In today’s episode, we get to listen again to Joe and Christie’s conversation about switching from project-based work to subscription-based model. They also discussed how WordPress developers doing freelance work can focus on creating prototypes of productized services, how engaging in competitor research can help identify flaws in your own products, and the best way to test out what product to build during your free time.
What to Listen For:
- 00:00 Intro
- 02:55 Transition to project-based work to subscription model
- 06:28 From building a $5,000 website to a $20,000 website
- 12:34 Prototypes of productized services
- 14:20 The best way to get into products is to do project-based work
- 18:03 Engage in competitor research, identify customer needs
- 23:57 Aim for enough people buying the product in any given hour
- 26:35 Moving from project-based to subscription-based
- 31:17 When you don’t need full service assistance
- 34:23 What’s the smallest thing that you can do to figure out if your idea is good?
Episode Resources:
- Leave an Apple podcast review or binge-watch past episodes
- Visit the WPMRR Community
Podcast Transcript:
Christie Chirinos: Hey work process. Welcome back the WP MRR WordPress podcast. I’m Christie.
Joe Howard: And I’m Joe.
Christie Chirinos: And you’re listening to the WordPress business podcasts. In the last episode, we’re timeboxing we talked about lessons learned. And one of the things that I learned was I had to take my travel day seriously, unless my travel days plan is to sit around at the place where I am and get work done. I’m not going to be able to squeeze work into my travel day. It was a really interesting lesson for me.
Because, uh, I’m not going to any weddings, but, uh, I think the next time I leave, my apartment will be. Uh, for what KIPP Baltimore. So that’s fun. I’ll be over there speaking. So if you’re there come say, Hey, um, be like, I recognize you from that podcast. That’ll be fun.
Joe Howard: That didn’t happen. A reward camp, New York that was pretty easy.
And Bradley, I think he runs this, uh, this, uh, plugin that runs on top of beaver builder. Uh, he came up Austin dude, but he w he came up and was like, Hey, oh, Christie, like, nice to meet you. Like, I think I’ve seen you on Twitter. And it was just, it was funny. Cause I feel like that always happens. It’s like the word camps are kind of the, uh, IRL, you know, get together for like people that you’ve hung out with on Twitter or on the make WordPress slack group or in Facebook groups or whatever.
Christie Chirinos: I recognize you from the internet. Look at you in the flesh. No internet person. Yeah. Bradley somebody who is going from project-based WordPress work into coming out with products and he’s built out a product that is pretty cool and built upon the work that he was doing. Sounds really exciting. He’s getting good amount of traction.
He’s bootstrapping it. He said, my product is not paying my rent. That is such a huge accomplishment, right? Like totally. Especially in New York city, what you know, so yeah. Yeah. That’s something that we’re going to be talking about today.
Joe Howard: Yeah. Very cool. That Bradley came into the conversation. Shout out.
Bradley. Cool dude. Check out his plugin, but I can’t remember what it’s called. Beaver builder. It’s a beaver beaver builder. Add on plugin.
Christie Chirinos: Uh, hold on. If we’re going to do a shout out. Yeah, we have to do it right. We are terrible. His name is Bradley curve
Joe Howard: Kirby. That’s right. I remember I said, when I met him, dude, your last name is awesome. I used to play that game all the time, which I’m sure.
Christie Chirinos: And his product is called Wallace in line and it is a front end product for beaver builder editing. Pretty cool. Pretty cool guy. And taking that leap going from. Project-based WordPress work, building websites for people to building out products, have other people who build websites or people are going to use to build websites for.
Joe Howard: Boom, that transitions pretty well into what we’re going to talk about today, which is most people who come into the WordPress base are introduced to it at least as WordPress professionals, through building websites for other people. And we kind of think of this as more project based. No, I’m building a website for you.
That’s the task at hand. You’re going to pay me to do that task and I’m going to accomplish that one thing for you. And this is kind of that project based mindset that a lot of people start off in the WordPress space with. But we want to talk about today about how that’s a little bit old school or starting to be kind of somewhat old school.
And how a lot of people are transitioning from doing project-based work to actually focusing more on a subscription model, the, uh, a productized service, like what we do at WP buffs, or maybe even something slightly higher technology, maybe building a plugin and possibly even at theme. So that’s what we want to talk about today.
Christie Chirinos: Brought up like Wallace in line or a caldera for. Joe. Is that how you started out in WordPress? Did you start out by doing project based?
Joe Howard: I very much started off in the WordPress space, but in project based work, I, I was part of the WordPress base. I’ve been part of the WordPress space for a long time. Uh, but a lot of the work that I was doing was kind of on the side of a full-time.
So I was doing consulting full-time and then building websites out as a freelancer has kind of a side gig. And so I was very much doing this project based work. And one of the reasons I actually moved into doing WP buffs and doing this productized service where people pay on a monthly basis and get kind of this, uh, they receive our services, but it’s really kind of packaged as a product to care plan and.
I always had a lot of trouble trying to figure out how to scale building websites. I always felt like I was either, uh, I was making very good money one month because I sold two websites and the next month they wouldn’t make any, because I just, the timing didn’t work out for finding new clients. And this is a big piece of the project-based work that WordPress people do.
I actually think that a lot of people, especially when you enter the WordPress space, Start in this kind of project based work, because you kind of have to learn the technology. You have to learn how WordPress works. You have to get involved with the community. It’s a pretty easy way to introduce yourself into WordPress and to kind of keep it at least somewhat low pressure, because you can always kind of build websites for friends and family, maybe even for yourself for a pet project or a hobby.
Christie Chirinos: Yeah. And definitely the pool is growing of just people that need. This is no short supply, everybody and their mom. In fact, my mom currently wants a website. If anybody wants a side project and it’s easy to get started. I mean, we get a lot of new people at caldera. So we bring on team members who are great at either customer service or whatever they do, but like maybe haven’t touched the WordPress before. And the first thing we have them do is build a WordPress.
Joe Howard: Oh, that’s really cool. Especially for people who are new in the space and to have your support in doing that, they could build something totally about that. So I like that a lot.
Christie Chirinos: Yep. We set them up with hosting. We give them a guiding sheet, but at the end of the day, to do anything with an a WordPress business, I need you to understand posts, pages, menus, custom post types. And so we have you do it. And of course, caldera forms.
Joe Howard: Totally. The challenge really does come in for mostly most of the people that are listening to this podcast, it can be WordPress professionals. And so they’re mostly people who are, have kind of evolved beyond the I’m just starting out with WordPress.
I’m building websites for, you know, $500 thousand dollars. You know, most people who have, uh, been in the WordPress space for a little while has started to move up market a little bit. And they’re kind of more focused on bigger web projects, not everybody, but a good amount of the population are kind of figuring.
Or at least trying to figure out how can I move from building, you know, $1,000 sites to $2,000 sites to $10,000 sites, $20,000 sites. And this is a big step for a lot of people. And it’s a big step up in terms of the work required to do. I mean, if you’re building a $500 site for someone there’s not a lot, that’s going to go into that.
Uh, at least there shouldn’t be for that little bit price, but if you’re building a $20,000 website for someone it’s probably going to be pretty robust, not only is the technology going to be robust, probably some customization in the WordPress, probably, you know, it may not just come from a theme or a template or a plugins from the repository.
There are also things like you have to make sure you hop on your discovery call. You know, you have to do monthly check-ins or daily check-ins for some people who want them. There’s a ton of communication that has to go on. Uh, there’s just, there are a lot more requirements for a website of that magnitude.
And so if you’re trying to build a business around that, it does present a challenge in doing that just because of. So much more to do. And if you’re trying to do 10 projects at one time, that’s a lot of moving pieces.
Christie Chirinos: It’s huge. And what’s interesting is the bigger they get, the more there is on the line. And I suppose that there are ways in which you can think of yourself like, oh, I’m going to grow this agency. I’m going to be the next 10 up. I’m going to be the next human made. I’m going to teach other people how to do that. But I think that tends to be something that is harder than it seems as are all things.
Joe Howard: Yeah, very much so. And those are two great examples of companies that are very well-known in the WordPress space that do awesome work for their clients. 10 up human made most people in the WordPress space have heard of these companies. The one thing I will say about both of those companies is for people who are just kind of getting into.
The agency world, and it building websites for people. These two, aren’t always the best examples of businesses. Exactly. Like your small business that have just scaled to a large, to a larger company or a larger business. They’ve really shifted from working downmarket to going up market, which really just means they’re not always focused on building websites for small businesses.
A lot of their business comes from. Large businesses from enterprise, which is a really different business than kind of a small agency. That’s building even $10,000, $20,000 sites, very different businesses, very different audiences. And so again, the, and these companies are awesome. Uh, use a lot of like the human made, they open sourced.
They’re hiring. Their whole hiring book, which I literally have a repeating task in, in teamwork projects to look at it every month to like steal more stuff from them, honestly. So Cuban made. Thanks for that. Uh, it’s totally awesome. But just to keep in mind that if you’re thinking like I want to be the next human made around to be the next, oh, my company to be the next tenet, it’s going to be, uh, we’re kind of talking apples and oranges there.
I’m sure that a lot of people listening think about a $10,000 website and they’re like, that would be awesome. Yeah. That would
be successful. That’s awesome.
Christie Chirinos: Yeah, that is awesome. I mean, that’s a huge win and I think there’s a lot of people who are successful with the 10 to $20,000 website. Right. And the not 10 upsize, but definitely more than one person type agency.
How do they figure it out? See, I never really went down that path.
Joe Howard: Yeah. So I think a great resource for this is something like WP elevation. So if you’ve not heard of WP elevation, it’s a community of WordPress consultants. Uh, it’s, it’s pretty widely known as one of the best communities for. Uh, and so there, they have a whole video course, no community around helping people be better WordPress consultants and build better freelancing careers, better agencies, WP elevation member of full transparency.
Uh, and I really love it. I I’m, I’m just speaking from personal experience here, but the community is awesome. A lot of people doing cool stuff, the. Resources are there to build a successful business like this. I think that’s one thing I want to make sure we’re pretty clear about what kind of talking about how project based thinking is a little bit, it starts to become a little bit old school that does not at all mean that you can’t be successful building websites for people.
Of course you can. A lot of people in the WordPress space do it. One of the challenges does come in. Of like market’s really saturated there. Everyone. And their mom is building websites for people except Christie’s mom, apparently who still needs a website.
Christie Chirinos: So she needs a website. She is not getting into being a professional WordPress developer
Joe Howard: with so many people, building websites for people.
The easiest way, usually to build a successful business is really to differentiate yourself from your company. So WP boss, we have a few big differentiators between us and other maintenance companies that are really significant. It’s literally a reason why people will work with us and not another company in the project-based work in terms of building websites.
There are probably thousands of other people that do that just in your area, especially if you’re living in a big city or highly populated place. So differentiating yourself is really hard and I think it becomes harder and harder every day with more people building websites. Again, it doesn’t mean it’s not possible, but.
It’s not always, it may not always be the right choice, especially if you have other options for business models or how you’re going to run your business.
Christie Chirinos: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and I do think that I’m seeing more and more people and more and more agencies of multiple sizes catch onto that. You see people who have been running hugely successful agencies, breaking out into products or product high services.
You see people who have been running perfectly successful two-person agency. Breaking into productized services. We’re seeing that more and more. I’m seeing that in my work at the end of the day, a lot of what people use caldera forms for is, um, setting up these kinds of prototypes for prototypes service and automated way to buy.
Uh, service, um, and pay for it and select what you want via conditional logic. So we’re seeing that, um, I’m watching it grow, , we’re still seeing a lot of people who are coming in and, uh, making a site and getting around WordPress in that way.
Joe Howard: Yeah, totally. Not only that, I I’m seeing people also not just productizing their services, but a lot of agencies are going into the plugin area as well. They have a client who needed a custom plugin built and we realized, oh, a thousand other people probably need this and we’ll pay for it too. And so it comes in and the plugin spaces.
Christie Chirinos: Yeah, that’s actually a lot of how caldera forms grew. Um, a lot of people will ask me how that caldera firms come about and, you know, full transparency, Josh Pollack. And I did not create Calera forums. Cause there are forms it’s originally created by a south African developer named David Kramer. Who’s super talented, but how did it grow?
Right and become what it became was, well, you know, David made it because it was something that he needed just like, uh, Joe just said, people outline, um, that’s why getting into products the best way to get into products, to do projects, because you see what people need. You learn about the wide gaps between tools that we have available needs that people have.
Something that’s always cracked me up as the second. You take a look under the hood of how the web works. You realize it’s all being held by toothpicks, and there’s a lot of opportunity.
Joe Howard: I say the same thing I say, life is held together by it’s all held together by duct tape, or it’s all held together by zip ties.
Christie Chirinos: It’s all held together by duct tape and that’s an opportunity for. Somebody coming in doing a project to identify the things that were painful for you, and then realize that you could solve those problems for other people. That’s a call their forms came about. And then the way that it grew was that we use that framework to solve other problems.
So we wanted a better contact form. Now we had existed. Now we wouldn’t have better content from that could link up the MailChimp. Now that existed. We wanted a contact form. Uh, that could actually be just a form maker who could not, could be used for registrations applications with multiple pages of conditional logic.
And we made all of those things happen and we solved a lot of people’s problems. We were helpful and that’s how the product took on a life of its own. So I think a lot of the idea for a product or a productized service can come from doing project-based WordPress work and. Feeling the pain yourself of what’s missing and then thinking to yourself, well, can I develop the skills to feel the pain of what’s missing with that said, I also definitely talked to a lot of people who feel a pain and then they’re like, I’m going to solve this.
Right. And then they’re the only person that feels that pain. So it’s important to get out there and to talk to real customers and to make sure that you’re not sinking your time into something, thinking that it’s going to have promise and actually finding that it’s not the case and using clever and moderate budget ideas to get the word out there are really good when we’re talking to.
This Bradley curvy, um, developer who created this Wallace inline product he mentioned that he did a pretty elaborate launch campaign, where he got people excited about what he was doing and create a sense of urgency for launch. And that was a good way to see if people actually cared about the thing that he was building and would pay him for the investment of time that he was making.
But. Products come in all shapes and sizes. Uh, there is a saying that I saw once. That was interesting. It said you can have product ideas from what you’re currently doing in your work in spreadsheets. Yeah, right. So if you’re doing some sort of management of something in a spreadsheet, could you create a product that could make that a more seamless process, um, with less steps for yourself solving the problems that we have ourselves is a really great way to get into products and start selling.
And making money, um, when you’re not directly exchanging your time at an hourly rate.
Joe Howard: Yeah. I hear that completely. In terms of caldera stuff. I want to even dive into this a little more because I’m super interested in this space as someone who’s not in it. It’s super funny. We’re doing this podcast together.
We know each other really well. I didn’t even know any of that background in terms of caldera. Um, so it’s cool to hear that. And that I think a lot of people think like plugin development, like you have to build something from scratch. That is not the only way to get into the plugin game or to find something that you’re really passionate about.
There are other ways as well. So when you and Josh first kind of decided to do. Into this more kind of subscription-based area of WordPress in terms of that first thing you were going to build out, how did you guys really decide? Maybe you said MailChimp MailChimp petition was one of the first ones you did.
Like, did you have customers who said like, I need this MailChimp thing. Is that kind of how you, you had that idea that, that that was gonna be your next step or your first step?
Christie Chirinos: I came way later down the road, um, caldera forums. The first series of ad-ons for it, we’re actually search ad-ons because that was something that the WordPress space very seriously lacked.
And it was a very niche little room where when people needed really powerful search solutions, there weren’t that many options. And so word press of Oliver’s people doing project-based work, um, had a need in which they would have to have a more complex search form, uh, maybe with check boxes with faceted search.
And so this contact form plugin. Also became this tool to create powerful search boxes that could sort out, uh, products or blog posts or whatever it might be. Because when you think about it, that’s a simple form. And it grew from there say somebody would use that and they would use the search form. And they would say, I like this search form.
I wish that only. A registered user of the site could use it. Yeah. Let’s make that for you. I wish that they could do that and that they could use the search form and then click into the result and then change the results that they see. Okay. Let’s do custom fields or front end editing. And that’s how the product grew.
That’s how the add on library group. Um, until there was actually a bit of profit to start looking around and sniffing around what other people were doing and think. Other potential options that are similar to this product, what are they doing? Oh, they’re selling MailChimp. They’re selling PayPal, right?
Let’s try and get some of those high interest, high ticket customers. Yeah.
Joe Howard: A lot is said about differentiating yourself from other products and trying to do things differently. But a lot of the times like, In this case, the having a form that connects with MailChimp is something that not just, you know, your competitors needed something that you need as well, because there’s, the market is so big out there.
So it makes sense to build something like that based on a little bit of competitive research.
Christie Chirinos: Exactly. So it was a matter of learning about what people like us needed and also engaging in competitor research. What was out there seeing what holes existed and seeing where we could exist. An important thing to keep in mind when we’re thinking about this kind of work is that this pie is growing.
That’s what all the data tells us is that we’re not all fighting over a limited pie because there are more and more people waking up every morning saying I’m going to start a business and I need a website.
Joe Howard: Yeah. And WordPress has grown about a percentage every year for, as, as far back as I can remember, at least for the last five years or so.
It’s been, you know, we’ve gained at least one percentage of overall web market share every year. So it’s definitely.
Christie Chirinos: Yeah, and that is for a reason, right? It’s because we are undergoing an information revolution and the way that business is working is changing and something like a large open source content management system is powering a lot of it.
Um, there are a lot of use case specific CMSs that aren’t WordPress, um, especially for things like non-profits and, um, for specific lines of business, There’s still the factor that more and more people are coming in every day and they’re saying, well, I want the new website. And so there’s a lot of room to improve on the existing products.
There’s a lot of room and that was a big factor of caldera forums, right. How they cut their forums. Show up in a world that already had plenty of form plugins for WordPress. The fact of the matter was that we were not focusing on stealing customers from gravity forms. We were not focusing on getting people who are using something else to switch to us.
Certainly there have been people who have, because they love the product and the quality and the team, but we were focusing on those brand new websites. We were focusing on those new agencies that were coming up and I’m making sure that we. The problems of the modern website builder. And that’s what our website says, right?
It says we solve the problems with modern website builder because this stuff is changing. It’s hard to keep up with, but that’s an opportunity.
Joe Howard: Yeah. And what you just said is super important too, because with so many new people coming into WordPress, there is a space to be, become an, uh, a new agency owner and to launch an agency and, and to be successful because there are still more people coming in to WordPress.
That being said, That also means more WordPress users in general means that people need everything from plugins to themes, to hosting, to WordPress support. And because WordPress is growing, I feel like everybody is focused on because WordPress is growing. Like let’s all go towards the beginning of that.
Uh, kind of, I guess, sales cycle, you know, the, the new people in. And that’s the reason so many people are pushing into building websites for new WordPress people, but there’s still a huge space because the entire space is growing to, to be, uh, doing something that’s a little bit farther into two people’s WordPress.
Yeah. So I think there’s space to be providing ongoing support for people and to be building plugins and, or starting plugging companies or some companies that there’s still a lot of opportunity out there for those kinds of people. Tell us about some stumbling blocks, anything that, what was, what’s the hardest part about, about doing this?
Because although I support very much this productized service and going more towards this pay a monthly subscription. Your services or your product. There are challenges there too. Did cause caldera running anything
Christie Chirinos: big, doing things like productized services and products are a completely different ballgame from doing freelancing when you have, well, let me not say freelance and let me say project based work.
You have a goal. You have a process. There’s a finish line when you’re talking about products. Almost none of those things are true. If you want to calculate your hourly rate, that’s going to be at the depressing exercise. And always, at least until you figure out that growth and you figure out that product market fit and you actually start selling, but you’re going to make a lot of mistakes.
And. There’s a saying among the product world that, you know, um, if you need to raise a little bit of money, just do some consulting, right? It’s just like the fastest way of making a little bit of cash. Why? Because you exchange your expertise and your time for money and products. Aren’t like that, that.
Immediate return on your time doesn’t happen. And there can be a lot of instances in which you think it’s going to go really well. And it doesn’t, and that’s something that’s really hard to get used to, um, that you’re taking bigger risks, um, or potentially bigger rewards, but they’re bigger risks. The other thing, that’s a bit of a stumbling block for us was learning to delegate.
Um, since we all came from a project-based, uh, environment, figuring out that a product owner’s job is to create a system that exists without you was a really difficult thing for us to wrap our heads around. And so we would think, well, you know, this is a project, let’s do it, but if you’re making a product, what you’re aiming for is that.
Enough people are buying that product in any given. That you’re getting more money than you would for a given hour. So that means that the margins behind what you’re making each hour and what you’re spending each hour and a half to work, it’s completely different than showing up and charging an hourly rate for a project, which you execute and you conduct and adjusting our minds and twisting them into that shape.
After doing project work was really tough for us.
Joe Howard: Yeah. I mean, similarly for us WP bus doesn’t do pure product. We don’t build any plugins, but the concept of moving from project based to subscription-based was it like the business model was completely different. And so the thought process behind everything is so different.
That was probably the hardest part of transitioning from kind of being a freelancer and building websites to providing ongoing support was just like, this is really. It’s like running a completely different business. Um, the KPIs, you know, these key performance indicators in terms of just like the goals of the company, like what markers you want to hit, you know, for project based work can be really different for project based work.
You may be looking at like how many new customers come in the door. Um, maybe looking at, you know, your, your one-time revenue that’s come in for, for us doing subscription. We’re talking more like what’s our monthly recurring revenue. You know, what’s our lifetime value of a customer. What’s the churn of our customers.
And these things are things that people do. Project based work, uh, have not been focused on a lot, uh, in their past, which they probably shouldn’t have been because it wasn’t pertinent. But moving into this area, definitely something to focus on.
Christie Chirinos: That’s exactly right, because that’s how you create that scalability, right?
Like people think, oh, scalability is coming from, um, this product can sell when I’m not working. And that’s not really quite the case where it comes from is that this product can be created and maintained in its own little ecosystem. And that’s what you were trying to do. You’re trying to create an ecosystem.
It’s a different kind of thinking and it’s totally approachable. But when you’ve been thinking a certain way, it’s really tough. Turn left.
Joe Howard: Yeah. The whole idea behind ongoing support and in itself being a different business model, isn’t all bad fit. And this is one of the reasons I wanted to talk about it is because I actually think it’s much easier to scale a business like WP buffs than it would be to scale a business.
It’s building websites again, not saying that the, an agency that builds websites can’t grow to become a great company, but I found it way easier to scale the company that does the ongoing support. A few reasons are because the pricing is a little bit lower, you know, especially if you’re charging $10,000, $20,000 for a website, 50,000 actual website.
That’s something that a bigger businesses, you know, maybe able to afford, but. For us, like our most expensive plants, like $400 a month. Most people get on plants are around $150 a month. So it’s a much easier pill to swallow, I think. And so people, uh, I think are more likely to want to sign up for something like that.
Um, because the price is just right for them. That’s, that’s one reason. I think it’s a little easier. The second is because just in general. I like the idea of building a WordPress plugin, however, to build a WordPress plugin, you have to be somewhat technical or have pretty technical I’d say, or have someone who’s pretty technical on your team.
When I launched WP buffs, I brought on people who were technical in the WordPress and the WordPress knowledge, uh, you know, the new PHP, HTML, CSS. But I think it was much easier to start a business like WP Bluffs that provides the ongoing support. Then it probably would have been to start a plugin company from scratch.
And so I think it’s a really happy medium between project based work, which you can, I think you can transition from project based work to something like doing WordPress ongoing work. Care plans for people. I think that switches pretty straightforward. There is that whole shift in business model and shift and thinking, but it’s not a huge leap from project based work.
Plugins, I think is a little bit Harrier when you get into the nuts and bolts of it in terms of the technical stuff you didn’t know. But I think the only one supports a pretty easy bridge to walk across. If you’re thinking about doing something that’s more subscription.
Christie Chirinos: I would agree with that. Certainly our business caldera WP, um, innovates a lot on, uh, What we’re doing, right. It’s not just a matter of cranking something out. And, you know, there are ways to create plugins that simply fill a need, um, that don’t necessarily have to be like the newest shiniest thing, but just do a one thing really well.
WordPress is a lot of room for that, but I think that most people want to be product creators. They want to create something new for sure. Yeah. And, um, I think that it does make a difference when you’re talking about a product high service, when you’re already really good at something. And really what you’re doing is you’re figuring out a repeatable process that you can then sell and just do it faster.
And, you know, the way P buffs is an amazing example of that. And there are other really cool companies that, um, um, that were, that caldera is a customer of.
Yeah, well, the people I’ll just one of them. Uh, uh, but we also use Pathfinder SEO. Uh they’re like DIY SEO. So this is kind of cool. It talks to, um, Joe’s mentioned of the happy medium between projects and, um, and hardcore development, right?
Like, uh, Pathfinders, not Yost. But they’re also not, um, an SEO consultant that does everything for you. They kind of just put together a platform that helps you help yourself. And that can go a really long way when it comes to businesses that are strapped for cash and are, you know, pretty good with a computer.
You don’t need full service, something. You just need a little bit of help, but. At an affordable price and it really just hits a need. Um, I think hit metrics and the example that Joe and I, yeah, we’re both big head metrics fans these days. Those guys have a good thing going, and it’s the same thing.
They’re productizing a service, they’re figuring out ways to do the thing that they do faster. They know that Christmas comes every year and that they can create a series of repeatable tasks to do things like. You know, analyze data. It all looks the same on all websites except for a couple of percentages of differences.
Joe Howard: Yeah. Yeah. So hit metrics is it’s, uh, analysts. It’s it’s two guys who run this company. Um, maybe a couple of contractors there too, but their stick pretty much is we’ll help you with all your analytics. We’ll help you with your conversion optimization. We’ll do this, this work for you and it’s project-based work, but it’s you pay for on a monthly basis.
And so. They’re kind of changed this from like, let me do this project for this cost to let me, you know, I’ll charge you a flat rate every month and then we’ll provide the service for you every month. And I think that business model is really smart. It’s it’s the same as WP buffs. And the reason I think it’s smart is because.
In my mind, there are a ton of people out there who use WordPress, who can’t afford a full-time technical person or a full-time CTO, but that’s kind of WP buffs, exact stick. It’s like pay us monthly subscription. You don’t get a full-time CTO. But when you do get as a part-time WordPress CTO, chief technical officer, for those who are not acronym friendly, but it allows people to.
Hey, you know, a more modest fee to have someone who’s part-time, uh, on their website, but we also have a team behind it. So it’s really kind of the best of both worlds. You get 24 7 support, but also at a less expensive price and metrics is doing something very similar, right? You’re paying a monthly subscription.
Uh, and you’re, I don’t re those guys don’t work full time for WP buffs. They don’t work full-time for caldera, but what they do give you is a few hours of good work every month. That really helps. Get the data you need to move your business forward. And so, yeah, I’m a big fan. All right. Very cool. Anything else, Christie, that we want to touch on today before we finish this off?
Christie Chirinos: I don’t think so. I think. If you are someone who is doing project-based work, and you’re thinking about moving onto products, there are a lot of really interesting resources to get started. We’re trying to be one of them. And what really matters is to think of this idea of a minimal investment of your time.
What’s the smallest thing that you can do to figure out if your idea is good. You can build the most beautiful, most perfect most feature rich product of your dreams in the future. But what can you do with a couple of days? To figure out if somebody would pay you money for your idea. It’s how to find the space between sinking in a huge investment in their returns and how to figure out how to quickly create an ecosystem that creates monthly recurring revenue, um, in a way that is scalable and can grow beyond what you can do in 24 hours.
Joe Howard: Totally. And for people who are in the WordPress space and based more on kind of the agency, the old school agency model, um, or freelancing, and your main thing is building websites. I would definitely think about what your business could look like with more predictable revenue and what it could look like when you focus more on monthly recurring revenue.
And as opposed to one time. Uh, I think a lot of people do these one-time projects and they kind of live and die month by month based on how well that month went. And it’s kind of a toss of the coin. Uh, when you focus more on project or less on project based work and more on, uh, kind of productizing your service and having people pay you monthly for what you do, you can really predict how much you’re going to make month over month.
And you can build that this is totally something we haven’t even said on the podcast yet. Uh, For those people listening WP MRR is actually more than just a podcast. What it’s actually a whole video course that teaches you as an agency owner or someone who focused on project based work, how to, uh, influx your business with a more, uh, recurring monthly recurring.
Focus. And so if you’re just building websites, this is going to teach you how to sell care plans to your current clients, to new clients. And, you know, within six months, be able to say, you know, I’m going to be making $8,000 next month. You know, I know that for a fact, because. You know, this is how much I made last month.
This is how many new care plans we sold. And so this is how much I’m going to make this month and not have to worry about. I made a lot of money this month. I didn’t make any last month that am predictability, can kill some businesses. So feel free to check out WP mrr.com. If you’re interested in the video course, we’ll wrap it up there.
That’s all for this week. As always, if you enjoyed this episode, feel free to leave us a quick review. On iTunes. Um, if you, well, if you want to leave us a five star review, you can leave a review on iTunes. If you want to leave us at 1, 2, 3, or four star review, you don’t even have to. It’s cool. Like don’t even worry about it.
So good. But these are, uh, these five-star reviews do help us get found by other people who are looking for WordPress podcasts, which has a lot of WordPress professionals. So that would be great. Super duper cool of you to just take a couple minutes and just leave a quick review. Tell us how you’d like to show
yeah. That’s it. Well, that’s it for this week.
We will catch y’all in the next episode.