my 7-year wordpress product journey -- success, failures & tbds

Lessons Learned from 7 Years in

WordPress ProductsCory J. Miller

iThemes @corymiller303

@corymiller303#WCMIA

Share Success, Failure, TBD Product Stories

• The Goal(s) - why we did it

• What worked

• What didn’t

• What we learned, are learning

@corymiller303#WCMIA

1. Themes

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What Got You Here, Might Not Get You There

• January 2008

• One of the first commercial theme providers

• Goals: Help people build sites; make money, establish the brand, business for what’s next

• Kept innovating but hit a wall

• Market became saturated, ultra-competitive (i.e. Theme Forest)

• (Design) Talent + Execution was key

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2. Hosting & Services

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Miserable Failures Lessons• 2009 & 2012-2014

• Hosting - wanted recurring revenue & control of server environment

• Services - additional revenue line + value add to customers

• If you or team isn’t interested / passionate about it, it’ll likely flop but mostly suck

• Became distractions & drains to what we & our customers cared about more

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3. BackupBuddy

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Grand Slam Home Run• March 2010

• Came out of our own disaster(s) and loss(es)

• First to nail it backups, restores, migration

• Hit every customer and market; natural upsell

• Customers said, “Shut up, take my money”

• Insider said, “Oh, I wouldn’t do that …”

• Utility - save money, effort, time

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Getting Back to the Plate• Sometimes a product gets more brand love

than the company (i.e. BUB, Gravity Forms)

• Keep iterating for the customer (i.e. BUB 6.- & Deployment)

• Take chances - uhm, rather make investments - in new, innovative products

• Helping fund the next things

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The Future Our Next 3 Investments

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4. iThemes Security

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Better WP Security• December 2013 & changed name in

March 2014 w/ big release

• One the most popular plugins in WP (600K+ sites)

• Found it (and ChrisW) because I needed it personally

• Challenge: Take freemium & establish sustainable business model on it (i.e. make money helping people)

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Batman’s Robin• Perfect compliment to BackupBuddy

• Huge user base (headstart & established)

• Security becoming huge need / topic in community

• Appeals to almost all of our customers

• Security + free WP plugins are sometimes brutal

• Very promising present and future in many ways

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5. iThemes Sync

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The Centerpiece• November 2013

• Solution for core customers: freelancers/builders

• Integrating all our products together

• Recurring revenue / glue

• 6K users / 34K sites and growing

• Optimistic about short-term and long-term

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6. iThemes Exchange

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“Hey, let’s tackle the biggest, most expensive project

we’ve ever done … with entrenched competitors

… oh, and give it away for free.”

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Ecommerce is HARD• June 2013

• Make ecommerce easier; Plant a flag

• Tried eating the entire elephant (Never-ending roadmap)

• Core audience is vastly different

• Fundamentally changed & improved how we work

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My Key Takeaways• “Be everything to someone” — Know and serve your key/core

audience better than anyone; lead, guide, iterate for them, EVERY day

• Know who you are, what you’re good at, passionate about … and DON’T stray from it

• Be early

• Don’t make it harder than it needs to be

• Always, always, always be investing in the future

• It’s only failure if you don’t learn and grow

Thank you! cory@iThemes.com

@corymiller303