Hey everyone. Welcome. This is WP Product Talk, and this is our first time being live streaming where you actually get to. See our faces. This is weird. This is different, but, uh, but here we are. We're like it or not. So I hope some folks are watching along. Uh, ooh. We got some folks out in the street who are happy about that. We did do a vote, didn't we? We did. And I was completely overruled. And now here we are. So Katie comes on board and is shaking things up right. But everyone agreed.
So here we are and I'm excited about it. I l I like this, uh, this format. And uh, it definitely makes, uh, visual facial cues add a lot to conversation a lot anyway, so yeah. Plus I'm probably gonna download it and make an audio version too. So, cool. When this is WB product Talk and this is a place where we talk about, uh, what it's like to. A WordPress product shop. Uh, we talk about hiring, we talk about firing. We talk about building, we talk about sun setting.
Uh, we talk about any and all things related to pains and joys of earning a WordPress product. Um, and we've been doing this for, I think this is episode 14 now. Um, and, uh, we got more in store for sure. So I wanna go around, introduce everyone. Katie as co-host. Katie, can you introduce yourself to the world? Hi, I'm Katie Keith, co-founder and a c e o at Bantu Plugins. We've, um, been selling plug-ins since 2016, having switched from previously designing WordPress websites for clients.
We mostly specialize in WooCommerce and we've got 20 premium plug-ins now. So we have lots of different plugins for different needs, and I really love talking to people about different elements of the business side of selling plug. Excellent. And I'm Matt Crowell, uh, founder of Give wp. Last year and now almost two years ago, we were sold to LiquidWeb, so I'm now doing marketing and customer success at, uh, stellar wp.
I've been building plugins and running shops for since 2014 and, uh, excited to, uh, talk about more of these things. And today we. Special guest, Erin Edwards is here from W P M U Dev. Erin, can you introduce yourself? Yeah, I'm Erin. I've been the c t O at W P M U Dev for, uh, I'm not sure how many years, but I've been with them for 12 or so. And, uh, we've grown a lot from being a whole lot of plug-in shops to moving into a lot more services.
And also I have a few side projects that I've built infinite uploads for cloud storage. And imagine AI just bringing AI image generation into WordPress. Nice. Excellent. Um, sorry, I'm playing around with all the fun tools. This thing has No, that would appear. Yeah. Uh, I was just trying to see if I could like Andrew's response here, but, um, it's not letting me do that. Cool. All right. Uh, today we are talking about, uh, how to sify your work press.
Product, and this is a subject that Erin recommended and suggested reached out to us about, and Katie and I both have not actually physically done this, uh, but we have considered it and it is a really interesting subject and one that I think is actually trending upward in the WordPress space in general. So I'm excited to talk about it. The way we always kick it off first is go around the horn and talk about why we feel like this is an important or relevant. Subject, I kind of tipped my hand.
I feel like it's, uh, it's an up and coming, uh, and continuing to grow aspect of, uh, WordPress products personally. And I also see it as definitely having some advantages when you want to be able to serve types of content or do types of functionality that. Shouldn't be limited to a WordPress website specifically. Uh, and I think it's a really cool model for certain types of products for sure.
It makes a lot of sense, and I think it also is, has great opportunity in terms of, uh, how it can scale. I do see it as a good option for, for scaling products a little bit more quickly sometimes. Uh, that's some of my takes on it. Katie, what's. Yeah, the scalability thing is, so from a business perspective, everyone's always looking to the next step and the next step toward scalability.
Really, a lot of people who provide client services are looking for the next step, which they often see as providing any kind of product that they can build once and sell multiple times. So certainly when we were a WordPress agency, Our kind of holy grail was to move upwards to selling plug-ins or themes, although we didn't end up doing the theme thing, and then now we are a pluggin company. We are like, yeah, it's great selling plug-ins.
It's so much more scalable than client work was for us, but what's the next step? Oh, sass. That's even more scalable. And there's various different reasons in. Business model. So I think as well as having benefits for the customer for certain types of products, I think from a business perspective it's very interesting. Absolutely. Yeah. Aaron, you got a lot of thoughts on this one. Why is this so important, or why is it so significant? Yeah, I do.
Just kinda back our history at W Wpm U Dev we used to. A few more than a hundred plug-ins and various themes and different things like that. And the problem was our customers treated US App Store, you pay and then download everything and then cancel. And uh, I know that a lot of plug-in businesses have done a lot better with that, with annual licensing and things like that, but still it's kind of mindset that your customers have and.
For me, I'm more of a developer, so I'm kind of approach it from the technical side. So that's kind of my focus will be today as we're discussing this. But the first thing from my experience is that WordPress plugins are compared to a lot of products are really hard to support, maintain, and I think one of the biggest things is just because WordPress is such a open ecosystem that you. Numerous hosting providers, all with different configurations.
You have any number of theme and plugin combinations that can be installed on customer websites and all those things often cause compatibility issues for your plugins. That becomes a huge amount of work to try to make sure you're compatible with everyone and all those kind of things. Like for example, at W P M U Dev, we have a QA team and actually part of their job is literal.
Whenever there's a major release of our product to test it with Yost and all these jet pack and all these popular products that many of our customers also have installed to make sure that we're not breaking with them, it just becomes a really big hassle. Also, the update system for WordPress, that's another thing. When you have software or code that needs to change frequently, it's very common.
your for WordPress website for customers to not update the plugin or for there to be a huge delay before they update to the newer version. Things will break very often, and then you get support tickets and it's like, you haven't updated it yet. We pushed a fixture that months ago. Oh. So that, that becomes a big hassle too. And then the other point that I was, that I've noticed is the hassle of maintaining like a free and pro.
So a lot of WordPress plugins, their model is to have a free version on the repo, and then you have a pro premium version that usually has to be downloaded from the site. And so that means two separate code bases to maintain that. That causes a lot of hassle for developer and also even just the process of switching from free to pro when a user upgrades or purchases your product.
Yeah, let's parse a little bit of this cuz there's a lot of different kind of details in, in what you're highlighting there. Uh, like for example, there are lots of different types of fast connector plugins. Mm-hmm. , like one of the most, or two of the most frequently used ones currently would be like a payment gateway, for example, is definitely a SaaS essentially.
Uh, and also, Um, any plugin that connects with an email provider like MailChimp or, or Constant Contact or active campaign mm-hmm. these, the service is happening offsite and it's having to be connected on the WordPress site specifically, and a lot of the work is offloaded off of the site and it's really just like a, a word, a connector in some ways. Right. But even that connector. , it can't be static and stagnant.
A connector has to be updated too fairly regularly, so you don't totally lose or you don't totally abandon that. Uh, need to keep a plug-in updated, right? Yeah. Depending on the use case, there's gonna be, uh, some amount of code that's gonna be on the WordPress site and some amount of code that you can have on your own servers. So in my opinion, the more you can move to your servers, then the less. , you have to worry about those maintenance burdens. Mm-hmm.
, you know, it depends on the use case, obviously. Yeah. So let's, um, for example, if you're able to do that, then that means you're, you're in one way or another, putting a lot of functionality into the WordPress website that originates somewhere else. Is that what you're suggesting? If you can add features and whatnot on the SAS itself, and then those are just embedded onto the WordPress website, is that like a good example? Yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna jump into specific examples.
Obvious, obviously, which I think we'll do that shortly, but yeah. Yeah, I just wanna make sure like we, we get some of the details covered so everybody's on the same page. Yeah, for sure. And, and another thing to consider too is often features, there's a lot of features that could be implemented much better on like the server side because maybe p h p you need certain PHP extensions or certain specialized software installed on. The user server. That just doesn't work that way. Great.
Examples of that are like whether it's processing images or video or all kinds of different things like that, or services that you need to provide from the cloud as a feature. Yeah, absolutely. And Katie, other thoughts on why this is a important subject for product owners? what, uh, Aaron describe sounds amazing to me. Just getting rid of the compatibility issues because it's all on the server and embedded and so on.
Um, because obviously running a plug-in company with lots of plug-ins, we constantly are having those dependencies. We've got, we use ghost inspect for testing and we've got endless suites of automated. In like 20 themes and with lots of popular plugins and there's always errors or something you have to fix. So taking away that, it sounds very attractive to me. . Absolutely. In many ways it's one of those things where, uh, we've just kind of times drawing and go, well, it's WordPress.
This is how everything works. This is how things are, and that what I hear Air and Payne is have to be that way. You don't have to always deal with these types of, of burdens. It's like, who doesn't deal with licensing trouble? Everybody deals with licensing issues. You don't have to. I, but even like with the like SAS connector types, Aaron, we're still gonna be some sort of authentication. Often. It'll be a simple.
plug in on, on the WordPress site, and they're gonna have to authenticate their connection to your server in one form or another, right? Yes. But that can be done in very seamless ways. They can register and do everything right from within the plugin interface. Yeah. Just interacting with your A p I. Yeah. Some other. like benefits that you might not consider with sasying is just different things to do with conversions and the upgrade flow.
So we already talked about like free pro version, like I've, we have. A number of like free and introversions for W P M U Dev still, but that becomes a big hassle when users have to upgrade from free to pro. And then you wanna make sure if they activate pro, it doesn't cause errors and that the free ones somehow gets deactivated. And then, um, a lot of plug-ins that have perversion, then you have to like the license key and then paste that in and, and this whole process, that's just.
It causes a lot of friction for users, I think, compared to a simple form rate in your WordPress. Where you just log in or connect in. Yeah. And then it's just connected and that's how it works. Yeah. So I think there's benefits, but it's never simple with a plugin. Like I love that. With sas you have control, uh, for example, three trials. Yeah. You've got to code it and things.
But it's much easier because if they don't continue by definition, they've lost that access or they go down to your free plan. Uh, I'm sure we'll have a episode on this another time, but there isn't a perfect licensing solution available for selling WordPress products as I most people will know.
And having things like free trials can be very, You are using, for example, easy digital downloads or commerce or something, and I've got to really think about how to revoke that functionality in a way that's consistent with G P L and all of that kind of thing. With sas, I think it would probably be easier, although you know better than me. . Yeah, for sure. Especially if out of the free pro pro versions of plugins you have, you're actually adding like extra code in that plugin.
And then you also have to think about like piracy and things like that. People can null the plugins and release your pro versions. And because all that code is in there and it's open source when it's a SaaS or a lot of your services are provided by a. , the SaaS side does not have to be open source. That's kind of a thing loophole with G P L and the WordPress repo.
Uh, so you can have a lot of that business logic, things like that, that can be remain secret and remain in a way that competitors can't necessarily steal it or hack it. Yeah. Because it's provided by you. Yeah, absolutely. Andrew Palmer is watching and uh, has a couple of interesting comments. Uh, he says he uses a hybrid version plugin, uses SAS for main functions, but still has to be installed. And of course now he has a Chrome extension too. That's interesting.
Uh, as for a dedicated sas not plan to go there quite yet, do think going like full on dedicated sass is kind of jumping into the deep end. Can be, but there's also lots of micro sass too that do really cool stuff. He has a follow up here as well. I think is interesting. Yo, for Shopify is a SaaS. Absolutely, that's true. And some of the functions of yos for WordPress itself are served from a SaaS. Like in many ways we always think of Yost in particular as just like the SEO plugin itself.
But some of the functionality is actually ified and they grew into that. Wasn't like that always. I'm, there's, uh, specifically some of the, I think some of the tone features. Ways that they can, you can validate the SEO on page. Things like that, I think are all last things. Those are some interesting, uh, examples actually. Yeah. Thanks Andrew. Keep it coming, man. Mm-hmm. . We actually, I think Andrew's on our short list to get on the show, right Katie?
. Yeah. Weren't you gonna invite him for next week? ? Yeah. Yeah. If he's fresh from, uh, word Camp Asia, then Andrew, you're on notice, man. . Uh, cool. Next subject is what we like to call story time. We wanna talk a little bit about our own experiences with Sasying products or. In Katie's case, and in my case, our experience of SaaSified products and as product owners, every time I interact with a new product in one way or another, I am hyper critical.
Uh, and I'm like, oh, this is not the best experience. Uh, they could be doing this instead. Uh, but uh, yeah. So let's talk a little bit about that. Uh, Katie, do you wanna jump into it? Yep. Sounds good. So I think I'm going to talk about, I suppose a challenge, a dilemma for me as a plug-in business owner in going down the SAS route.
So we've identified actually on our strategic growth plan for last year, 2022, that we aspired to move in that direction and develop some kind of SaaS product, and we have a formula. which we built with CIS as our marketing company for evaluating new product ideas. And so we look at various factors to say, is it a good idea, uh, different ideas for new, uh, WordPress plugins. And one of those factors from the beginning of last year is, Can you satisfy it? Is it that sort of product?
Which brings me to a dilemma I think we have with the satisfying of products, which is that you should only do it where it's actually relevant for that type of product. So there is some product. That it just makes sense to have the whole thing in the WordPress admin and for us as a W Commerce, largely specialist W Commerce company, all the ideas we have, it just wouldn't make sense generally to take it out of WordPress and have a SaaS.
That would all be about us trying to improve our business model in the ways we've just discussed, rather than any. To the customer in terms of the functionality. So all the ideas that we have assessed in the last year for new products have had a zero on the satisfying scale, but we know how to do what we do and how to build successful products. So we've continued with those new ideas, despite failing that on every idea we've had.
So one day it might come to us, but I. I don't wanna do it just for the sake of it. That's what's making me hesitate. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. On our end, we actually, were right on the, and I've talked about this on the show in the past. We actually were right on the verge of going full on sass a while back. We were going to jump in and do. A big donation platform, uh, that we were really excited about, and there were a lot of pros and cons to it.
Uh, the product itself, we were, we had a lot of high confidence in it. And, uh, the, a approach was, would be that, uh, you build stuff on the platform. and then you could embed them in different places regardless of WordPress or not. The advantage there of course, was like, yeah, WordPress owns 40% of the internet, but that means there's 60% out there still that can't use gift WP at all. So let's open up our market and try to reach some more folks.
And I think that's definitely a good, valid, uh, reason to head out there. A lot of the complexity was. Was also things like, uh, crane and owning all of that data selves rather than a distributed plugin means that, uh, they have to have responsibility themselves for all the donation data that they're storing on their websites. You start running donations off on your platform and now there's a big liability in there. And also like play truthfully or press.org is a great funnel.
When you are a freemium product, you have a huge plugin base, a huge audience, so you get to. Market to with a free product. And if you go full on SaaS, then um, that's actually taken away and you really have to earn every single customer that you get. So these hybrid examples, like Andrew's mentioning and the ones that, uh, Andrew and Aaron are mentioning as well. I think are really interesting. I, there's a few other small products I've come across recently.
There's one that I really like called Mighty Share, which is one of those, it generates your featured images or your social share images for your blog post automatically based on a logo and colors and the text of the article. And they actually are a SaaS connector. They actually are generating that image on their server for you. And then, uh, and then you're serving that up with a URL that they generate.
And, uh, they actually reached out to me as they were building it out to say, what do you think of this as a SaaS? Or do you think that I should try to do it all on the WordPress website? And a lot of the things that, that Aaron brought up of like the difficulty of doing that kind of image generation on the WordPress server. some of the reasons why they decided to go SaaS or SaaS connector.
So it's a fully a hundred percent WordPress product, but, um, but all the benefits of the features are happening offsite. Yeah. Some of it, I still think there's a lot of, uh, lot of room for talking about pros and cons on both sides, but I want to hear a little bit more from Aaron in terms of story time. One thing that I. Post here for everyone. Uh, let me see the best way I could do this. Uh, I'm going a little bit on the fly here. I wanna highlight this so I can do it. I can do it.
Here we go. Here we go. Uh, share screen. That's where it is. I'm gonna show the tweet. Let's see. Ah, does that work? Nice. So Aaron has, and I'll put it in the comments here as well, but um, Aaron has a great diet here on exactly how the classifying some of the WP M U dev products and some other products of his as well has really helped increase their revenue. So Aaron, Story time. Tell us all about how we increase our revenue Sure. Let me give just some examples first.
Some WP and U Dev, uh, most of our plug-ins are hybrid approach, so basically we took whatever services would be better served. on like a API side and move those there. Most of them have a free option. For example, smush would probably be like one of our most famous ones, very hugely popular plugin, and it compresses images. But a software for doing that effectively doesn't really exist on on host hosting providers. They can't really do it within.
The plugin at least without a lot of compatibility issues and things like that. So we built the API for that. That smushes, you know, millions of images a month. It's crazy how much traffic it gets, but that's all handled the api and that way when we want to improve it, we, there's a new technology, there's a new kind of way of compressing images, even better. Then we just roll that out and no one even has to know, don't need to update anything. It just happens on our.
Amen. I don't wanna stop your story time, but I wanna pause No there, super quick. Uh, cuz that is a little bit of a big concern for folks who wanna satisfy their product. I can't imagine the cost involved with smush alone. Uh, there's gotta be a lot of server resources to do all of that compression for sure. Right? For sure. Yeah. , yeah, we have a, yeah, definitely a investment there on the infrastructure side.
in that case at least, it's not really an alternative, but it provides one of our biggest products. So yeah, so it works out great for us. And also we have another SAS feature to that that's pro only, and that is the cdn. So after it compresses your images, then they get served from our CDN instead, and then we have ways of generating extra revenue on top of that for bandwidth. So if they need extra bandwidth or whatever, then. Pay for that.
So it provides all these other ways to monetize your product on top of just a plug-in license. Yeah. And another one of our plug-in snapshot, which is our backup plug-in, and that eases a full cloud service now to do incremental backups cuz we've found that just doing something so resource heavy like that within WordPress just wasn't possible. Especially when you're trying to do incremental. And so we have a whole server side API that handles all.
Fetching like different files that are updated and compressing them and making incremental thing and storing it in our cloud storage and different things like that. And that also allows us to have plans that may be based on how much cloud storage they need, how for backups and things like that. Um, versus if what that was all handled in the plugin. Nice and smart Crawl is similar to Yost, as Andrew mentioned, to where we have.
Little API is to handle certain parts of the plugin, for example, a web crawler. So that's not something that WordPress can do efficiently. So we have a web crawler service that that Smart crawl talks to, and that goes and it crawls through your site to identify SEO issues with various pages and things like that. Hmm. And, uh, defender is our security plugin.
We have a lot of features that are p powered by Cloud, and I think most of the major security plug-ins do the same, whether it's like downloading the latest signatures for, like, detecting malware and vulnerabilities and things like that. Or in our case, we have a really robust audit logging feature in Defender, creates an audit log of every activity that's done in WordPress. yes, you could store that in the local database, but if your site gets hacked, then what's the point?
The audit log is useless. So from the start, we actually built that as a SaaS service. So there's a whole cloud service that we run where every time one. , something happens on your WordPress site, that event gets shipped off to our API and it's stored in in a way that it can't be deleted or modified even if your sites get hacked. And also allowing people to, to view all that history from one central location on our, in our hub.
Nice. Yeah. I want you to, I think they're really good examples of the types of products that should be. So for example, backups inherently, you don't want the processing to happen in P H P. And also the storage of them, by definition, you want them away from your site. And all of those examples I think are really good illustrations of when it is the right time to use the status for your product. Yeah. For sure. Some can be optional, like they're just design choices.
Like for example, our hummingbird optimization plugin. So most, most of the optimization plugins when they minify your CSS and JavaScript, they try to do that within P H P, within the plugin itself. and there's no way to do that very well. So instead we just built a simple little service where it sends the the CSS or JavaScript file to our service, and then we run it through the actual unify JS and CSS men tools like that that are used, like the standards for compressing those kind of files.
And so we can use just do that really quickly and return it to the client or. as another way of monetizing for, as a pro feature is we can save that on our cdn and then it gets served from that instead. So it, it definitely opens the door and it doesn't have to be either or, like all SAS or all server side, you can have little micro services that are better served from your own APIs. So I wanna dig in a little bit with your examples on.
specifically that tweet, uh, like you say, here's how to take most WordPress plugins and turn them into a SaaS business. Uh, how much do you stand behind that? I think a lot of them can be . Definitely. There's an argument for, are you doing this just for. Sales marketing purposes, cuz obviously it depends on the ethos and me, I'm trying to make a profit, right? . Mm-hmm. provide and at the same time provide the best service that I can to my customers.
But some other people on the other side, they say, oh, it's all, it's the open source ethos. You want all the data to centralize and to own that data and have it on our own servers, even if that means it's gonna be more work or not work as well or whatever. So there's definitely trade offs to consider there. I. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, talk a little bit about how you feel like this move specifically for W B M U Dev actually increased revenue. Yeah, I think it made a big part and especially as.
We've kind of focused our business on our ideal customer, which would be like WordPress agencies or people that just have a few client sites, synchro or larger agencies. And all our products have kind of neutralized on that one central purpose. And because of that, like we built our hub and hosting where all that can be managed centrally. And so the whole SaaS side of our plugins is very important. Like we've maintained them as separate plugins.
and with free versions in the repo, cuz that's a huge funnel, as you said before. Mm-hmm. getting new signups and things like that, but they all funnel in using like SAS connectors into our overall like hub package. So you can manage your seo, your backups, your, your optimization, everything for all your sites from one central location. So definitely has been super important to, even though we're taking a hybrid approach with the way the plug-ins.
like most of them don't necessarily have to connect. It's just ties in really well with our business model and the the customer that we're trying to target. Nice. I don't know how I just did that. . I'm waiting for the QR code now. Yeah, you can click on it. Platform's got some interesting features, I gotta say. Yeah. Nice. No, that's excellent. I could say personally, forever ago, I actually did like a. Uh, image compression plugin, uh, throw down article forever ago.
This was like even before give and all that stuff. I don't know, like 2011 or 12 or something. Uh, and at that time, smush definitely was one of, 'em, was probably one of the biggest ones even. Um, but it was only a plugin, no SAS connector at that time. Um, and truthfully, like it was really heavy on the server and it was really challenging to use it at that time.
So, Definitely see how, uh, how making it more of a sa and offloading a lot of those resources and things would improve it and make it a far better product overall. Um, that makes a lot of sense to me. For sure. Make it more reliable, be able to do a lot more, uh, image compression and bulk to one at a time on, on a $5 shared host or something like that. Yeah, and it, it can also allow.
To, to do products that aren't possible in a plugin, like for example, infinite uploads, which is the kinda side project business that I started a few years back, and that's a cloud storage plugin for WordPress media and video. And the whole point of that is to offload. all your WordPress uploads to the cloud cuz you want it to not take up space on your local host and you wanna be able to scale to any amounts of, of files, whether it's images or video or whatever.
Can't even provide that as a plugin in itself. So as far as like business models, you have two ways of doing that. You have the offload media, which you're probably familiar with, and that's by delicious brains. WP Engine, I guess owns it. Yeah. But they take the approach that is just connecting to your own S3 cloud account. But so they have like three and a premium separate versions of the plugin and when they need to make updates, they have to push 'em like the normal way.
And, and in my case, I thought I saw an opportunity where you can make a much simpler to where I could wrap the whole cloud storage and especially the CDN part and. Caching and clearing and configuration and custom domains and SSL and wrap those all into a much simpler product that I could sell as one flat price instead of having just a connector plugin into some other cloud provider. Mm-hmm.
. So it provides like whole new kind of business opportunities, ways of monetizing and building products. Nice. On the business side of things. Another thing you said in your tweet is that, uh, SaaS recurring revenue is better than WordPress plugin licensing recurring revenue. Someone who built a WordPress business around the annual RU renewal. I'm like, there's a case for that. Is it always better? Not necessarily.
Monthly recurring revenue is, uh, every single month is a, is an opportunity for churn. I think that's definitely a concern for sure. And, um, but you can also do annual for SAS to, you could do annual Yep. Pretty. Yep. Do it. And they can't keep using it after they cancel. Yeah. That's the big, that's the big difference is once the cancel stops working. for sure. And also you can easily provide tiered plans. With a normal plugin, you might not be able to do that so easily.
You don't want to have five different versions of your plugin with different features. So with a SaaS, you can say, okay, if you need extra storage, you can pay a little extra to get more storage. If you want to enable this new pro feature that we just created, that's a whole new plan. Upgrade. Mm-hmm. . So you have all these new ways of monetizing and un unlocking revenue that you can't do with a traditional just app store.
Yeah. Or even downgrading, allowing them to downgrade to a more affordable tier, uh, is better than losing them as a customer completely. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Um, Katie, do you have thoughts on the business model side of the SaaS thing? Uh, not particularly, but I do have a question for you, Matt, which is whether, um, there's anything you can talk about experiences within Stellar of switching to a SaaS model.
Cuz I know that, um, particularly providing a hosted version of a product is something that Stellar have been doing with several of their brands, and that's SAS as well. Isn. Yep. Uh, biggest example is Learn LearnDash. We launched LearnDash Cloud. Um, there's a bit of precedence for this too. Elementor launched other Elementor hosted version a while back as well. Uh, and, uh, the LearnDash version and Elementor websites, both our monthly recurring revenue.
Uh, and the idea is essentially that you're trying to provide them with the whole website and feature set all wrapped up into one. With Elementor, you're building a whole entire website with, uh, learn Dash. You're really building a learning portal. Uh, and it might be for a short time, it might be for a long time. Uh, but the big op opportunity here is that you get to control that whole experience for the customer.
Uh, learn Dash can be configured in a million different ways, and our experience is we kind of all the best ways to configure it. So we might as well give that to you right out of the box if you really want that. So hosting costs involved, which is actually a lot easier when you're Yeah. Hosting company. So that's convenient as we kind of, there, there's still costs, of course, but the costs are kind of done a little bit differently. But, uh, it, it definitely is a, an interesting idea.
I think for, for the most part it was done, um, to serve a customer need. They, there were plenty of customers who were like, oh, I'd love to use Learn Dash, but I don't know anything about building WordPress websites and. Hosting, what does that mean and how do I point a domain at a host? And all of that is just a hassle when I really just wanna spin up a course site today. Uh, that's the customer need. And, uh, learn Dash Cloud really tackled that one, like.
Cleanly and clearly, and I don't have the exact numbers right in front of me. Uh, the worry with things like this is that are you going to eat into your existing customer bases, like all the plugin, are they gonna say, oh, much rather do this, and then they drop their plugin licenses and go over to the hosted one? And at the end of the day, that's not what's happening at all. They're really two different customer segments. Some of 'em really.
They're doing the WordPress plugin themselves, and the others really prefer being able to spin it up and run. So that's a little bit of where I, I'm like, I think there's different use cases and different purposes, different pros and cons. It depends on the customer, depends on the need, all that kind of thing. That's a really good question. Thanks for asking. I hadn't even. Thought of that
. Almost like that's the ultimate session for satisfying a WordPress product because it's from the user's perspective, it's taken WordPress out of the equation because it's the whole website. So the other examples we've talked about involve using a satisfied product to enhance your WordPress website, but ultimately you still have set up word. And hosting and during the admin, but with these two examples, they're the Elementor and the Learn Dash.
That's your whole website, and it doesn't matter what the platform is. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, and I, I know that's brought up controversy too, like in the community, like when Elementor is doing that, That you're satisfying the entire WordPress experience or taking WordPress away, even though you're using it as part of your SaaS. So that's something to consider too.
Something that you brought up earlier, Matt, that I thought was kind of interesting is what if, give an example, imagine ai. So I built that, that's my most recent product to, uh, For focusing on like AI image, anything with AI images. And I kind of decided I wanna maybe leave the WordPress ecosystem, even though that's where all my connections are. So I kind of thought as a SaaS first product. So first it's a SaaS open to anyone. You don't need WordPress.
But then you have the Imagine AI plugin which connects to it. Uh, so you don't necessarily half by being able to target all the. And everyone, it doesn't mean you necessarily lose that awesome funnel that is like a, a connector plugin on wordpress.org. You can have best of both worlds , so you get people come in and finding out your service from that. But you also can start targeting a much broader community than just the WordPress ecosystem. Yep. And you could go the other direction too.
You can start with your plugin and expand it, like as you're talking about, maybe give WP doing or things like that. Yeah. Even Yost, uh, for, they did the Shopify integration. They actually, they created Yost dot js, which was like a way to be able to use Yost on any website that supported JavaScript. And um, that was an interesting experiment. I haven't really seen personally much use of it or anybody really. claiming that it's awesome or whatnot.
I'd be curious to hear if they're getting usage out of that, but I, and I believe that's what was poured into their Shopify feature as well, more or less. I might be just making things up. They can correct me if I'm wrong, but that's, that's one way to go about it too. We have hit, oh, go ahead. Oh, I was just gonna throw out one more example. If you're familiar. Ari. Yep. They started out as, was it like WP Feedback?
I forgot what it's called, the WordPress plugin, and now they've gotten full SaaS. Yeah, I mean targeting anyone, any web developer, any website, anything like that. Yep. There's a good example that I think has been successful. WordPress. That's a good one. Yep. We're gonna wrap up with our last segment, which we go around and we share what our best advice is for any new plug-in shop owners who might be considering classifying their products in one form or another.
Uh, Aaron, do you want to kick us off? Sure. Uh, just in summary, I'd say there's a lot of pros to classifying. There are some trade offs that we mentioned, especially when it comes to the technical side and having to develop APIs and services and maintain those. And there's cost involved there, of course. Uh, but overall, think that the good, um, thing to pursue for a lot of different plugins to see if they can that or add some SaaS features to their product.
Absolutely Katie. Yeah, I'd say consider that as part of your thinking about what source of plugin shop you're going to set up and where you're going to specialize us is not the only way to build a profitable, sustainable business. As Matt touched on earlier, it's not like we are saying, I'll put your plugins on Co Canyon, where you can't get renewals or anything. You can get sustainable ongoing revenue, which allows you to keep supporting and maintaining a normal plugin.
But I think there are business. Aaron, are you still there? I'm here, yeah. Okay. Katie. Freeze for you too. Yeah. Ah. We hit a technical snag. Bummer, . He can finish her words right? ? I bet. I bet you that she'll be back any second. Now, I'll say from my end, uh, that, uh, the best advice I have is to really dig into the cost.
Uh, there's actually, when we were looking into doing a full fledged sass, we found tons of resources online on estimating your server costs based on what type of features and functionality that you. Be doing. There's like Excel spreadsheets and all kinds of stuff that can help you estimate those things, do all of your due diligence, and really dig into what the costs will be and use that to figure out your pricing for sure, and but also really consider.
How are you going to attract customers if it's primarily just a WordPress connector? I really think it's a lot harder to use the WordPress funnel as attracting new audiences because the plugin itself isn't gonna do anything without the SaaS. But if it's a plugin that does something and has SaaS features as well, then there there's potential there. , or if you're just gonna do the SaaS with a WordPress connector, like how are you going to market that SaaS?
Because in my mind, costs and acquisitions, new customer accounts are kind of some of the biggest ions to take into mine. Or jumping into a business model like this. That's right. My, yeah. Yeah. And just speaking on that, Server side, it doesn't have to cost that much. In most cases, $5 droplet on digital Ocean can handle a surprising amount of traffic , depending on what you're trying to do. So that doesn't necessarily have to be like a huge blocker or a huge thing to overcome.
Yep. And it looks like we might be getting Katie back in just a second cuz we are gonna wrap up and I wanted to make sure to talk about next week as well. I know it still looks like it's struggling a little bit. Let me see if I can add what happens. I was worried about that . It's not quite there. Think I got that might be just my video. Oh, okay. Great. Uh, let's see if that works. Just trying to get the video. Okay with me without video then . Cool. Cool. We're wrapping it up.
Thanks everybody for being here and for listening in. Aaron, thanks so much for being here as well. Yeah, this was great. We'll be pushing it out on the socials and we do have a new YouTube channel for Product Talk, so find us on YouTube at Up Product Talk and hit that subscribe button if you can.