Sounds like the perfect unicorn startup (ie able to raise) would be deep-learning sales/marketing/engagement copy-writing and follow-up with some human supervision? Reducing CAC and sales staff.
Congratulations on your launch, however I wouldn't build any kind of business on Wordpress - the platform itself is just too crap to get any kind of enjoyable work out of it, not to mention the extreme competition from third-world countries keeping the prices down.
I feel compelled to jump in and defend the platform I've spent most of my time on for the last 5+ years. Yup, it's not Laravel or some other new, beautiful framework that has the luxury of standing on the shoulders of giants. But it's solid enough, it's constantly being updated... both those are technical considerations. We're talking about launching a product people pay for. WordPress powers 25% of the web. I challenge you to considier the potential market for a product for WordPress vs something like Laravel. Which market is bigger, has more eyes, is more established, and is known to spend money?
You seem to be comparing apples and oranges - Wordpress is a CMS and Laravel is a web framework - two totally different products aimed at a totally different audience, but let's ignore that for a second.
The fact that 25% of the web is powered by it doesn't mean 25% of the web will actually pay for your solution - they might pay for a third-world competitor's one that's 10x cheaper, or they may not pay for anything at all.
I would also be skeptical about the amount of money you could make on WP vs Laravel or a similar framework. A WP plugin is relatively hard to sell at a good price (let's be honest, with a 100$ price which is pretty steep you're only recouping a little bit of the time spent developing the plugin, and I'm not even talking about mandatory tech support you'll have to provide). Excluding a few outlier plugins that have exploded in popularity, a PHP developer's job at a company or as a freelancer building quality products will earn you way more cash.
Of course this assumes you want to do legitimate business - if we go down the scammy route you could pretty much sell anything - even an empty PHP file - there are a lot of idiots out there who'll happily buy your "magic" plugin based only on your (fake) sales pitch.
Sorry, I jumped to a couple conclusions from your original post. When you said "the platform itself is just too crap" I just assumed you meant tech, so that's why I mentioned Laravel, which most PHP devs consider better, code-wise. But both could have products developed for them.
> The fact that 25% of the web is powered by it doesn't mean 25% of the web will actually pay for your solution
You're right, of course, that not everyone in any market might buy whatever my product is. But I'd rather have an opportunity to sell to a market that includes millions rather than thousands, purely so that I could write more beautiful code. And yes, a bigger market means that you're competing with more people, but I think the numbers still stand.
> I would also be skeptical about the amount of money you could make on WP vs Laravel or a similar framework.
As well you should. Developers are a notoriously cheap market, especially for software. Why buy it when I can build it? :-)
But I'm skeptical that one could make a more financially successful product around another, better code-based product (and again, I think that's the scope of our debate, which is my assumption). Few code-based markets can compare to the size of WordPress, so even if you could charge 10x as much for a product, you still might make more selling at a lower price to a bigger market.
And yes, I will probably always make more per hour as a contract developer, but the extra $1k/month buys me a lot of beer and pays for ever conference I want to go to (especially Wordcamps :-) ).
I agreed with a lot of what he said, but then I clicked on his Sales page [1] and my spam senses tingled. Feels like the marketing went overboard there and comes across as more trying to attract 'suckers', rather than actually having a good product. I could only find one single review too, which was 'sponsored', so undecided overall what to make of this.
Edit: Their disclaimer [2] seems to have copied from another website too, which funnily enough mentions that you cannot 'use the materials for any commercial purpose, or for any public display (commercial or non-commercial)'. Strange limitation for an e-commerce plugin.
That was a lot of words, so here's an executive summary of how to use the Project Greenlight Framework™:
1. Identify a demand.
2. Find customers who will pay you for your solution.
3. Blog posts.
There's also an optional step 1.5: See if anyone's already meeting this need, then proceed regardless of answer. Especially proceed if the answer is yes.
I'm blanking on his name but this sounds like the teachings of The Foundation (thefoundation.com)
I have no affiliation, but I recall podcasts where he repeats over and over that you just need to interview small biz and find real pains they'd pay for.
The biggest point I agreed with in the article was: "There's a huge difference between someone telling you they'll buy your product and them actually buying it."
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 27.9 ms ] threadMove on from wordpress
...because? That is a pretty strong statement, and some reasoning for that would be useful. As it is, your comment is spammy and out of place.
The fact that 25% of the web is powered by it doesn't mean 25% of the web will actually pay for your solution - they might pay for a third-world competitor's one that's 10x cheaper, or they may not pay for anything at all.
I would also be skeptical about the amount of money you could make on WP vs Laravel or a similar framework. A WP plugin is relatively hard to sell at a good price (let's be honest, with a 100$ price which is pretty steep you're only recouping a little bit of the time spent developing the plugin, and I'm not even talking about mandatory tech support you'll have to provide). Excluding a few outlier plugins that have exploded in popularity, a PHP developer's job at a company or as a freelancer building quality products will earn you way more cash.
Of course this assumes you want to do legitimate business - if we go down the scammy route you could pretty much sell anything - even an empty PHP file - there are a lot of idiots out there who'll happily buy your "magic" plugin based only on your (fake) sales pitch.
> The fact that 25% of the web is powered by it doesn't mean 25% of the web will actually pay for your solution
You're right, of course, that not everyone in any market might buy whatever my product is. But I'd rather have an opportunity to sell to a market that includes millions rather than thousands, purely so that I could write more beautiful code. And yes, a bigger market means that you're competing with more people, but I think the numbers still stand.
> I would also be skeptical about the amount of money you could make on WP vs Laravel or a similar framework.
As well you should. Developers are a notoriously cheap market, especially for software. Why buy it when I can build it? :-)
But I'm skeptical that one could make a more financially successful product around another, better code-based product (and again, I think that's the scope of our debate, which is my assumption). Few code-based markets can compare to the size of WordPress, so even if you could charge 10x as much for a product, you still might make more selling at a lower price to a bigger market.
And yes, I will probably always make more per hour as a contract developer, but the extra $1k/month buys me a lot of beer and pays for ever conference I want to go to (especially Wordcamps :-) ).
Edit: Their disclaimer [2] seems to have copied from another website too, which funnily enough mentions that you cannot 'use the materials for any commercial purpose, or for any public display (commercial or non-commercial)'. Strange limitation for an e-commerce plugin.
[1] https://woocurve.com/one-click-upsells-for-woocommerce/?utm_...
[2] https://woocurve.com/privacy/
This blog post itself seems to be a marketing ploy to get more customers.
1. Identify a demand.
2. Find customers who will pay you for your solution.
3. Blog posts.
There's also an optional step 1.5: See if anyone's already meeting this need, then proceed regardless of answer. Especially proceed if the answer is yes.
I have no affiliation, but I recall podcasts where he repeats over and over that you just need to interview small biz and find real pains they'd pay for.
https://mixergy.com/interviews/the-foundation-with-dane-maxw...
0: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dane-maxwell-b7105b5b/