Matt: Hey, Kim, welcome back to the WP Minute.
Kim: Thank you for having me, Matt.
Matt: You are the the leading return guest.
You're the, you're the all star.
on the,
Kim: try to keep doing cool stuff so that that stays the case.
Matt: The other day I, I tweeted out, I forget what day it was, but you
know, prices going up everywhere.
Food, water, everything.
And streaming services, my God.
And I actually want to dissect that in a moment here, the
software streaming services.
and I was like, man, I don't see anybody really going up in the WordPress world.
And even my day job at gravity forms, we've held the line really long.
I mean, they still have the developer license and we're
rolling out gravity SMTP.
We're wondering, okay, like how do we turn this into a, we want to
turn this into a secondary product.
This can't just be for free.
We can't continue free.
And then I saw that you were raising prices.
My brother's been, a happy customer for many years running, thetraderisk.
com, his daily, finance, Non advice, newsletter slash membership, so check that
out if you're interested in that stuff.
But you just raised, I got the prices up right now.
You have a free plugin, which everyone knows and loves.
Your standard plan is now 3.
47 for the year, plus plan 5.
97 for the year.
And my favorite plan, which I should, I, I want more plugin
developers and theme authors to do is have an enterprise plan at 5, 000
plus, like here's the floor, Mrs.
Enterprise customer.
Who's about to throw lawyers and a purchasing department at me.
It starts at 5, 000 and we scale up depending on how
much headache do you give me?
So all of that is to say you're raising prices.
Fantastic.
Insert.
Clap, audio and the post edit.
why did this happen?
You have a whole sheet of notes, but why did this happen for you?
Kim: Yeah, we, it's two years in the making, increasing these prices.
The previous increase was the introduction of that standard
plan, which was formerly 247.
So that saw about a 33, 30 percent increase.
And plus, formerly it was 347, jumped to 597.
So, that's pretty cool.
Bigger, bigger jump over 50%.
I think if I do the math on that, and it kind of coincides with the philosophy
that you should always be experimenting with pricing, always be looking and
reevaluating against inflation against other players in the market, and
against where you really want to target and the best buyer for your product.
So it kind of was a factor of all those things and least of which was our new 3.
0 version where we pulled some of our paid products into the core plugin.
So we just made the core product itself even richer, even better to start with.
So we can dig into any of those areas, but really in the spirit of experimentation,
this is the first phase of some other pricing changes you're going to see
from us this year and next year.
Matt: The free plugin.
I can't remember, the core plugin and 29 free add ons.
Was that always the case?
The 29,
Kim: The free add ons keep increasing.
We move some out of paid tiers as they become more user friendly.
A lot of what divides what's in core and what's an add on feature for us
is how much support and developer experience and technical know how
you're going to need to use it.
So, and 29 is also because we release all of our integration plugins.
for free as much as we can and as much as possible in the WordPress.
org repository.
so it increases as we add new integrations.
the newest ones are the Google Analytics integration, which has fully commerce
tracking, and custom dimensions tracking.
So you don't have to use a product like Monster Insights for that.
And then also an integration with the Kismet to help prevent spam checkouts.
So those are two additions to that free tier.
Matt: how much of the low cost of plugins and themes is because
developers, let's face it, most of the folks who are starting these
pieces of software are developers.
There are.
They happen upon building a business, right?
Oh, that I built this thing.
It's kind of cool.
People started using it then, Oh, you should actually monetize this.
Cause that's what everyone says you should do.
And then all of a sudden they find themselves three years down the road
with a business and they're doing taxes now, and there's all kinds
of craziness running a business.
How much of it is this the low price because they're afraid to raise the price?
They they're not really they weren't really built for this and they're kind
of afraid to say oh, man Try to bring my 29 plug in to 79 now How much of it is a
fear factor or is there another element to why prices are so low in WordPress?
Kim: I think in general people peg their product against other products that
aren't necessarily related or necessarily as feature matched or feature rich.
So if we say like, oh, across the board, no one wants to pay more than
59 for a plugin, that's ridiculous.
Well, some plugins are one line of code.
And some plugins like ours are thousands of lines of code and do a lot more and
add a lot more value to the end user.
So I think they just look at what they think the, the top threshold
is that they can get someone to buy it and they stick there.
and often they're a small team.
So 59 and you get thousands of customers in a year, that's a big deal.
Really good wage for a small team or a single founder with a couple freelancers
working for them So often I think they look at it as what's sustainable for me
What do I need to make and they stop there and they just don't want to think about
it anymore I also think it takes time to get into a pricing model that will really
fit you and fit your product So early on you have no clue you put a tag on it And
if you're not looking at that every couple of weeks, every month early on, then
you're going to let that big gap go by.
And then that fear sets in because you're like, wow, it's
been this price for three years.
How can I possibly raise it double, like double people
are going to freak out on me.
when you really should have been slowly increasing it.
So you might be at triple or quadruple that initial price
a few years down the road.
Matt: Yeah, you know and I was saying this at the top of the show.
I mean streaming services This is the last this is the last service or business.
I It's the only, it's the one that really gets me when I see like
Netflix go up another dollar, Spotify go, you got, you don't need it.
I would love to know the backend margins of these streaming services, or
maybe there are, maybe they're losing money because they're plowing so much
money into the content side of it.
So we kind of win with that, I guess as consumers, but I, that's
the one that really drives me nuts.
And I think.
people who are building plugins or themes or a SaaS business
that's powering another business.
That's okay.
That one makes sense.
Raising that price makes sense.
if somebody is listening to this, they have their, their plugin business.
What was it that triggered you to say, okay, it's, it's finally time to do it.
Like, was it the economy?
Was it the inflation?
What was it that was like, okay, it's finally time three years since
we've done this, let's do it again.
What was it that really pushed it over the hump for you?
Kim: I think launching 3.
0 was like, get that out the door.
And then we'd look at things again.
And we did a lot of thinking toward the end of last year over.
Who do we really want to design this product for?
What is the direction of this product and who does it fit best?
And as much as we're fully open source, we have all of our code on GitHub.
Everything is technically free to use.
the person that we're really designing toward, the person that years from now
we'll be using our product and succeeding best with it is someone that wants to
get paid through their membership site.
It's someone that wants to invest in their business and create a
serious online membership and the online subscription portal.
and those people have money to invest in their business.
So, even though they're a DIY or they're looking at this as a
long term relationship with us.
And I think by increasing the price, we're getting more of those focused buyers on
the product rather than like the person that's just kind of considering it
and just going to disappear in a year.
a lot of our value is provided in that first year of membership.
Yep.
So when we work with you through support within three months, you
should be pretty stable and your sites launched maybe sooner than that.
and then year two is just gravy.
You're, you're iterating on your business.
You're generating your content and you're growing.
but we see a lot of people drop off on year two and a lot of it
is because their business failed.
So I think we're trying to tackle that from the front end to say,
If you're ready to invest in your business, a larger chunk of money.
And really commit to it then I think you're more successful
year two and we have less churn
Matt: I'm going to try to set the stage for this question.
It's going to be a little bit long.
So bear with me.
In the age of AI, I think investing in humans is the most important thing
somebody can do to really bring out that brand, the human in your brand.
Not saying you specifically, Kim, but for anyone listening that has a plug in
business or a theme business, whatever.
I constantly see, especially in the creator side, I made this comparison the
other day, and I don't want to put you in any hot water, especially if you have
add ons, but beehive, the email platform versus convert kit, the email platform.
I see beehive like the typical startup bros, the content that's
coming out, the brand that they, that they portray startup bros.
Look how much money we raise.
They just raised prices as well off the back of whatever, 30 million or
something like that, that they raise.
I forget what it is.
And it's this constant, like, look at us.
Securing the bag right as founders and you just know that at the end of the
day They're just gonna sell to whoever is ready to buy them for it's gonna be
their song story of a billion dollars or something Insane and congratulations to
them But the content and the connection they put out is look at us build this
platform that you all love or care about I see people perceived to love only to
get sold at the end of the day, you know, and that's what blows my mind is that
people should be investing in brands that put that customer first convert kid.
I see it much more on the creator side.
They just launched like a podcast studio that any of their customers can
use in Ohio or something like that.
Different, two different stories.
And both you and Jason have been around since the dawn of commercial plugins.
And you continue to put that customer first and foremost, back
to your thing about these customers.
We lose customers because they go up.
They, maybe they go out of business.
This membership thing was too hard.
How are you positioning to, to solve that now that you've got 3.
0 out the door and your notes, you have already working on 4.
0 in the, in progress.
How are you, Because that's a whole other animal.
How are you getting that customer first and foremost to say, we want to make you
the most successful at your membership?
How are you positioning yourself for that?
Kim: Yeah, so the the big things coming are We're definitely
focused on the front end design.
So I think that's going to support people these people are the first time often
they're creating a website and working online They get very hung up on design and
appearance of things when that's the case Misdirected what they need to be doing
is content and delivering value creating their courses and doing the things that
are going to get people to pay and keep paying them for their membership site.
I joke that like ugly websites are successful websites because a lot
of it isn't what it looks like.
It's that people are getting the value that you said you were going to provide
them to challenge that recurring fee.
So we're going to do front end work.
It's a long time coming.
we often thought, you know, themes would handle this and themes would
style forms better and themes would do this, but it's not the case.
So we're getting very opinionated.
I think you'll see in a lot of what we do, taking a lot of things in house.
we can say we integrate with all these platforms, but in reality, that's
another point of failure for people without, their own skills and developers.
So even things that we thought we would just provide working
with recapture for abandoned cart recovery, we're going to take that.
Or how can we make things like that in house because we
know that we can control it.
We know that we can make it more seamless and we don't have to
rely on the other partner to do some contribution of that code.
So I think that will just make things a lot easier for that DIY creator.
we're also looking at how our 4.
0 version could function not only as a membership and subscription platform,
but kind of as a one time payment, transactional, Purchase environment.
So we look at memberships as a subscription Platform, but we're as
integrated with gateways as WooCommerce is so if you think WooCommerce is challenging
to work with and to develop for It's even more challenging for memberships because
we have subscriptions built in but we have the ability to take one time payments,
too So a lot of our users are saying they want to be able to sell recurring
memberships but also sell one time things.
So, we're looking at that as a way for people who just don't know how to
deliver value on a recurring basis, but they can create one time info
products and still have a community and audience of members on their site.
so definitely looking at those two pieces.
And then also, because we're focused on helping people get paid, we can focus more
on, On the things that help our members get paid from their members so looking
at like I said abandoned cart recovery is one point there churn and all kinds of
things like that So helping them be more successful by avoiding shooting themselves
in the foot with rookie mistakes.
Matt: Yeah, I don't envy the position you're in having to serve
so much for a customer, right?
Cause you know, the, the seasoned WordPress person, probably the person
listening to this episode is like, Oh, it's just a membership plugin.
It's just a member.
It's just a membership plugin to you and I, who kind of know this stuff.
And we know where it slots in because we have our solutions maybe for front
end and forms and all this other stuff, but your customers come to you
and they're like, ah, I don't even.
Like, what's this WordPress thing?
They said I should use this and you have to solve for so much
theme in front end is huge.
And you guys started tackling with your own theme probably like what?
Six ish years ago, roughly.
Kim: Yeah Member Lite we've, we developed as a classic theme, it has some hybrid
theme features and now the theme landscape in WordPress is very confusing because of
site editing and full site editing block themes and all of that, so we're still
looking at that as an option, but the page builders themselves, Elementor is still
king of our user base, and I think we want to do more for Elementor for sure.
Matt: yeah.
so that was, that was going to be my next question.
Were you, are you going to get into looking at creating the,
a block theme, like full on
Kim: have one kind of in progress.
We started with Tammy Lister, Focused on that individual
creator, building community.
A lot of our users choose to use the BuddyBoss platform because the theme is so
elegant and simple, but it also comes with a lot of baggage because not everyone is
building a full community site and wants messaging and wants the directory things.
So we're trying to feel it out and feel which would be the right theme direction,
not replicating BuddyBoss's features too much, but some of the profile
pieces that people like that just make them feel like their website is more
professional, more professionally created.
Matt: Yeah.
And this is.
I mean, this is why you raise prices, right?
Because there's, there's, there's just so much under the hood.
One of the notes you have, one of the bullet points you have written
down here is being seen as expensive pricing compared to similar products.
You and Lifter LMS have, strict, do I call it strategic partnership or partners?
Kim: we, Jason and I own 50 percent of the Lifter LMS product, so
Matt: How do
Kim: in bed together.
It's for real.
Matt: It's for real, they're in bed together.
How do you differentiate yourself as you mature PMP?
Because I always saw LFTR as, the high, the lux version of LMS.
How do you, as you mature and push 3.
0 and future versions of PMP, how do you ride alongside what you all are
doing with LFTR at the same time?
Kim: That's a challenge and, and I think it's more interesting for me watching
what MemberPress is doing because they're doubling down on courses a ton.
And, and that's a historic thing.
People conflate membership and course, together.
which is confusing, I think.
Yeah.
For us as a business because we don't complete membership and course together.
It's really hard for a course A course creator to justify recurring subscriptions
You can't churn out courses all the time.
And once a course is taken it's hard to justify Why do I keep paying
you like I took all your courses?
Why am I going to keep subscribing?
So it's interesting to me to watch where member press is taking their product where
paid memberships pro is more focused on the member itself On the association the
community site which may have an aspect of e learning But not as the core delivery.
so that's an interesting thing.
Lifter's interesting too, because they don't have their repos public right now.
So they are open source, but a lot of their code is not publicly
available on GitHub the way ours is.
So I think Jason and Mai's influence has been dumped more into the core product.
Think about ways, that we can become more open source and more open, through that.
So they are one of the most expensive luxury LMS.
And it's, again, they have the very robust free open source plugin, more complete
than any others that are out there.
I think, you know, I haven't used Sensei much, but it's a
shell of what Lifter LMS does.
LearnDash has a premium only product.
So, there are other ones in the repository that are popular LMSs.
I think the most successful e learning sites, the huge e learning
sites are using Lyft or LMS or LearnDash for their products.
So yeah, I don't know.
It's interesting to be in two conversations about
pricing with two products
Matt: I was going to say, like, yeah, does it influence you at all?
Does it come into play or is it, do you just like mentioned to Chris in
like a, an executive meeting and say, Hey, like, here's the direction we're
going in, happy to see like where you go, but like, here's where we're
firmly planted in this direction.
Does it influence each other at
Kim: Very much actually.
And what's been cool is that we're able to run different experiments in different
products and get different results.
The results kind of simultaneously.
So lifter right now is running an introductory pricing, strategy.
So they are doing that 50 percent off your first year and not in the way that it's
like a FOMO, scarcity four hours left.
it's more introductory pricing.
It's we want you to choose this platform and let price not be
a barrier for you in year one.
Become successful.
We know that in year two, we'll have proven our value even more to
you and you will pay the full price on year two upgrade or renewal.
that gets a lot of flack.
Carl's, your boss at Rocket Genius, has given that form of pricing a lot of
flack, but it's something that's been really working for the Lifter product.
Because they had such a high tier, their top tier was 1, 200, for people
to get in at that price was really challenging, and a lot of the add ons
in that tier are important add ons.
ways to offer advanced quizzing formats, protecting downloads is
coming, delivering advanced, I said, quizzes, forms, custom fields,
playback on video, timing of things.
A lot of those are, are essential to a course, but it was a
prohibitively expensive price point.
So it's interesting to watch that introductory pricing.
It's something we'll probably end up doing, with Paid Memberships Pro.
Because it aligns with our mission, to help as many people as possible
get in, get on board, get set up, and start a business that's
paying their salary or more.
So, yeah, we're, they're watching, some ad, we're doing some Google Ads work.
You connected me with someone in your company to, to talk through
that, which was really helpful.
so they're watching our Google Ad, Google paid ads work, and we're just
sharing all of that back and forth.
Matt: Cool.
Yeah.
You know, I think.
As a user, you know, the other day, the fine folks at, Publish Press released
a, like a Kanban board update to their content calendar plugin, and I love it.
it makes sense, and, you know, I, I gave them just a little flack.
As an end user, there's a constant, upgrade now bar at the top of the thing.
And I totally get it, like, there's nothing wrong with it.
But as a, as a user and somebody who, who kind of like thinks about products a lot,
I like, that's fine, as long as I can dismiss it, because I feel like if I'm
using it as, number one, I feel like it just screams at me all the time, like when
I'm using it because of the color pattern.
but if I'm, if I'm putting it on a customer site, it also feels like,
Oh, you're using this thing that's constantly telling me I have to buy it.
So there's a sense of urgency.
It's just a inside baseball thing.
But from a product perspective, I like something that once I get to
a certain point, I, I can't do the thing I need to do unless I upgrade.
And that I don't mind because if I'm being successful, like looking at you
have your free plug in free core plug in.
And then if I look at the standard, I might be looking
like, oh, well, I'm finally at a point where affiliate tracking.
Yeah.
Is useful to me or membership cards.
I need that.
Or if I go into the plus plan, I can do invite only membership.
A lot of people come to the site, you know, on the, in the context
of, Oh my God, you're so expensive.
They look at it and they go five 97 a year.
I can't afford that.
Well, you don't need it yet, right?
You just don't need all these things unless you do, but
if you're just starting out.
The free one is going to do it for you.
And until you get to, okay, I finally need sponsor or group
accounts because I'm selling so much that that's finally come up.
And Oh, by the way, if you're selling a group account, five
97 for the year is probably.
What you're charging that one seat for, you know, minimally
to get access to this stuff.
So I like this, I don't need it until, until I'm like forced to get it kind
of a bad way of saying it, but I don't need it until my business is
succeeding and then I'll happily upgrade.
I think that's the smartest way to get there.
No direct question, but just more of like a statement of how I use software
and how I like it to be developed.
Kim: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of intention there.
There's, if I look at the add ons that are in standard, I think to
myself, what type of site is this?
What are they probably charging people like you said?
What are their goals?
Where are they going next?
Can they afford that?
And as long as we can justify all of that in our conversations internally,
then we can feel that the price is fair.
And the same goes for the PLUS plan.
As it becomes more expensive, the type of site at that tier is like a large
scale thousand member PLUS association.
I hope that they're making way more than 597 a year.
that that's a fraction and a no brainer to them.
Still, it should be a no brainer, for all that they're getting under one hood.
piecing things together creates a nightmare, locking yourself
into a SaaS product that's going to tax you more as you grow.
That's how all the email marketing platforms work, right?
I was so successful, my email list grew to a thousand people.
I'm paying a lot of money a month to a product like Beehive
or ConvertKit at that stage.
That's not the case with open source software.
So, we have to kind of think, who are we also competing against outside of the
WordPress space, and how do they price things, and how do they tax people or,
or increase the price as growth happens.
and, People don't realize that I think from day one, but hopefully
they, you know, five years in when they're very successful.
I hope they think back like, wow, I'm still only paying 5.
97 a year for this thing.
And I'm, we have sites making millions of dollars a year.
We can see in Stripe Connect how successful they are, and
they're not paying us any more than the site that just starting.
Matt: Let's just take an aside.
Let's define, we started to, but we kind of got away from it.
Lifter LMS, certainly in the definition, it's an LMS.
You, you want to run a course, a highly specific course certification, curriculum,
lessons, quizzes, all of that stuff.
Paid Memberships Pro can be used for memberships and it's not just
Hey, I want to sell a course.
Hey, I want to give you access to, some protected content.
How else are you seeing people use it beyond the internet marketing space?
Are other brands or things that we've never heard of
using it in a different way?
Kim: we see association type sites where it kind of picks among all of those.
professional organizations, a bar association, if you, if you could
think to that, a trade association, homebuilders of Pennsylvania.
They don't, they're not our customer, but it is an example of
a different type of membership site that's not strictly content driven.
we do have some people that are creating paid newsletters, through our system.
So that is something you can start to do now, I think, with ConvertKit,
charge for, for your newsletter.
But we often see that that's just one piece of the puzzle and there's
no home for people to come back to.
So I think.
A membership site works best when you have content that you're delivering
of different formats, and you want to protect it under one roof.
Matt: Do you have anybody, do you have anybody using it at like reselling
the membership functionality?
Kim: We do.
We have a multi site add on that lets people sell and create
a site as part of Checkout.
So, people have set it up that way that they, it's almost like a
WordPress, maintenance or hosted, managed WordPress under one hood.
So people could, buy and purchase their site at Checkout automatically
gets created for them, is one way.
We do have an affiliate program ourself.
We like that.
Better when the customer is the buyer of their own license.
So, we haven't done things like white labeling, and stuff like
that, but it's been talked about.
Matt: Yeah.
yeah, I think it's important to clarify that.
You know, the different the two different like use cases and the paths
that one can go down, and the reasons why, you know, you should use it.
I think Lifter has, I was just looking the other day.
I don't know, I think, was it like video chapters or something like that?
So if you're embedding videos, I think there's an add on to
like enhance, like video stuff.
And that's the kind of thing that I'm like, okay, this is like full blown.
Like you're teaching a course, you need all of that stuff.
That's lifter.
And then if you need the membership, for content, for recurring payments.
You don't need to be teaching somebody this in depth course that's paid
memberships pro, at least in my head.
Kim: I mean you could use the two together.
We have like a streamlined compatibility now that was something we developed.
So, people use us alongside LearnDash.
People use us alongside LifterLMS.
it's tough.
Choosing your software mix is tough.
It'll always be a problem with WordPress when it's the DIY
person searching the repository.
Reading top 10 plugins for xlists and getting really confused.
we often see people like install two membership plugins when you don't
need to like there's conflicts that people create because it's It's
hard to identify where one plug in's functionality ends and another begins.
And then we see plug ins kind of all calling themselves a membership plug in.
an example of that was the WP User Avatar that rebranded to ProfilePress
and now is a, is a membership plug in.
And, it was a largely used Avatar only plug in.
We recommended it, and then all of a sudden they were like, we want to be a
membership plug in, so we're going to add.
Call ourselves profile press and add some features in and it was
just a strange experience, but we're still seeing it happen.
Matt: Yeah.
that another great segue into another, section we can talk about consolidation
competition in the market we talked about, or you mentioned, sensei,
from automatic and automatic product.
What, what's your thoughts?
What's your feelings on competition in the space?
We just said, it's hard to pick the stack.
It can get confusing for an end user.
There's a lot of choices at the same time.
Probably not a lot of competition when you look at the real world and
you zoom out and you look at SAS marketplace or software at large.
What's your thoughts on competition?
What's your thoughts on competition from the mothership?
How do you think about it now versus maybe when, you know, 10 years ago
when the market was like super hot and everyone was launching something
every other day, do you have a shift?
Do you feel much more grounded these days?
Do you feel much more confident, in where your position is?
Kim: I, I think I don't, I, I think, it's, it's a challenge to
understand where automatic is going, where, you know, this whole move
toward agency stuff is, is curious.
Um, I think it's, it's a challenge to understand where, you know, this whole
move toward agency stuff is, is curious.
Growing to something more and it feels like something that gets started
and then kind of punted to be looked at later, which is interesting.
I, I then the whole, like, if you got me onto the wordpress.
com wordpress.
org plugins listings thing, I think that has created confusion for users.
we saw that conversation about search ranking and seeing.
com results come up, they're still coming up for me before.
org rankings, which.
is I don't know.
It's gonna keep happening.
So, I guess I'm, we're starting to look outside of WordPress and the
competition within WordPress and look, like you said, look outside
to the grander scale of things.
I don't know.
Matt: The,
Kim: be nice when you look at like a product like WooCommerce, it was
just right time for it to become the e commerce platform for WordPress.
And now there is no one.
Membership plugin for WordPress and, and who can make that decision?
Who can make that call?
It's really a challenge.
There are enough users for all of us to go around.
I don't think a membership plugin will ever reach the
scale of WooCommerce itself.
Matt: Yeah, there's a, an interesting thing happening in
the, in the podcasting world.
Cause I world, cause I follow that still really closely, for obvious
reasons, but I, I also really just like, I love open source for WordPress.
I love open source for podcasting.
I think the two are very important for humanity.
but Spotify, they acquired anchor many, many years ago.
and they've, and then they rolled that into what they called Spotify
for podcasters, where you could go and record your podcast,
just like you could with anchor.
With Spotify and they just killed that off.
So now the industry is like.
Cause that was like the automatic solution, right?
That might be, that might have been like the sensei in the LMS world.
Like, Oh yeah, it's, it helps you create a membership, but it's nowhere
near what you're going to do with paid memberships pro or lift their LMS.
And certainly nowhere near if you combine the two.
So it was always largely looked at like, ah, yeah, I did this thing.
60 percent of like what other podcast hosting companies could do.
And then you have all the different fragmentation of podcast hosting
companies, largely just doing RSS feeds, but there's, there's, there's They
all have like their little accessory features that go alongside of it.
So the experience is, is different.
but now the industry is like, who the hell is going to take over?
Like the, the free version of, of podcasting, because that was as much
as everybody, you know, railed against Spotify and what they were doing with
podcasting and trying to own podcasting.
That was also a huge on ramp for like amateur podcasters to be like, okay,
this thing's free and I can record here.
And that got people into the space.
Sort of like what Automatic could, should do, right?
It'd be like, oh yeah, we'll help you get in.
And then, by the way, here's paid memberships pro when
you want to go up, right?
When you want to move up.
so now the, the podcast world is, is in a bit of like, what, what, what is going to
happen now that the free thing is gone?
That we, that we all kind of needed.
you know, and, and I see it with Automatic, with the agency stuff.
Yes.
One of those things too, where I was like, For years, why doesn't Automatic
in WordPress work more with us, right?
We're the ones building it, but now that they have that suite of, of
plugins, you know, you can probably assume that if they're walking into
an agency, they're gonna be like WooCommerce, Lifter, like these are the,
Jetpack, these are the things you'll, yeah, Sensei, I said Lifter, Sensei,
Jetpack, these are the things you're gonna use, and now that becomes, all
right, well, that's a little scary.
For us indies that are out there.
you know,
Kim: with the awesome motive products, you know the incest of recommending each
one to each other, you know, it's like um
Matt: Can that be the
Kim: okay.
I get it.
I totally get it, you know And stellar and and the liquid web brands like I
totally get it It's just it's where we are now And I think it took it took
me a while to wake up and see it and now that I do I think my relationship
To WordPress itself is changing.
And I'm, you know, I'm like, now we're business people.
We're not open source community people hanging out in the hallway, you know?
And that's okay.
It took, we had to get here.
It's an evolution and may swing back.
We don't know.
I don't know.
Matt: So how does that change your, how does that change your perspective?
This recent article from, make or blog posts from the make team talking
about the decline in, WordPress events, fewer and fewer unique users.
How do you see yourself connecting with the community that, you know,
like you said, we used to all just be in the hallway together hanging out,
but now things are getting a little bit more serious again, consolidation.
Maybe less competition.
So now we all have to.
Start getting a little bit more serious with this stuff.
How does that change your perspective?
Like, do you, do you feel different going to those events?
Do you think like now you kind of step outside the WordPress world
and go to like other events or do other marketing initiatives that
aren't traditional to WordPress without giving away the secret sauce?
Kim: I think that would be, we are looking at other events to attend and.
Sponsor.
We're looking outside of sponsoring WordPress events themselves
and, and looking at, you know, other places where people that
use our product are hanging out.
you joke a lot about the size of the WordPress news audience, and it's a finite
group of people that care and want to listen to and consume what you're doing.
I think the same is true within the community.
If they don't know about Paid Memberships Pro yet, that's okay.
I don't think that they're out there building membership plugins,
or building membership sites.
So does it make sense for us to always be a part of this anymore?
I don't know.
I think I'm getting to a place where maybe I bring a tinge of bitterness that the
newer entrants to the WordPress community don't need to hear or be a part of.
And I'm, there is a youth in WordPress.
There is a growing number of people.
I'm in my 40s.
There's people in their 20s that show their enthusiasm In more
ways than I can today provide.
when I look at international camps and, you know, in Asia, the vibrant communities
there, I think it used to, it's migrated.
We used to have this young WordPress community in the United States.
I don't think we're here anymore.
I think we're more international and that's good.
That's like another evolution that I'm happy to see happening.
And it doesn't necessarily include me or disclude me.
I can participate it at will when I want.
And I can step back too and let the.
The new generation not be tainted by my bitterness, right?
Matt: You know, I, at the beginning of the year, I, speculated that
we would see a new entrant into the, into the WordPress community
and those that are non developers.
And just so happened, this kid, young kid named Mark Zemanski fell into the WP
minute, Slack, and he was a, he's a guy that started in WordPress with Elementor,
I don't know, five or six years ago.
he live streams a lot.
He let you co host with me at work.
We'll be live streaming, actually think tomorrow or the next day.
And, he's a guy who came in never cracking open a code editor, didn't have to, you
know, edit functions, PHP, like you and I had to do, or probably still have to
do on some of our sites, never even saw that and just came in through Elementor.
Now he's a, he's using, he's using bricks and I know there's a lot of fan
favorites in the, in the page builder world, but there's like this reality that.
You know, just like when our parents or grandparents used to say, like, I
used to walk to school, like, well, we don't need to walk to school anymore.
Right?
And there's these users that are like, I don't need to write code.
I don't want to, like, I want to enjoy using WordPress.
Just let me enjoy using WordPress.
Isn't that half the battle?
Yes.
So just let me use my element or my bricks or my beaver builder, whatever.
And let me just do my thing without having to do it the hard way.
And I think that's a reality.
That's what Gutenberg and site editor as much as we're using.
Pulling our hair out about it at some levels.
That's what that's getting to in a slow, tires tirelessly aggravating pace.
but that's what people want, man.
And we just have to embrace it and, and work with it because I think,
like you said before, when you see Elementor, Just by the numbers.
Everyone's using it.
You go.
That's what the market wants.
So I'm going to support it.
I'm sorry It's business and this is how we're gonna work So again, yeah 100
percent I agree with you There's this whole new wave of people coming in that
are experiencing WordPress for the first time and they're not doing it like you and
I used to do it, but so what we can we can help them right and we can share with them
Like the most positive side of it, which is the open source side of it to a degree.
Kim: Yeah, I mean Speaking of page builders chris badgett's wife built
a website and from the from start used the site editor used The block
editor and chris observed her having zero friction Building her website and
it looks great and it does what she wants and she's capable of editing it
and she's not afraid and that's the experience that we're not having because
we've had to like learn something new and change is hard and You know, it,
it happened without our input, you know, all, all of these things that we.
We as I say we like you and I and people who have been in WordPress
for 15 18 years are feeling about the direction It's not what's the end user
like Mark or Sam are experiencing.
So we have to just accept that that's okay
Matt: Yeah You DHH from Basecamp or 37 signals.
I forget what they call themselves now.
He put out a pretty good piece, whether you like the guy or not, but he put out
a good thing, a good piece about open source and pretty much says like it's
open source, it doesn't mean that you have a say in, in absolutely everything
or the, or the complete direction.
And I agree with that.
And I, I'm still struggling, still wrestling.
Cause I have this debate with Mark all the time.
I'm still wrestling with.
How to portray this without sounding, too, commercial, it's not that even the right
word, but it's almost like, I love word.
I love WordPress because it's open source and I love open source because
we, we, we can have a say in it.
It doesn't mean that we'll get accepted.
So on one hand, I love the fact that I, I can have a say in it.
The other hand, I know that I'm not going to obviously get everything
that I can, that I'm asking for.
But at the same time, I'm not ultra worried about.
Like the automatic mothership thing, because at the same time, like I'm reaping
the benefits from open source as well.
So it's almost like respect, open source, take from open source
and give back to open source.
I'm like at this like trifecta thing right now where like, you can, you
can still reap the benefits from it.
It's, it's okay.
But as long as you respect it and give back at some capacity and then
take Stuff away from it, which a lot of us do like we're selling websites.
We're selling plugins.
We are gaining from it You know, but we just can't have everything.
I don't know at the end of the day It's this weird thing that we're at.
Kim: I I think to peace with that is necessary, and, and something I think
Jason struggles with, when he, he feels like sensitive about it, and he gets
emotional about it, and it's good, he should, and in our kitchen we have, you
know, conversations that are hard, and it's somewhat sad, and it's interesting,
and he'll, he'll want to go public with things, and, and post things on Twitter,
and I'm very much like, You know, no, I think it was Eric who posted recently on
the WP minute site Like that this like clickbait and this like needing to be
outraged like it just has to end From the bigger voices in the wordpress space The
negative criticism like let's just like tone it down a little, you know Accept
where things are and the direction they're going or stake a, put a stake in the
line of the sand and go change something.
Like you can hook into WordPress in so many ways.
Most of what you're upset about can probably be fixed
with your own custom code.
And if enough people come along board with you, then maybe it
becomes part of core eventually.
Like that's what you said.
That's the beauty of it.
Take what you want from it.
Build off of it.
It, it's yours to do that with.
sitting around feeling sad and sour grapes is, is not where you should be.
That's a sick way to live.
Matt: and it's hard because we're probably I mean product
space is super opinionated Right.
And then you mix in social media and it's like, we're all
building products to some degree.
Like we're all branding, marketing, building a product.
So it's very easy for, you know, I say a lot of us, but a hundred, a hundred
ish people who actually like jump in and say things, you know, on Twitter.
it's very easy for us, you know, to do that, because we, you know, we
are very opinionated, but I think we're at it's such a monolithic
piece of software and community community now.
It would really take something massive in order for people to really revolt, right?
People revolting about, you know, how the Gutenberg block sidebar hides
the typography unless you expand it.
Like, why isn't that just open all the time, right?
But you can't, we're not going to win those arguments and that's not the thing
that you're going to just like die on a hill for, you know, eventually it's
going to get fixed, you know, it will.
So just like, let's all just move on.
And I think it would take something massive.
It would have to be something massive.
And that is the safe, that would be the safeguards of open source at that point.
I don't know what that massive thing is.
I have no idea.
It would have to be like open AI, like an open AI integration into
core WordPress where you'd be like, wait a minute, what the hell is this?
You know, I, I don't want this in my, in my WordPress or it'd have to
be something massive to really have.
People stand up and revolt or change things in WordPress.
So the little stuff
Kim: I mean, from the hosts and the products, the users, every
angle has people championing and, and pushing it forward.
not just the project itself.
So, yeah, I agree with you.
Matt: did you have anybody complain about price increase when you raised it?
Kim: One person email we well, this is the graceful way to increase prices.
Here you go the 30 second pitch we email people in advance.
We let them know the date that it's happening.
We honor legacy prices We sometimes run a sale But this time we didn't to get people
in as if they can at the current price Before the prices go up and if people ask
later, we usually give them the old price So those are just like the most graceful
way to increase prices Go to sleep at night without feeling like an ass.
so some one person emailed and said you highly overestimate the value of your
product one person And I was like, I think we highly underestimate it, you know, i'm
thinking we didn't write them back We just let them their email go into the trash,
you know, so no not so far there's always a lull after a price increase and a lot of
that is just like The way people buy and the way people make software decisions.
So, sure there's people that come to the site, see the price,
check out, immediately go.
A lot of people begin at the free level, 10 percent of them upgrade to a paid plan.
I think it's about 50 50 whether people buy just outright or
sign up for the free first.
those are weird numbers that don't make sense in the way that I told them.
but there is always a lull because a lot of people are
making these decisions slowly.
They might have, other stakeholders involved that they're getting on board.
So if two weeks ago they went to the pricing page and they were one price, and
they come back to buy, it's different.
They begin those conversations.
They begin that mental wrestling again.
So there's always a lull right after.
It's about a week long.
We're not even.
A week out.
We're almost at a week from, from it, having done it.
So, we'll see long term if we stay at this price and how long we
stay here, but, no major pushback.
I'll say just the, the fear and uncertainty that me and
Jason have after doing it.
Matt: yeah, yeah, yeah.
Do you, do you, have you both identified a seasonality to the business?
I mean, you guys have been at it for a while.
I don't know if you've seen a significant pattern, holidays, new year, summertime.
Kim: It gets quiet after Black Friday, which is a natural time.
May is usually slow.
we've insulated ourself from seasonality by running seasonal sales, which we
have some articles on our site about.
but we're stopping all sales until Black Friday, unless things go terribly wrong.
But, we have enough recurring revenue to, to keep the cash flow fine.
But, we, we would use those sales to perk up quiet months that we
saw in the year pre, previous.
So it's pretty regular now, except for that outsized November.
I don't know.
I guess when you're an international, serve an international audience,
seasonality isn't as big of a thing.
Do you see it at your, at your company?
Are you into the numbers?
Do they let you see that stuff?
Matt: No, I don't see.
Kim: Okay.
Matt: Guy with microphone does not get access to,
Kim: Reports.
Matt: reports.
but no, I mean, I know about, I've only been there just over a year, but
obviously Black Friday is massive.
that I know.
but I don't, I'm not privy to any of the sales logs or anything like that.
He would show me if I asked, but I don't, I don't want to know.
I don't want to slip up if I ever get captured, by some other form company.
I don't want to be the guy that knows any information.
you have this bullet point on the, on the end of your document.
By the way, if you don't mind, I'll copy and paste this into the show
notes because I think there's a lot of other great takeaways here.
but planning ahead for introductory pricing.
let's break this down.
Avoid the always on sale look, which I think you just mentioned.
Avoid the always on sale look for false, scarcity.
is that something that you, You tried and that's basically like first year 97
and then next year is one 97 customers.
Like what the hell just happened?
I thought it was 97.
is that your take on false scarcity?
Kim: Yeah.
The false scarcity to me is the, the countdown timers.
Matt: Oh, okay.
Got it.
Kim: like
Matt: Get it before it
Kim: FOMO and creating the, the need to buy now that we
know isn't real, but it works.
And.
You know, we see it slapped on a lot of products that get acquired
and and it must be working right?
But we are going to try an introductory pricing at some point.
That's what lifter is doing right now.
We used to be more expensive the first year and cheaper the second and we went to
the same price every year, as, as well as your first year, so now we're going to try
the inverse, less your first year, more in the second, and that's just that alignment
to letting people get in who need it and can't yet afford it, who are just starting
out, and that's what our mission is aimed at, so the people that want to grow, and
in year two, they should have proven And they should be grown enough to justify
the full price renewal of the product.
So it'll be curious to try it.
It's an experiment we haven't done.
And why not try them all?
Matt: And that's where you have, you have step one, get people started for free,
which is obviously your free plugin.
Step two, make it as inexpensive as possible for people to get support plus
additional add ons and aimed at growth.
And you feel like.
Where you're at now with that pricing, that's you've accomplished step two.
And then step three, charge them full price once they have proven their model.
And that's, is that your, is that the, 597 a year plan?
Or are you just saying, Oh, look, now that they're here, we're just
going to charge them full price.
So are you, are you going to change the price again?
Is that what you're
Kim: I don't think we're doing it until January next year is where we're thinking.
We'll get through one full year of these full price prices.
And then in January of next year, consider a first year, 170, what is it?
172.
50 or something.
I don't know.
Doing the math.
Knocking them half price first year and then bump up.
Yeah, we'll try it.
We'll see.
There's lots of ways I mean we have never
Matt: for the listener, for the listener, you can't see Kim, but
she's actively thinking about it and
Kim: I know i'm like It's good.
I it's always on our minds to to look at it again to reevaluate it a
lot of places do like an extensions model in it and add ons model.
It's not one we've considered trying But who knows we are going to start
selling like add on license keys, which we haven't in the past offered
We've just been like buy another plan
Matt: because Chris
Kim: different email
Matt: Right.
Chris does that you can get, you can get, and he has, does he
have, obviously he has success
Kim: he does the ala carte, or bundled options.
He also does lifetime deals.
That's something we haven't done But I think for black friday,
we're going to consider doing one.
Matt: Mm hmm.
Kim: I don't know You We don't know.
You never know until you try it, and then you, you know better for what
you can try again in the future.
Matt: Last question.
I want to talk about this enterprise plan.
Mm hmm.
Talking about that, how did you come about to the 5, 000 plus price tag?
do you get a lot of enterprise inquiries?
Do you ever move anyone into enterprise?
You say, hey, look, you're on this plus plan, you're doing this thing.
Let's just move over to enterprise.
How does that look to you?
Because that could be a, a massive driver, for the business, revenue wise.
Kim: Yeah, we, it's mostly a, a way to open conversations, and it largely turns
out that they aren't, An enterprise customer, largely their agency's
speculating on whether they take PaytonMembershipsPro as the membership
plugin they only use and install.
And in those cases, it makes more sense for them to either be an affiliate
or to pass on a discount and let their customers sign up directly.
It's really hairy when, developers own the license for people's sites.
Unless they have had like established long term business together.
It it's hard for me to recommend that.
as interesting as that is, it does serve as a decoy price and maybe
becomes a lifetime deal in time.
but it exists to say like, yes, we can be used on large scale associations.
You know, then an enlisted association of the national guard uses paid
memberships pro across all of its member states, they don't pay us 5, 000.
They pay one of our developer partners to maintain.
Their websites and their, their things, and they pay for a subscription for
their license keys individually.
so it, it really is a conversation to say, what are you doing
with paid memberships pro?
Oh, you're really an agency.
Should people be buying their own licenses?
Should you just start buying a la carte licenses and what would that look like?
I can't talk about it yet, but there is a dominant, predominant, well
known, WordPress agency that's going to use Paid Memberships Pro and was
otherwise considering building in house.
And they were like, are we an agency?
I was like, are you going to support this customer?
Yes.
They just need a license and let them use it.
So, I love having those conversations because it's, it's where we
learn about the really cool implementations of our product.
Matt: Yeah.
I mean, and again, for, for those listening and hearing enterprise 5, 000
plus, like if you're a plugin developer, I can absolutely tell you that is the bare
minimum price for, as somebody who worked at, Pagely before they were purchased
by GoDaddy and got a lot of experience.
I mean, I got some experience in enterprise at my agency, but certainly
at Pagely, it was all, that was all I was selling into was the enterprise.
minimum plan was 5, 000 a year because every single purchase was,
Oh, marketing person at some company.
Oh yeah.
I love it.
Want to buy it?
Okay.
How much is it?
And you're just like, you're talking to them and they're like, okay, yep.
Okay.
Sounds great.
And then.
They're like, we'll, we'll, we'll buy it.
I'll send another email like next week or whatever.
And then that email next week is the legal team.
It's the I.
T.
team that wants you to pass, some kind of like security sanity check and
you're filling out Excel spreadsheets and you're like, what the hell is this?
and I think that every plugin touch something in enterprise should have
this reserved enterprise price.
Even if you're not, Advertising it, you just have it because you're not going to
want to go through all this other stuff.
And you actually might lose some, like, if, if you find it interesting,
you might lose business if you don't have that kind of solution advertised.
Cause they might, because sometimes even at five 97 a
year, an enterprise is just like.
They find that in the loose change drawer.
Like that's nothing, right?
500 nights, they won't even work with you,
Kim: Yeah.
I mean, at the.
Matt: bigger.
Kim: Outside of the WordPress space, the products we compete
with are 100, 000 plus a year
Matt: yeah.
Easy.
Kim: hosted software solutions and people dislike them and migrate to us
because they're just outdated dinosaur products, you know, and, and they don't
work the way that they need and they're not extendable, but without a price
like that on the, on the table, it's not obvious that this product is for them,
you know, When they see 597 DIY, get it, do it yourself, they're like, Oh,
you couldn't possibly manage my thousand member organization, Chamber of Commerce.
Like, yes, we can.
You know, our site has 160, 000 members.
You can, we can manage your thousand member Chamber of Commerce.
it's just, it, it's hard for people to say, see that an open source product
and something WordPress on a blogging platform could, could batch something
that would be in those six figures plus.
Matt: I said last question, but I want to hit this one last
bullet point, on your list.
you have Jason's sabbatical, sabbatical, and Kim plus David's
brutal push for beta release.
So, I can't let you go without explaining Jason out sipping cocktails, while you
and David are brutally pushing for a
Kim: Yeah, so I, you know, I'm the get shit done person in our group.
team, and, and Jason gets a lot of stuff started, and he thinks about
things, and he thinks about new things, and he starts things, and
I'm just like, why isn't this out?
Why isn't this launched?
You know, clean this up, fix this, get this done.
So it was an interesting time.
Jason went on sabbatical at the mid November, early November
through the end of 2023.
he actually was not sipping cocktails maybe some nights, but he just took
his time to read books and heal.
I think he was really getting burned out.
At the end of 2023.
and we had been developing 3.
0 for over three years.
The first commit was like June, 2021 or something.
It was like, no, it had to have been earlier than that.
I don't know.
I can get you the real date.
And I took that time to work with our lead developer and just say like, what's in,
what's out, what do we have to get done?
And we just, by the end of, even before Jason's sabbatical, mid December,
we had a working beta version of 3.
0 to share with our community.
Of people and it was Just really fast decision making, really fast
code review between David and I.
I would do a PR, he would approve it and merge it within minutes.
I would say, it's up, it's ready to go.
and we just kind of got really hyperactive on it and, and we
got a beta release out the door.
So that was a fun time for me to work that closely with David because
I didn't really in my day to day.
So I just moved aside all my marketing tasks and focused on
my development tasks in the team.
So it was good.
It was like.
Jason's not here.
We can make the decisions.
And that came up a lot.
But when he came back, he said everything in right that it would have
been in the way that he wanted to.
But it was grateful that he didn't have to go through that period with us, I
Matt: Yeah, yeah, sure.
paid memberships pro.
com.
You can check out the new pricing live.
Don't complain about it.
It's there.
It's 347 for the year.
And look, like I said, so many of us can use it for free.
It's a fantastic plugin.
Been in business now
Kim: 13 years.
July 5th, I think, is our, is 13 year birthday.
Yeah,
Matt: that's fantastic.
Kudos to you and, the team for surviving this long.
It's, it's, your praises are not sung enough, in the, in the WordPress world
for, for meeting the decade mark alone is, is something that I think we should
all celebrate more across the community.
Paidmembershipspro.
com, Kim Coleman, where else can they go to say thanks?
Do you have any other socials that you want them to go to?
Kim: I always forget what my ex account is.
ColemanK83, I don't know.
I'm on it less and less lately.
Election year's got to tune that thing out.
Matt: Oh yeah, you're gonna
Kim: yeah.
Just come to PeytonReichesPro.
com.
Complain about the price.
Go ahead.
I don't care.
Matt: Send all complaints, paymembershippro.
com.
Thanks, Kim.
Thanks for hanging out today.
Kim: You got it.