Matt Chat, Episode 66

Episode Transcript

Carrie: Howdy. Howdy. (both laughing) Let me just start this over. Hello! Welcome to officehoursfm episode # 66. I am your host Carrie Dils and I’m very happy to be here today. I don’t know why. I just got a little case of the giggles. It’s something about just being the presence of Matt Medeiros. Hey Matt!
Matt: Hi. I wish more people took me seriously.

 

Carrie: It was the funny hat you had on earlier. I won’t tell people what it said. Now that you don’t have that on, I can totally take you seriously.
Matt: Awesome.
Carrie: Speaking of taking seriously…pause…wait for it…I would love to thank our episode sponsors today. First up we have DreamPress2 the predecessor…the faster speedier predecessor to DreamPress1, which is a managed WordPress hosting service brought to you by DreamHost. They’re superfast, they’re the least expensive managed WordPress host on the market and you can get email accounts too. Daily backups. All the good stuff you’ve come to expect from your managed WordPress host. You can check them out @DreamHost.com/office hours. And then we’ve got DesktopServer which is the fastest way to spin up a WordPress development site locally. Matt, do you use them?

Matt: I don’t. But I do have clients that do. All thumbs up from everybody…so good stuff.

 

Carrie: All thumbs up. That’s the testimonial right there. DesktopServer is all thumbs up. Yes so if you’re not already using them do yourself a huge favor, get off the podcast right now and go check them out @serverpress.com. Don’t really get off the podcast. I want you to stick around for the podcast. We’re going to have a great conversation today. There you have it. So for those of you tuning in live I’m really glad that you carved a little chunk of time of out your day to join use. If you want to ask Matt questions you can tag it #officefm on Twitter or if you’re watching over on Google+ you can use the Q&A app. I promise to actually check it this time. So without further introductions of other things I will now turn my introductions to you Matt. Hello.
Matt: Hey how are you? It’s great to be back for the second time, maybe third time maybe one other time I was on the podcast by accident. I think when you did a live show somewhere else; I kind of hopped in because you tweeted out a link. But yeah it’s great to be back. Thanks for having me. I’m Matt Medeiros. I run a podcast called the Matt Report. You can find that at Mattreport.com. I run an agency just south of Boston, doing all kinds of WordPress stuff. And we do themes and plugins most notably the conductor plugin…Slocumthemes.com…I do a lot lately and things are looking good in our WordPress business sphere so I’m happy to be here.

 

Carrie: You are a pro. That was the best introduction ever. Like you got it. You wrapped it all up into a neat little package and put a bow on it. So thank you.

 

Matt: You’re welcome.

 

Carrie: Yes. So for you for folks that have not tuned into the Matt report give that podcast a listen. It was actually one of the first podcasts I stumbled upon in the WordPress space. You’ve had some fantastic guests on, some fantastic interviews, and just lots of great insights into what’s kind of happening on that the business side of WordPress. So thank you for that.

 

Matt: Thank you. Thanks for listening.

 

Carrie: My great pleasure. Although the podcast waves have been a little bit slow lately.

 

Matt: Somebody’s doing her homework.

 

Carrie: Well you know I’ve got the feed coming into my iTunes and I keep looking for a new episode. I don’t know. You may have a good excuse of planning a wedding or something like that.

 

Matt: Yeah. There is all that stuff. You know the personal life and the business life and the professional life. Things have actually been really busy with client work. So everybody knows who runs either their own freelance consulting practice or a small boutique agency like I do, sometimes you go through the waves of feast or famine. We kind of talked about this before the show started where there’s absolutely nothing coming in. You do have time to blog more regularly or create a podcast. I did the crazy thing of launching a plugin/product business back in September. That was the same thing. There were some very high times in the beginning and sort of the dip and then we had the holidays so everybody sort of closes their wallets except for when they go to like Best Buy or something that. No one’s making moves as a lot of us know in the agency world. Things were quiet and I was kind of revamping and restructuring the podcast. There are a lot, if folks don’t know. You should only know about these two podcasts right? That are going on right now. But there are a lot of WordPress podcasts surprisingly. I am just trying to retool things and go more of a storyline and I did a web design series. I have the seventh and last episode like sitting on my hard drive somewhere. It’s with Pippin…redesigning Pippinsplugins.com and the good and the bad about that whole process. I’m just looking for new story arcs and I think story arc number two which will hopefully kick off fairly soon will be more of like a journal of me launching products and sort of running the product side of this business…and just having some more intimate conversations along those lines.
Carrie: I think that’s fantastic. Like kind of pull back the curtains and give folks an idea of what’s going on behind the scenes because it’s you know…I love the post you wrote…it was total link bate by the way…so what was it like…how I launched a product on Carrie Dil’s podcast.

 

Matt: Yeah. How I launched my plugin and made $4000 in one hour.

 

Carrie: Yes. You’ll never know what happened next. Yeah total link bate but actually a great post about your learnings there. Speaking of plugins, you’ve got a new one coming up. Get Julep?
Matt: Yeah I’m just playing with this and this might be the one that I sort of put on a new story arc. So if you go to get to getjulep.com and can just sign up for the mailing list. There’s a quick 15 second teaser video there showing what it does. It basically adds text on top of your images right? So if you’re on a daily blogger and you’re prettying up your featured images you can put your post title in there or some catchy headline, quote, or something like that. You can also do it with images…any image in your media gallery. So that means you can put images in your post content page, page content, that kind of thing. It’s really just an experiment. I’m not sure where it’s going to be going yet but that might be the storyline I lead into with my “second season” if you will of the Matt Report. That’s @getjulep.com. So yes there’s always these moving parts that I’m always sort of launching and getting into. But I feel…or at least I try to…with us being the negative Nancy…sort of just exposing the reality. I fund all of these ideas and these plugins and these services through client services. So I’m knocking on doors just like everybody else. I don’t have the quick win victory stories that a lot of other folks do. And by the way, I think folks need to take a step back and realize a lot of folks that sort of publish their quick wins, have actually had a lot of failure for the last 5 to 10 years. It takes them a decade to get here. It just looks like an overnight success kind of thing. But I’m always one to have a lot of irons in the fire. A lot of people try to stay focused, niche down and all that fun stuff. I like to play into my weaknesses as my strengths. Gary Vee says that a lot. Yeah. So getjulep.com. It’s going be interesting to see where it goes.

 

Carrie: Awesome. Well I appreciate the reality of it because business is hard and it takes a lot of hustle and a lot of effort to make things happen. I can’t remember who actually…I don’t even know if coined the phrase is right…but they were talking about overnight successes. It was basically hey! It the overnight success that took 10 years accomplish.
Matt: Yeah exactly.

 

Carrie: Sometimes things can come out of the woodwork and look like it’s overnight but in reality there’s been lots of trials and failures and wins behind that have come to that moment. The encouraging… that sounds discouraging that my gosh it’s going to take forever to get the big win but the encouraging part is that everything that…all the little things that we’re doing every single day and for the listeners of the show as well…that those things even when they flop…that’s one more little bit of learning and knowledge under your belt.

 

Matt: Yeah. Absolutely. And even the point of that post is when I launch and have a $4000 hour right…which maybe creeped up a little bit after that… but you know the 30 days after that it was few hundred bucks in sales. So when you make that first sale and you have a big day like that, you’re pumped, right? I was like we struck gold! Like this is it. We can finally focus on 100% product. And then the arrow goes down. And you’re like oh my God! This is a lot harder than it seems. Thankfully everything has been up and to the right since then. But yeah. It’s just a lot harder and you just have to keep doing it because you have to think about all the other folks who were doing it before you and taking that next step. The worst thing you can do is not launch and not do it. Then just be another year behind, another month behind, that kind of thing.

 

Carrie: Well I feel like in some ways our journeys are very similar. Client services, dabbling in products and so I’ve always been really just secretly or not so secretly stalking you and cheering on your wins. I’m rooting for you down here in Texas Matt!
Matt: Thank you. So few Texans say that to Bostonians.

 

Carrie: Well, I’ll tell you what. When football season rolls around we’ll talk. So you recently did this post on some of your thoughts on launching the Conductor plugin and things that went well and things that did not go well. What will you do differently with Julep in terms of its launch that you did not do with Conductor? Learnings that you’re going to be able to apply there?

Matt: Yeah. So is very important that Conductor is still very much the forefront of all of the stuff that we’re doing here. It sort of all wraps into the services work that we do that the future themes and the current themes that we offer for sale. But you know the number one thing with Julep is…it is a baby idea. It is a small idea right now. Conductor was actually something that we had already been using and sort of evolving over like the last year before we actually turned it into a product. So it is actually very sort of hashed out and really built around our processes and how our clients used it. So although it was a new product in the sense of being a product that we had for sale, the idea and then the way we worked with it was very much sort of a culmination of behind-the-scenes for quite some time. I’m kind of interested to see what I can do with Julep by just exposing all of it right away and really just seeing how it floats when I just throw it into the water, right? If that makes sense. It will be very little sort of behind-the-scenes building. It’s just like let’s get it out there and see what it does…sink or swim kind of thing. But tell a great story around it because I think it’s kind of useful. The idea…I think the problem is that folks have an idea for their product that they’re building and what they don’t realize is it will inevitably pivot, right? There will be…once you find that…once the market starts to consume it, then your ideas and your sort of plans will shift. It so easy to say no, no, no that’s not going to be me. I won’t do that. It will happen. It’s like when you started your business. You thought you were going to focus on something and then you found this whole set of clients over here and things are now different. That was very interesting to confer us with Conductor and when we actually found out that more developers were buying Conductor then non developers…which was kind of weird to us… we always kind of figured like well developers won’t buy this because they’ll just do it themselves. When in fact more developers have been purchasing it.
Carrie: Interesting.

 

Matt: The developer plan…the most expensive plan…is our bestseller. Developers are saying give me all the tools. I’m going to use this again. We give very little support overhead from them because it feeds into their hey this is 80% of what I need and I’ll go finish or polish off the other 20%. It saves me a boatload of time and I could be more profitable. So that was kind of cool. So yeah. Julep will be like kind of taking a sip of mint julep. One sip at a time…no idea what’s going to happen. Maybe by the end you’ll be wasted. I don’t know. It will certainly be interesting.

Carrie: So you’re working with essentially your MVP…your minimal viable product and just the push something out the door to see what the response is and kind of go from there?

Matt: Yep.

Carrie: I like that because you can spend so long…not there’s not value and merit in spending a long time to develop something and flesh out a plan…but you know when ideas are a dime a dozen and all of sudden you wake up one morning…It would be so cool to do this! The sooner the better. I don’t know if you know…there’s no reason you would know…but I did literally wake up one morning a few weeks ago and it came to me to do a webinar showing off workflow. Actually not even necessarily in the format of a webinar but just so many people have asked about WordPress developer’s workflow and just seeing the process in action. I started thinking about it in my head. Anyway, by 7 AM I had it kind of mapped out what I wanted to do. It’s already on the books for August. The planning is currently at about 15%. I wanted to publicly say that it was out there. So then there’s accountability, right? You actually have to show up. Listeners? I swear the webinar won’t be shoddy. You’re probably listening to this and thinking, Oh my gosh. This is just going to be a disaster area. It won’t be. I promise. Yeah. Just get it out there and see what sticks. Learn from that and then iterate…the whatever’s next. So if you’re listening to this and you’ve got some idea that’s been sitting on your table, think about what you’re MVP is and ship it. Ship it next week. Don’t sit on it. Now I will just climb down off my soapbox for now.
Matt: Well so many people get stuck in just spinning their tires in the mud. Just refining, refining, refining a lot of folks are embarrassed about launching. This is all stuff that people have heard for the last 2 to 3 years across startup podcasts and blog posts. But yet still people…they’re just not really taking it to heart. That’s for somebody else. I need mind to be 100% ready. Like no man. You just gotta launch. You’ve just got to get it out there because the worst thing you can do is bottle it up and then find…look WordPress is very competitive. It’s competitive. I don’t care what anybody says. There’s solutions cropping up all the time and popping up all time and you know it’s always an attention grabber. Somebody else has always got the attention. You just have to keep doing it and launch as fast as you can in my humble opinion.

 

Carrie: Well tagging along with that…Jackie has a great question but I’m going to circle back around. Davinder asked what are your thoughts about current pricing structure of themes and plugins? Of course that’s not a new conversation but in light of what you just said that the competition that’s taking place. Everybody’s got a theme for sale. Everybody’s got a plugin for sale. Your moment in the spotlight is short. There’s a short little fuse on it. What are your thoughts?

Matt: Yeah. It’s a great question. It’s not a new conversation for sure. You know it’s very tough to compare themes and plugins and the business of themes and plugins. Because you see so many different business models running. Club memberships, monthly memberships, one-time fee, lifetime fee you know different takes it, right? You hear about some real breadwinners. Like Theme Isle. The folks at Theme Isle last time they put a post out about one of their themes about .org. They were doing about $30,000 a month. That is amazing when its premium off sale, right. Price wise…look…this is just my own opinion on themes. Themes are like new cars to new car dealerships, right? Everybody has the same inventory. They all fairly look around the same if you’re looking at the same price range. Everybody has a red Corvette and a blue Corvette. Which person do you want to buy from, right? When you go to buy that that new car, there’s not a lot of margin in it. Because everybody has the same inventory. However, it brings somebody to the car lot. And it gives that person to sell…it gives the opportunity to that dealership or salesperson to sell maybe a certified used Corvette. There’s more margin in that. No other dealership has this Corvette with this color with this many miles. That certified, right? So there’s more margin in that. They bought it a good price. And that’s our plugins, right? And I say us as product providers…like you and I. Where we can bring in people and market them with our well-crafted beautifully looking themes and then Oh by the way we know we’re not going to make a living off of $40 theme. But if you transition and see Conductor for a few hundred dollars and you use that and you buy that, now we’re talking. That we’re making a little bit more revenue off of that. That’s been really the biggest target that we’re going after. Like we’re not saying like…come to our theme shop and buy beautifully coded themes and all this fun stuff. It’s very much of a marketing channel for us. If that makes sense.

 

Carrie: Absolutely. Yeah. I don’t know. I think generally things are underpriced. It’s difficult to communicate the value…and this is why I don’t make a great salesperson…but say I’m selling a theme and it’s a $100 bucks versus something that really looks similar or maybe even more fancy for $35 bucks down the street and I can say things like…spout off the features…but it’s hard to sell the value of some of those things that makes somebody say yeah I can justify spending $65 extra bucks on yours. I don’t know. I feel like it’s…
Matt: Yeah. One of the things that…so when we go into the plugin business…again we’re almost a year old at this point with Conductor. I think next month marks the one-year mark for Conductor. And by the way we’re going to launch a new site design. Keep your fingers crossed. And have a new site design that will be super sharp. The biggest thing that we found was…the biggest surprise…when we launched we did a four pricing tier model. My idea was to limit that pricing model in terms of licenses like support licenses that we give out per month, per seat and then let’s just see what happens. So for instance one site was $50 bucks. Two sites with the two add-ons was $100 bucks. Then you could get 10 sites for $200 and then 20 sites for I think $500 when I launched. I was basically saying at the highest end the value of this Conductor plugin is $50 per site if you install that…if I’m doing the math right on the fly. That’s what it came out to. It might have been 10 licenses for $500 bucks. But I was saying that as an agency I know that I’m using this plugin on sites that are that we’re selling for $3000, $5000, $8000 dollars, right? It’s saving us a chunk of time and our customers like interacting with it. They want this feature. So is it worth $50 bucks to you on this site where you’re selling for it $5000. Yes or no? It’s a pretty easy answer. So that’s how we structured it…four prices. When we shifted over to the three pricing model…or excuse me…we took the highest end developer license and we made it unlimited and factored in support just for the person who bought it. Just like everybody else. Unlimited lifetime license and unlimited sites. We started selling a whole heck of a lot more. The support terms changed a little bit. Like we’re only going to support you as the person who bought it. But that’s what everybody does. But those are the ways that I was trying to sort of…like can I challenge this model a little bit? At the beginning it was rough. People were saying is $500 bucks for 10 sites. I had a lot of those conversations, right? But at some point that to break. At some point that had to break because at the end of the day you need to sell, right? Cash is oxygen. Another Gary Vee quote. Cash is oxygen. You have to start selling. So you have to kind of come down a little bit and say yes you can get all this for unlimited and sort of get back into what the market is dictating, unfortunately. But with that said it also became the highest selling price point. So our highest selling price point is the highest cost license. Which is cool. So support wise, I think I mentioned this before when somebody buys the $50 blogger version they are the person who asks the most questions. They are the person who asked for a refund because they’re not even caught up to what WordPress is yet. That’s been super clear. Like a lot of people talk about that but it’s been super clear to us that when somebody buys a $50 version, I’m like…Oh God…when I see come through…I’m like Oh boy. How fast is this person going to ask for a refund? It’s unfortunate. We help them out as much as we possibly can. But you know usually that’s the person who is just getting into this. They don’t even know if they should spend $50 bucks. They think it’s going to change their entire website to a whole new website and that is person who asks for refund. The $400 customer they ask for maybe one thing and that’s it.

 

Carrie: You know I think there’s a good lesson there in terms of pricing services as well. That the lowest tier are the most likely to ask for things that they’re not willing to pay for and generally be sort of squeaky wheel. Where as the higher dollar amount people are paying there is more of a higher level of trust that the person that they’ve spent that money on is professional and will take care of things.

 

Matt: Yeah. That your low end price point has to have such a clear definition of what they’re going to get and the expectation has to be so 99.99% accurate that there is no question of…Gee I just gave you $50 bucks. Can it do this too? Like it has to answer all of those questions, right? That’s what is kind of interesting with Julep. Like there’s no expectation of it changing  your entire site. So it’s definitely one of those products where it’s like you put text on top of an image. You hit save and now you’re featured image or your image has a quote or whatever you want in there. We’ll see.

 

Carrie: Well Jackie says great point about that entry-level plugin and maybe it’s time to drop that lowest tier. Which is an interesting question. I’m no psychology buff. We can call up Chris Lema if we want to know all the psychology behind it …but that sort of three-tier…you’ve got the highest end sort of anchoring or justifying the cost of the lower two and you know that lowest tier plays a role even for the people that don’t purchase it…I don’t know. What are your thoughts on that?

 

Matt: It’s great. It’s something that we have sort of white boarded across our office right now. When we come out with a redesign, we’re probably going to challenge that and go down to three a three-tier pricing model. I will tell you that all arrows drawn on our board point to increasing the price because of what we’ve seen. So that’s either increasing the price across license plans now or having some kind of added value thing that comes along with Conductor. Something extra that we sort of map out that will be a higher ticket item but just delivers a whole heck of a lot more value. Apple, Ferrari, Mercedes…people love these brands…like Virgin Airlines…people love these brands but they’re most expensive brands. It’s because they can provide ridiculously awesome experiences because they’re making boatloads of money. No one’s like loving Walmart for the experience, right? (laughing) No. Like I need a flak jacket every time I go into Walmart.

 

Carrie: I have to get out of the way of the guy coming down with the cart to stock the aisle. No excuse me ma’am. Go right ahead man.

 

Matt: I’m like stretching out before I get into my Walmart. Like getting ready to like fight people. It’s ridiculous! But you don’t get that when you to like a Nordstrom’s or whatever…some higher end thing. It’s because they’re making boatloads of money. I’m not trying to make boatloads of money, I’m just trying to be profitable, to give a better experience than most.

Carrie: There’s a lot of ways that you can add value that don’t cost you a dime. Maybe don’t cost your ongoing time. For instance on my…of course…people may disagree that is a value add…I don’t know. On my premium version of my theme I offer up a DesktopServer blueprint. It already has the theme setup the widgets area is all popped in there…are you frozen Matt or am I just talking to myself? I’m talking to myself. Hey self! How’re you doing today? Anyhow so that was something that took me very little time to create relative to the theme. I can offer that up that saves people a lot of time yet costs me virtually nothing to create. So yeah. I’ve been challenged this past year to try and find ways to add value to people in ways that don’t necessarily take more time or money and be creative about that. Matt? I don’t know if I’ve totally lost you. You’re either…I think you’re frozen so… and he totally dropped out of the call. If you’re just tuning in I was chatting with Matt Medeiros from the Matt Report podcast. We are talking about the business end of themes and plugins and pricing in and all that good stuff. If you would like to ask a question of Matt you can just tag it #officefm and we will get that on there. Davinder chimes in. He also has a theme shop at the developer license. The highest tier of people that ask the least questions. I also have also seen that true with the UtilityPro theme. Can I just say its kind of awkward to hang out here and talk by myself, gazing into the camera’s eyes. Yeah. It is. I’m glad you’re out there listening. Thank you for that. How you doing? How you doing Design TLC? I’m doing fine. Thank you. Well you know what? I’m going to take this little opportunity to get a Carrie question in if you want to #officefm and we’ll get that answered while we’re waiting on Matt. Oh there he is! Look! I don’t have to go so solo anymore. People were getting tired of hearing me talk.

 

Matt: (laughing) I don’t know what happened. My laptop just stopped connecting.

 

Carrie: I thought I just grossly offended you or something.
Matt: I think you sent Chris Lema and he just pulled the plug on me.

 

Carrie: You know he does have the control of the entire Internet.
Matt: So I heard.

 

Carrie: He just flips a switch and it’s gone.
Matt: So I heard.
Carrie: So let’s…Mike thank you for gazing back into the camera’s eye. Let’s circle back around to Jackie’s question. Matt particularly a king for you being or having the Customizer plugin but thoughts on the future for web designers when customizers, page builders, all these things are coming to market. There was an article that was published on Mashable a couple of days ago…let’s see the headline here….Why Web Design is Dead. It is talking about like The Grid, .io, AI Driven…what’s your thoughts there? Are we irrelevant?

 

Matt: On Man. That’s such a crazy question. You know I’m no web information genius but I think everybody’s has seen those sort of writing on the walls…especially with search and with data. So everybody that we been pounding on to get every restaurant that we been pounding the streets on saying…God you guys need a new website. You need a new website and you need to invest thousands on great design and do all this stuff you know. Now the results are getting sucked up by Google and getting displayed in a search result. Same thing is coming if not already to Facebook. Facebook pages and all information there. So a lot of these businesses are very data-driven. So I think we’re going to hit this sort of …we are going to see this dip and then something is going to happen where great design and somebody’s like us has to solve that. I don’t know how many years away that is, right? There is that crazy sort of concept if that makes sense. You know I think these tools are going to get easier but it’s all going to be about the relationship and the experience that the customer has with us as the consultant. They’re not going to be paying for design so much or custom functionality so much. They trust you to do all this…excuse me to use the word…”shit” on the Internet for them, right. Because businesses…listen… there’s so many businesses out there that aren’t even on the web yet…never mind saying hey can use Grid and saying hey maybe I can do this with square space myself? Even those folks who try it they just can’t do it and they don’t have the time. Big businesses, small businesses, it’s all the same. It’s just extra zeros at the end of the pay check. So they’re will always be a need for “us”. Us will have to sort of adapt to that and just become slightly more well rounded with everything, right? But those who sort of niche down and continue those verticals…I don’t see it vaporizing anytime soon. But for a lot of folks in the WordPress space you have to know marketing automation…you have to know sort of all of dots to connect for your customer. There’s a lot of things…and we have these conversations all the time with our clients. Our minimum is $10,000. Because we have a team of people here that we’re paying. We’re not a one-person shop so there’s a lot of mouths to feed, right? And to be profitable so that we can exist for our clients. Become a business. But with all the tools available to us like a Conductor, like WordPress themes, like all of these plugins that come prepackaged, maybe that person doesn’t need to spend that much money on their web presence. Maybe they just need some good solid consulting and understanding how to use all these things to better their business…to connect the dots of value. I don’t want to spend $10,000 on a website but I will spend $10,000 on some kind marketing automation that keeps in touch with my clients. Ok. Let’s spin it that way. Let’s not spend money on design but let’s get the right pieces in place for you instead…that kind of thing. I don’t know if that answers the question.

 

Carrie: Nope. Good discussion. I do think we’re a long time… a very long way from automation being a replacement. When you think about the development cycle to go into a piece of software like a really intelligent piece of software like…Grid…whatever. I haven’t even played with Grid. I’m calling it intelligent based on an assumption. And maybe it’s doing X, Y and Z and it gets to where it can interact with a human and do X, Y and Z beautifully. By the time they can get it out the market doing X, Y and Z the market has already moved onto doing A, B and C. So I don’t know development cycle wise if all of those tools can keep up with the technology. Somebody else chimed in too that the human touch will always be relevant in web design. You can’t automate that.

 

Matt: Absolutely. And don’t forget the projects that we’re building for people right now are only appearing on this laptop, you know this cell phone, (holds it up). What happens when televisions and monitors are more prevalent across your home and everywhere else you go? You’re going to be designing information sites for billboards that don’t even exist yet. I mean there’s going to be so many different areas that somebody is going to say I don’t care how easy it is…technology is. I need somebody to do it right.
Carrie: Indeed. All right. Well that’s a good discussion there. Jackie I hope we got that answered or at least a curiosity satisfied there. Jan is asking do you have a constant promotion strategy after the launch of a finished product?

 

Matt: No. (laughing) That is the answer, right? I was having this discussion with somebody in…I can say it’s Nate right? From Theme of the Crop. In the Post Status club just before we started the show. We talked about that. One of the things is you know you just keep… we just keep… I’m constantly out there, right? So I have the podcast, we have the blog; we do some video stuff still for the studio that gets published on our theme site. Our thing is like we’re always…I’m always doing business development. I think I said that in that blog post. Like you biz dev the shit out of your product. I do a lot more talking to people but it’s really organic. I don’t have this mind map of here’s how I’m going to attack it because client services is still the blood life to the business, right? That takes up a massive amount of time and attention especially when things are busy. So it’s not like we sit down every single day and just focus on product. If we were just a 100% pure product shop like a Gravity Forms or a Ninja Forms, or an iThemes…things would be different for us. So it’s challenging. It’s a challenge to balance client services feeding the product side of things. We’re just hoping that the product side of things scoots up a lot more…up into the right on the chart. But I don’t feel like we’ll ever get out of client services because it keeps us in touch with reality and it’s a revenue stream.

 

Carrie: You took the question right out of my mouth. Do you ever see yourself getting completely out? I think that’s a really interesting point that you say…keeping in touch with reality because again you know it goes back to you’ve got these great ideas and you’re developing them in a bubble and then by the time an actually user touches it…you’re like…ugh? That makes zero sense. Or why are you doing it that way? Yes. Get feedback early and often. I guess I hadn’t thought about clients being the people to do that but that makes sense.

 

Matt: And it’s no different… and I hate to just keep talking about our products and stuff like that on your show. But Conducter…
Carrie: I’m sending you a sponsorship invoice after the show.
Matt: So the reality is Conductor was the same way. We build it with a lot of publishers and we didn’t want it as a “pagebuilder” as the page builder term is known in the WordPress space because our clients didn’t want it. We certainly didn’t want it. We just wanted something that was going to re shape content. Sort of abstract content away from the theme and place content across your site or multiple sites. When it came to market because it’s in the WordPress customizer and because it’s drag-and-drop because of WordPress widgets it’s immediately pegged as a page builder, right? Which is cool because you’re still building pages. I get it. I think the term is sexy. I like to be in that market and get the attention of page builders because it is a crazy market but then people start comparing it to other you know well entrenched page builders and page builders with loads of options. It just doesn’t compete in that market. It’s like going get groceries in the NASCAR race car. It’s like no. Like I don’t even know where to put the bags. There’s only one seat.
Carrie: Nice. Nice analogy there. All right. Well folks…keep your questions coming. These are some great discussions here. I guess the what’s next? Client services…sorry I’m mulling these things over in my brain…I’m trying to process and speak out loud at the same time…which that’s like walking and chewing gum…patting your header and rubbing your belly doing all that stuff at the same time.
Matt: Rubbing your belly.
Carrie: But do you see the sort of symbiosis between products and client services as one just feeds into the other…just feeds into the other…that’s like this balanced thing or is it eventually more of you know…one exists really just feed into the other? Did that even make sense?

 

Matt: Yeah that it totally makes sense. It totally makes sense. I can tell you how to win more clients, how to make more, how to sell bigger projects, how to find more clients, that kind of question, right? So where do you begin? I was just on a consulting call the other day with somebody who’s asking these questions. I felt like he’s been doing this for a couple years. He’s been the same…like I get a lot of folks skimming Theme Forest. Grabbing themes…sort of hacking them up and giving them to clients But he wants to do it right. He goes on Twitter, he goes to Meetups. He sees people that say do it WordPress way and he wants to get into that mindset. We talked earlier before about shipping and doing it often. One of the biggest things for us is even though we’re not the iThemes of themes, right? Or the Theme Forest of themes selling tons of themes, we do it decent enough that it’s it supports one stream of the business but it’s also a reputation builder for us. Because now when we talk to clients we say well you know they say how can I compare you against another WordPress shop? Well…you can take a look at our portfolio and our case studies. Do you like that? Yes or no. I have a prominent WordPress podcast where we talk all about WordPress and the WordPress way of doing things. So we’re very in touch with the community and we know the platforms really well. We have over 400,000 downloads of our free themes. So do we know what it’s like to support code and write code that passes the WordPress way of doing things? Yes. We have a commercial plugin that solves some these issues. Yes. Do you want to sign on the dotted line now? Yes. (laughing) You know…I don’t mean…and it obviously does not come across as arrogant as that does during a sales call, but the point of the matter is you should be using all these things that you ship and that you do in the WordPress space to sort of build up your credibility over the next person. Maybe not in a super competitive way but it just shows that you know this stuff and even if your theme isn’t making a lot of money it doesn’t matter, right…or your theme or your plugin isn’t making a lot of money because to the person who is coming to hire you for customer service stuff it’s a great backer. It’s a great thing to say look what I’ve done in 400,000 downloads. It’s not like you can search for us and find like we infected 400,000 websites. So you know things are going fairly well. It’s a great sort of building process. So all of these things sort feed the other in ways that…we’ve had $5,000 or $6000 projects land when somebody bought one of our $50 themes. Because they hired some marketing student to do it from their company. They’re like ugh…I can’t figure it out and we say… all we do is look at the domain name of their email that they bought it from…we’re like Jesus this could be a big lead. Then you just email them and say hey we notice you bought the theme. Let us know if you have any questions. Then you find out that they’re loading the site up for a big event coming up and they need help with. They thought they could do it themselves.
Carrie: Nice.

 

Matt: It’s like a cold call. Like selling themes is like a cold call in a way. It’s interesting.

 

Carrie: Is that an automated response that you that you follow up with?

Matt: Nope. We have an automated…we do some automated stuff which I think you’re starting to get into…you have been getting into it with your Theme install service that you have. We do same thing. We will install your theme at various levels but we have a Drip campaign that teaches people how to build the perfect WordPress website for businesses starting from creating a child theme to getting the right plugins for your business and all that fun stuff. It’s a 9 or 10 part series and by the end of it they’re either pulling their hair out saying I can’t figure this out or they’re happy. They say Hey I bought your theme or I downloaded…it’s in all of the free themes too. They can opt into it and get all the information for free. But either at the end of it they say you know what I’m going to buy the pro theme because these folks seem to support it really well and they’ve got some great knowledge here. Or they say you know what? I’ll buy your $500 website set up plan. You guys set up like the demo. You set up my initial five pages and you know I’ll be done in a weekend kind of thing. Folks are happy with.

 

Carrie: I love that you mentioned the Drip campaign…the education piece. When you dropped off the air, we were talking about ways to add value that are inexpensive but still can deliver a ton value to a customer. I think that’s a perfect example. They’ve already made the sale but you’re continuing to deliver value by going through that…you know sending them those educational emails and how to work with your product. And that gives you more credibility as someone who cares about customer experience. Yeah. Those are wins all the way around.

 

Matt: Yeah and just one more in positioning that stuff. And here’s a perfect way to position it, right? So we have a WooCommerce theme called Simple Shop. Somebody comes to you and they say can you set up an e-commerce site for me? I say yes. How much? And I don’t do this in all scenarios but when you get that kind of customer we know where it’s going. Can you do it for free? Yes for free. You just download our theme install it and you have a WooCommerce shop. Oh yeah but what if I want to change colors? Well with $59 bucks you can buy the commercial version. You can set up yourself. OK, but can you help me do it? Yeah if you send us all the stuff we’ll do it for $500 bucks or a $1000 bucks for an e-commerce installed with all the plug-ins, SEO, Yoast, email capture all the stuff. Here’s the list of things we do for a $1000 bucks. Ok, but I really want it to look like Amazon.com. Ok. So you want one of our custom plans that’s $10,000 and we’ll start with that. Wow $10,000 is 10 times the price. Well it’s 10 times the work, right? So we go from zero, which you do it all yourself. A $1000 bucks will do it in some kind of templated quick build fashion. Or if you want something custom it’s custom work so there’s a bunch of people, it’s 10 times the work. It’s $10,000 and up. It’s is a great way to sort of segment those things. At least that’s how I decipher it.

 

Carrie: Excellent. Which you bring up another interesting point. You serve a lot of customers at varying price points. Because you do have people that can get in for free with your themes or by you know…whatever. What are your themes priced at? Like $50 bucks?

 

Matt: $50 bucks. Yeah.

 

Carrie: $50 bucks. That’s a very different person I would imagine then is going to be paying $10,000 to go with a custom solution. From a marketing perspective is that difficult to attract the right audience?

Matt: That’s a great question. It’s one that I think everyone will always struggle with that stuff. The market is always moving, you’re always finding new clients that kind of thing. It is a little bit difficult for us in the sense that we don’t spend a lot of time actively marketing the agency side of things. That is very much a sort of residual effect of podcasting and selling these products. But obviously a lot of it is word-of-mouth and people doing research on trying to find custom developers…WordPress developers. So yes at one point we used to have like Slocum Studio custom services, Slocum studio themes sort all on the same site. That quickly…that only lasted maybe six months to eight months. We were like wow, because that really start to come into play. As we got busier and more referrals…people were like you just gave me a $5000 quote and you’re selling a theme for $50 bucks. We still have it under the same brandit’s but it’s just not on the same property, right? Plenty of businesses do that…Cadillac, Chevrolet…that kind of thing. So it is a challenge. But it really…I mean it’s not like it’s making us pull the ebrake now or anything like that. We’re hoping that when people see something from Slocum it’s a very trusted solution first. Before they said Jesus. It’s $50 bucks over there and $5000 over here.

 

Carrie: Yeah. I kind of ran into that. I separate…like my theme shop is separate from my site but over on the theme shop side I toyed with adding in maintenance plans. So you can buy the theme or you can buy a set up package and yeah if you want somebody to make sure everything’s updated and backed up every month it’s check the box…it’s $75 bucks or whatever. Whatever the price point would be. But then I looked at Oh my gosh! How  can I possibly then sell a $500 a month retainer plan to one of my clients if they’re looking over there and saying for $75 bucks a month you’ll update…duh, duh, duh, duh duh. When the reality is there will be different things. You’re a retainer, you’re on-demand, you’re actively doing development and that sort of stuff versus just updating some plugins and pushing a button to back up. But the perception…I just dropped it. I did not pursue that at all. I deemed it was not worth devaluing what I was doing on the other side but I guess maybe they can exist in harmony.

 

Matt: Yeah. I mean it certainly can. Aside from all the stuff that’s in the media about Uber, right? You have what you stand for. That’s right now for them its on-demand car service, right? It’s going to be on demand other things as the future comes. It’s all about saving time really. But there’s…I mean.. you can go from point A to point B in three different cars. Uber X, the cheapest, then there’s the black car, and now I think they have an SUV and they have a luxury one where you can go from point A to point B in luxury, right? But you’re still getting it from Uber and you can order up either one. I sort of see it like that. We set the baseline of great customer service, no matter which product or service you hook up with and a good product at same time. So great customer service and a great product. And whether you’re buying the $50 theme or the $5000 custom site. That’s all I’ve got.

 

Carrie: Nice example. I like the Uber example there. And for the record, I like Uber. I’ve never had a poor Uber experience.
Matt: I love Uber. Love it!

 

Carrie: I don’t know. One time there was even this bottle of water in the black seat and it wasn’t one of the black cars…what do you call them? Uber black, X or whatever. Yeah I thought that was a nice little touch. All right. We are coming up towards the end of the hour. So if you’ve got questions for Matt get them in now. And before we wrap up I did want to again thank our show sponsors. We’ve got DesktopServer delivering MAMP, WAMP, XAMP and PHP all together in one delightful easy install ball that lets you get your WordPress sites up and running in no time flat on your local machine. You can even deploy straight to a live WordPress site effortlessly. Like literally effortlessly. Unless pushing a button is considered effort. You can check more out about them over @ServerPress.com. And then our friends at DreamHost who bring to you DreamPress2. The successor – not the predecessor…Oh my gosh…I can’t talk. Anyway, I personally like to have an account. I have an account with DreamHost. I have multiple accounts. On my blog you know that you have to try out different services and try things. So not all eggs in one basket if you will. At any rate, if you’re looking for another host I do encourage you to give DreamPress2 a try. It’s super speedy and very affordable. If you want to check them out, their site is over @dreamhost.com/officehours. Matt? You must have…no one submitted any more questions. I think it’s just a testament to how well you anticipated all the answers on your own.

 

Matt: You know I try. I sort of do this for a living.

 

Carie: Nicely played. Well…(laughing) Matt seriously you’re always fun to hang out with. If you have enjoyed today’s show or enjoyed listening to this podcast all…I would love, love, love for you to pop over to iTunes or Stitcher and leave a nice little review. The more reviews just helps basically the podcast become more visible and more people just like you can find it and hopefully find some value in it. I would greatly appreciate that. You can also catch the archive of this episode and all previous 65 episodes over at officehours.fm. With that…Matt give us a little something. Give us some insider baseball…whatcha got?

 

Matt: Oh man! There’s so much WordPress drama going on.
Carrie: Oh my gosh! Can we even touch on the drama? Here. Let’s just do it this way. Customizer…yes or no? Oh my gosh! Did you just cut out right when we were just about to talk drama? Well I just lost my guest right there at the moment. You can chime in with the customizer.. yes or no…with #officefm and as always remain civil. Matt, Matt, there you are. What did you say? Yes or no?

Matt: Yes. Yes to Customizer.

 

Carrie: Yes the customizer because it creates a better customer experience?

Matt: Because my shareholders and Conductor would kill me if I said no to the customizer.

 

Carrie: Fair enough. Let’s see…yeah we get another vote. Yes on the customizer. Personally, I don’t like using the customizer. I am the 1% though. I use WordPress very differently than 99% of the people that use WordPress. I recognize that it’s a helpful feature for other folks. Any other drama we need to clear out? That was pretty light.

 

Matt: I think if you type in the word thesis.com it goes to Automatic’s theming site. So I heard. I don’t specifically know that. That’s about it I think for today .

 

Carrie: Here’s a fun one. Syad over from WP beginner he has wp.org.

 

Matt: (laughing) Oh yeah. He has the domain org.

 

Carie: He redirects to wpbeginner which I think you know hey kudos on you for getting your two letter domain. How many bajillion years ago you had to get that. And Matt still has w.org so which…yeah…not you Matt…the other Matt.

Matt: Or do I.

 

Carrie: With that, I will let you return to your life of planning your after launch marketing strategy for Julep.

 

Matt: Thank you. It’s getjulip.com for folks who are still tuning in this far into the episode.
Carrie: Yes, yes, yes. And from myself and all the listeners to officehours wishing you a very happy upcoming wedding to your bride and congratulations.

Matt: Thank you. Thank you very much.
Carrie: All righty. So until next week folks have a fantastic weekend. Go out there and crush it. Remember if you’ve got something or an idea you’re sitting on…get it out there. I would love to hear about it. So you can tweet me @cdils or at @officehoursfm and tell me what you’ve got going on. What you’re sitting on. I’d love to hear about your ideas. With that, we will see you later. Bye!