Experts Corner Round II — We’re Back with More Top Tips for Selling Plugins and Themes — Freemius
Nearly 6 months ago, we launched Experts Corner — Round I and received a wonderful response from our community and partners. The experts have had a chance to share some of their most valuable tips for plugin and theme businesses about how to grow sales with subscriptions, optimize conversion rates, support customers, and more advanced topics like scaling your team. We’re now super excited to announce we’re stepping it up even further with 🎉 Experts Corner — Round II 🎉
Before we get into Round II, here’s a recap of the extensive topics covered in Round I:
As an avid educator, my goal has always been to share the best insight from folks you would normally meet at WordCamps and other conferences. Now, with coronavirus affecting all our businesses and lives, I’ve seen my role as even more important because finding valuable information online about how to grow your digital product business is even harder.
Expanding the Knowledge, Even Further!
This is why we’re back with Experts Corner Round II, and we’re bringing new experts into the mix, along with a ton of new topics covering every aspect of selling plugins and themes.
This is why we’re back with Experts Corner Round II, and we’re bringing new experts into the mix, along with a ton of new topics covering every aspect of selling plugins and themes.
We’re honing in on some pretty complex and interesting topics this time around, including selling add-ons, selling bundles, increasing conversion rates on your checkout, using a decoy pricing plan, first-time user experience, and more!
You can stay tuned in to our YouTube channel to discover more about all these topics as we reach out to the experts, collect their advice, and put it all together in the most useful way we can.
Zee Hazan — Our New Head of Video Content
I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to deliver great advice in the form of informative, educational videos over the last 2 years at Freemius, in addition to producing Experts Corner.
My objective at Freemius has been to build the fundamentals of our video content efforts, and with the help of the team, I think we did a pretty good job 🙂
I recently received a job opportunity that is better suited for my skills, which I couldn’t say no to, so we now have an amazing new Head of Video Content taking the reins, Zee Hazan, who is well prepared to continue my legacy at Freemius 😉
I hope you’ve enjoyed learning from me, and I wish you all the best in using your new knowledge to empower your business growth! Here’s a little bit about Zee, so you can get to know him.
Head of Video Content @Freemius
“When it comes to creativity, Zee is an unstoppable force of nature, and video content is his main field of expertise. Zee is active as a filmmaker and artist, and his personal interests include poetry, mindfulness meditation, ayurvedic medicine and cooking meals for his family.”
New Experts to Learn From
Before we wrap up, there’s one last thing — introducing the new experts, of course! Round II brings us 7 new experts to learn from (in addition to all the experts from Round I).
Here’s all their deets below, and, this time, our roundup is even more amazing, with founders and developers of all kinds from so many unique areas of the WordPress space.
Andre Gagnon
Owner at ProjectHuddle
Selling plugins
Tone is better than perfect, and you need to get things in the hands of users as soon as you can. I think user feedback is the most valuable tool we have….
Andre Gagnon is a Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based web developer with a passion for design and development that “just works”. He loves making unique and powerful digital products that create rich user experiences.
Iain Poulson
Owner at Pole Vault Web
Selling plugins
There’s definitely a crowded marketplace in the WordPress plugins world and I think, in terms of differentiating yourself, is down to user experience, and having a good user experience.
Iain is a WordPress developer and business owner based in England, with over 15 years developer experience, and in the WordPress business since 2011. Over 30,000 websites have used his WordPress plugins.
Jason Coleman
Owner at Stranger Studios
Selling plugins
My vision is for the long haul — I need Paid Memberships Pro to be the best membership platform on WordPress from a software standpoint, and embracing the GPL is going to lead there.
Jason is co-author of Building Web Apps with WordPress and Lead Developer of Paid Memberships Pro, the 100% open source membership plugin for WordPress.
Katie Keith
Co-Founder & Operations Director at Barn2Plugins
Selling plugins
This is definitely the best industry to be in. Because anybody can teach themselves WordPress & start selling plugins from the comfort of their own home with the lifestyle that they choose to have.
With a 15-year background in WordPress, project management & marketing, Katie oversees everything at Barn2. She’s in charge of the support team, documentation, business development, and marketing. She loves giving top-notch advice on how to get the most out of WordPress and their plugins.
Arindo Duque
Founder of WP Ultimo
Selling plugins
I realized that if I had a need for (a certain product), there were probably a couple of other people that had that need as well, (and) I could sell that product to.
Arindo is a Brazilian WordPress developer who founded NextPress and WP Ultimo. He’s been working exclusively with WordPress for many years.
Jamie Marsland
Founder at PootlePress
Selling plugins
The number one lesson I’ve learned in this business is “Patience!” — It takes time to build a community and to build an audience.
Jamie Marsland is the founder of Pootlepress. They’ve trained over 2500 people on WordPress in the past 4 years, have over 750 members in their online training Academy, and their plugins are used by thousands of customers worldwide.
Chris Badgett
CEO at LifterLMS
Selling plugins
If you focus on just giving to others… …in the long run — that helps (you) build a great product, a great connection to our industry, a strong community, and brand.
Chris started learning about online education on a glacier in Alaska. He’s created courses on everything from organic gardening to woodworking. He is passionate about helping other entrepreneurial educators find success and create impact.
Shoutout to the Experts from Round I
We’d like to give a shout out to all the experts who participated last time — your advice has been fueling the growth of hundreds of plugin and theme businesses and proliferating throughout the WordPress community.
The Round I experts include:
- James Farmer from Incsub
- Vova Feldman from Freemius
- Laura de Figueiredo from OnTheGoSystems
- Maziar Firuzmand from Artbees
- Kim Gjerstad from MailPoet
- James Kemp from IconicWP
- Amit Keren from Unlimited Elements
- Michael Makijenko from Visual Composer
- Matt Medeiros from Matt Report
- Vito Peleg from WP FeedBack
- Dave Rodenbaugh from Recapture
- Sanjip Shah from ThemeGrill
Thanks for Joining Round II
For the experts joining us, we’re eager to hear your thoughts on how to grow our digital product sales, and thanks so much for your willingness to support all the other plugin and theme devs out there looking to break barriers they’ve never broken before 🚀
Originally published on Freemius Blog on November 25, 2020.
