How we grew 300% in one year- WPManageNinja year in review 2019
Did you know that among all the startups, only 62% make it to the fourth year? Well, we kind of guessed that percentage (we initially thought startup success rate was less than 35-40%) when we started WPManageNinja back in April of 2016. But it’s not a story of how we started, it’s more about how we maneuvered the startup and put it on a path it is currently excelling in.
I know, the title of this year-in-review blog sounds like bragging. But it isn’t! This is just a testimonial to what you can achieve when you actually listen to your users and clients and build products that actually add value to their lives. And we are truly thankful to our users and well-wishers who helped us reach this stage. So, in that sense, this article is actually about how listening to the users can truly help a business succeed. It’s a testimonial to how caring for your customers can lead you to the path of being a stable business!
One important note here, have you ever wondered why we are named “WPManageNinja”? Well, let’s just say that the startup was initially focused on something else rather than developing WordPress plugins, which is our only focus right now. Why did we shift our business focus, you may ask. Actually, it was evident that we could help more people and make their lives better while maintaining a healthy growth rate if we switched to product development. The WPManageNinja you know of now is practically a little more than 2 years old that started in the last quarter of 2017! And this is the story of how we risked everything and built a self-sustainable WordPress Plugin business in the first year, and made it better than the previous year in 2019.
A brief, yet necessary throwback to 2018
As we didn’t publish a year-in-review last year, it is necessary to give you a glimpse of what we did in 2018 to help get the context. It was a crazy year for us to say the least and a lot happened in that year. But I’ll try to keep it as short as possible. So, On the 1st January of 2018, we had 2 plugins in our hands. The first one was Ninja Tables, which was available on WordPress plugin directory for free since November 2017, and the other one being WP Fluent Forms that was yet to be published. The forms plugin got approved in WordPress directory on the first or second week of that month.
The philosophy behind these plugins was simple, but the execution was not. Ninja Tables is the plugin that helped users create and maintain 100% responsive and dynamic WordPress tables. This wasn’t an easy task to accomplish before Ninja Tables. On the other hand, there was Fluent Forms. “Another form plugin? How original!”- you might be thinking. Well, it wasn’t “just another form builder”. A summarised description would be- the fastest and most lightweight form builder that was not only feature-rich, but also the most affordable and cost efficient plugin among all the existing advanced form builders.
But these plugins weren’t meant to generate any revenue for the first couple of months as the premium versions were yet to be released. The company was still investing on these plugins from the profit we accumulated in the previous two years. Basically, we were investing everything we achieved and earned previously into this new venture.
The first Premium version of Ninja Tables was launched on the 26th of February 2018 after receiving feedback from the users of the free version and developing a few necessary features according to user requirements and bug-fixes. And the plugin started generating revenue from the very first day! And the revenue stream is still growing stronger every week as the plugin addressed some really annoying issues the similar plugins couldn’t and still adding more powerful features that are really helping the users.
But along with that, our development team was working on another beast that was being prepared silently- WP Fluent Forms Pro Add-on. The Pro Add-on was released in the first quarter of 2018, followed by the Fluent Forms Signature Add-on.
While we were preparing a third plugin- AzonPress. both of Ninja Tables and Fluent Forms got a few major updates throughout the year. And these updates were focused heavily on user feedback and feature requests. We had to hire new developers and assign everyone to designated product teams to keep up with the development roadmap.WPManageNinja didn’t have a marketing team at that point, but we started building one in the fourth quarter of that year.
By the end of 2018, we were generating enough revenue to operate almost the whole team. By December of 2018, just 5% of our monthly costs were contributed by the services we provided to our previous clients, and 95% was coming from our plugins! The most notable thing here is, we weren’t even putting any planned marketing efforts in these products and didn’t have a marketing team until the last 2 months of 2018! All these sales were coming from the users who converted from the free version to premium and their word-of-mouth marketing to other WordPress users!
Feedback-driven product development+ Zero marketing+ Users’ WoM Marketing
= A self-sufficient business in just one year!
WPManageNinja
Enough of the history lesson, let’s get to the point!
To be frank, we were not expecting to be in a breezy situation and financially self-sufficient so fast. We were confident about our products and knew they would eventually succeed, but we didn’t expect things to happen within the first year! And the unexpected ‘success’ of 2018 made us set a new roadmap for 2019.
The initial plan…
We were receiving new product requests every week. And launching new products served us well. So for 2019, we set a target to release at least 2 more flagship products that will be as useful and feature-rich as Fluent Forms and Ninja Tables, and at least 4 smaller products that will solve our users’ day-to-day problems. Updating and adding more features to the existing products were in that roadmap as well. Along with that, we decided to market the products more efficiently and effectively.
It’s time to work!
We were set on a plan, it was the time to execute. The whole team was pumped up. The business team started researching on what the next products would be, the development team started working on the subsequent updates of the plugins, and the marketing team set a goal on how to take these products to the next level.
The business team provided a prioritized list of ideas on what the next products could be. Which products we should be working on next and what features needed to be added to the existing plugins. The list was finalized and the development teams were handed a roadmap to work on.
On the other hand, the marketing team set a list of contents and publishers to contact. Because no matter how good your product is, it will never reach its true potential unless people know about it. Though the word-of-mouth marketing from our users was getting us good sales, we realized that it was time to capitalize on the products’ merit and get better traction.
The teams released 2 updates of the products on average every month in Q1 & Q2 of 2019. Along with these updates, we released our next flagship product- WPPayForm.
Everything was going pretty well and smoothly. But you know, it’s not normal for a business, especially for startups if everything goes right without any kind of mishaps. We were gliding smoothly, almost! The developers were busy with the updates, and some of them had to provide support for the existing customers too. It was a busy time in the dev team. And the marketing team was busy with their schedule as well as communicating and collaborating with the publishers and plugin developers. But there was something else that we were missing.
The setback…
We had to take a pause and check thoroughly what was going wrong. We did that on our half-yearly evaluation meeting. Head of the product teams, marketing team and the CEO sat down and made a list of what we did in the previous 6 months. If everything was going well, why wasn’t it being reflected on all the other parameters?
Our initial plan was to release six products (two of them being flagship) in 2019. But in reality, we could release only one. And the rest of the products were nowhere near the halfway mark, except for one! Why did this happen, even though we have been working hard for the past six months?
Well, the lack of experience played its role here. You see, our team was capable enough to develop, maintain and update two flagship products on a regular basis, including handling the support tickets from our customers. But it was not ready to develop and update more products while maintaining the previous ones. And as Ninja Tables and Fluent Form grew, more support tickets they brought. We prepared detailed documentation and video tutorials for these products and keep updating them on a regular basis (we have at least two people working constantly on the documentations and updating them at any given time of the year). But these can not solve all the issues users face. And so, the support tickets kept piling and developers had to work extra hours to resolve them as soon as they can. And in the marketing sector, things seemed like we got stuck in a place and the growth stalled.
Basically, the problems we were facing can be summarised as-
- Planning of taking too much in our plates than we can handle
- Not being able to develop new products as planned. Though it was practically impossible, we just didn’t know it yet as we were all busy either coding or communicating
- Support tickets slowing down the development process
- Advertising the products to a general WordPress community, partially ignoring the target audience
New plans, new responsibilities!
As soon as we realized that the model we were following for the previous six months was not a practical one, and nowhere near scalable, we had to untangle the clutters.
We immediately scrapped the “More products brings more happy customers” philosophy as it was backfiring for our team. If we think practically, with that model, we would have reached the saturation point in 6-8 months. By that time, if our developers stopped working on updates, we would still be unable to deal with all the support requests from users, and eventually turn them into unsatisfied customers.
So, our developers were switched to a transition mode and we immediately hired our first Support Engineer the very next month! This guy was a fast learner, and within a month or two, he was single-handedly dealing with around 75-80% of all of our support tickets. But we weren’t going to repeat the same mistake again, so we hired two more support engineers as soon as we could. Currently, these guys are handling support tickets for all of our products, but our aim is to turn them into “Lead Support Engineers” for individual products and assign a platoon of support engineers working with them. This was one of the best decisions we made this year, as within just six months, this team turned out to be our most successful team!
As the developers didn’t have to deal with support tickets any more, they could concentrate more on maintaining and updating the existing plugins and introduce more features. And as we were planning on some targeted marketing efforts in the next few months (more about that later), the developers were on a tight schedule to develop, test, and ship new features.
The ships are ready to sail for uncharted territory!
On August 1, we launched that promotion for two weeks. It was a 50% discount offer on the Unlimited Site Lifetime License of Ninja Tables, and boy were we overwhelmed! We got flooded with feedback from the community. That deal got us more sales, exposure and most importantly a loyal fanbase than we could have expected. Not just that, people went through our products and loved all of them. Though the initial deal was for Ninja Tables only, the community members started asking for a bundle deal of all of our premium plugins together, and we couldn’t refuse their request!
Releasing that bundle worked really good for us, and we are not talking about just monetary gain here. People got their hands on WP Fluent Forms Pro with that bundle, and started testing and using it. As they had easy access to the product owner and WPManageNinja CEO Shahjahan Jewel on social media, they kept sending us new feature requests and asking for more 3rd party integrations. These feedback and requests shaped our development a lot during the next two months. We introduced some major features and added 10 brand new CRM and tool integrations to the form plugin. As a matter of fact, it can be said that Fluent Forms Pro v3.0 was developed almost entirely based on users’ requests!
Later, we duplicated the Ninja Tables’ campaign strategy on the same community again, this time with WP Fluent Forms Pro. An early bird discount on the plugin’s version 3.0 was launched. People were already discussing the plugin in the group and were waiting for a discount deal. And we are a company who rarely disappoint their users. These deal was another instant hit! The admins had to open a new comment thread a few days later because the original one was being flooded with user responses!
