and relevant tutorials. We see this again and again. You put yourself out there, educate people, and build an audience, and then build your business on top of that platform. And finally, this is my favorite takeaway here.
Brian Casel:Pippin throws a lot of ideas at the wall and he sees what sticks. This approach, in a way, it kinda seems frowned upon by many in the startup community these days. The idea that every idea, most people say that every idea must be validated before you go ahead and build it. But here, in Pippin's case, this is definitely an exception to that rule. He's just throwing a lot of things at the wall, seeing what sticks, building all sorts of plugins, trying out things, just an idea that it comes across just for his own use.
Brian Casel:He'll go ahead and code it up as a plugin, put it out there and see what happens. Some things flop, some things are hits. Sometimes the flops turn into hits later on. Know, really one of those exceptions to the conventional thinking these days. And I love seeing, quote unquote, rules being broken.
Brian Casel:Forget the rule book and just trust your gut and see what happens. Just do it. So that's my kind of thinking. All right. So next week on Bootstrapped Web, be sure to tune in Monday, every Monday.
Brian Casel:And let's catch up on Twitter between now and then. Hey, guys. I've got a mailing list. So head over to bootstrappedweb.com, enter your email, and you'll be in the loop on everything that's going on here. Thanks for tuning in to Bootstrap Web.
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![[4] 2 Years, 77+ Different Products?! An Inside Look at Pippin Williamson's WordPress Plugins Business](https://img.transistorcdn.com/LDB_Cv9bHAA2vtoSPkZCpkdHPF6fAqfl7PL-PG7_c-M/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:800/h:800/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9jMjkw/MDYxZDQ0MWIxYTUw/NTMzMGI2NTExZWMx/MWQ1Yi5qcGc.webp)