The biggest issue I have with the game is that the art design is really bad, it’s as if the game designer had provisioned multiple artists and had a deadline of 2 weeks. I’m serious AF when I say this. I thought the design was intentional , i.e. retro cheesy science mix, but after our first game I noticed a lot of layout errors that would be caught during review. If you have TM a good example of this is the margin spacing on the instructional cards (which is inconsistent between cards and left/right of some cards).

Speaking of instructions — I want to applaud the person that can read the guide and fully understand how the game works without any help (YouTube or friends). The guidebook needs a re-write with an easier way to reference common mechanics of the game.

It just seems to me that the overall quality wasn’t a priority for the release, almost as if this was a beta testers edition to test the mechanics.

The play mats (and the cards) are fairly low quality glossy paper, and any slight bump of the table or the play mats you’ll be asking to yourself “where were these cubes exactly?”. It’s no wonder I see a lot of alternative play mats for TM.

Again, the vibe of Terraforming Mars is a beta release stands out as soon as you open the box. Everything is simply thrown in baggies, there are no dividers. With this game having tons of cards the expectation is at least a card tray in the box. It’s no wonder (again) there are a lot of organizers for TM.

I know, I know, this is all superficial and that’s why with all these quality issues I still see it being an excellent game. One that I highly recommend playing.

I’d recommend when playing drafting process for selecting project cards, it’s going to add some time but it will prevent the game from titling in a players direction based on a random draw. That said it has a trade-off of extending the game time, especially if you have slower players, so ‍

After playing for a bit you will notice how well thought out everything is; which allows for you as a player to be fully engrossed in terraforming mars.

A Chart…

I’m going to be referring to the chart below, so analyze it and pick it apart. I also understand if it’s your TL;DR synopsis and you don’t read anything else, sorry to bore ya.

As you can see I haven’t shared $$ numbers [insert unwarranted apology for those upset]; I simply don’t feel comfortable sharing Sprout Apps revenue, a small part of that hesitation is competition anxiety, but it’s simply a personal preference not to share income[ref]More than simply saying “My business supports my family and lifestyle…”.[/ref]. That said, don’t be distracted by the mystery, plug-in your own financial “Nut” and “Goal” (after expenses), and continue reading…

Early days…

Keep in mind that Sprout Invoices started development late June of that same year, and during that time I wasn’t doing much contract work. In early June I decided to go all in and build my own plugin, I had already ran a successful plugin business for years (as a client project), and I thought I knew how the business should/could be run from top/bottom. My concept of “going all in” was to not moonlight the product while I worked on services during the day, it was to quit accepting projects so I could spend at least 80% of my work day on this new product. Admittedly I was very lucky[ref]This isn’t the only luck I’ve had.[/ref] to have the financial security to do this, since I had saved a lot during the first 5+ years of Sprout Venture and my wife is unsurprisingly supportive.

The plan had a six month term; get the product out early August and if the sales can support my family (i.e. Nut line) than I’d continue it, if not I’d push it to the side and go back to client work.

That first six months of Sprout Invoices was brutal. I released late. I had the unrealistic notion that selling a plugin that people wanted was easy, and consumer confidence (i.e. credibility) had nothing to do with it. My view of the landscape was: if it’s the better product than that other crap people will buy it.

I knew early I wasn’t going to hit my goal in January, the ~six month timeline, even though I waited until the end of January to make a decision. My hope was that people wanted to change their invoicing software early in the year and the growth I saw in December would translate to an awesome January. It was not awesome, my plan called for quitting.

Nuts…

I was crazy though, and I didn’t quit (obviously).

What changed my mind/plan was reading/hearing encouraging stories from other product business owners, especially James Laws Ninja Forms journey [ref]I tried finding the original article I read but can’t find it.[/ref]. Thank you WP Biz Community.

I can credit Pressnomics (held in January) for helping SA tremendously. That conference did a number on me that year. It was a conference that revitalized me (more than those encouraging stories) and taught me how to properly market[ref]Even though I still have a lot to learn[/ref]. Thank you Strebel family (and friends).

Those things I learned at Pressnomics immediately paid off in February. Although I had some yo-yo months, one month of exceptional growth (e.g. February) followed by a down-turn (e.g. March), it was bit maddening to see those down months. Retrospectively looking at those down months wasn’t a big deal but they were, I was working so hard to get to that goal of financial security. Especially since I felt as though I was pillaging my savings every month.

I didn’t lose sight of the trend, and I after an awesome December I finally felt confident that I had a business — 18 months after starting it. “Business” defined by me was not having to dip into saving anymore and I could say that Sprout Apps was “finally  profitable”[ref]Since it could pay my full salary[/ref].

I hit my “Nut”, gosh I regret a lot in life and not using a different term is one of them, but the chart is done so I digress.

Financial security…

As you can see from the chart above my trend line has finally hit my monthly goal[ref]Confident in the trend despite the steep declines. The steep decline in July can be attributed the review issues in .org, May’s is attributed to a bug in my email marketing and from what I heard May was a down month for a lot of other product businesses.[/ref]. This is the sweet-spot I wrote about earlier, and it took a long time to get here.

Now I get to pay off that money I used in my business savings for this venture, slowly building financial security for the next opportunity. Hopefully Sprout Apps lasts long enough for that next fork of my business. [shrug emoji]

Recipe for disaster…

I don’t recommend my process, there’s a reason people moonlight their products and proving there’s a business before jumping in. Although, for me personally I don’t think I could have built Sprout Apps without the commitment I had, regardless of it being an obligation at times.

Admittedly this journey would be a disaster without a lot of luck and persistence…but I find luck with my persistence, so maybe you can too.

Cheers!

1. I don’t have a goal for “$15k a month” because I don’t have a plan at the moment to get there…
2. …at the moment I’m fine tuning my business process in order to continue to grow at 15-20% without having to put in 15-20% more work. In fact I want to decrease my workload and continue a stable business. If I end up having to work really hard later because I took my “foot off the gas” than so-be-it.

Yes, in the beginning I had aspirations to earn enough to hire a developer and some other support folks, allowing me to build the business into something more than WordPress. However that all changed after my first year of doing Sprout Apps; since that first year was an arduous battle (struggling to continue, & losing money); my outlook/perspective on the business changed, I learned something — there’s a sweet-spot.

The sweet spot (to me) is continually hitting the monthly financial goal while reducing workload[ref]I love being a father and husband — it’s my priority. Reducing my work week to spend more time with them is simply proving my priorities.[/ref].

My Goal:

My financial goal is about 35% over my nut (AKA the amount I need to make before I tap into savings to pay the bills). The majority of the 35% (~75%) is used for business savings — since I depleted most of it in the first year of Sprout Apps.

aside: if you’re running any type of business (i.e. product or services) start saving, get a rainy day fund of 1.5 years. The only reason I was able to build Sprout Apps, without spending a lot more time moonlighting on the product, was because of this savings strategy.

The rest of that 35% is added to our personal savings, so we can take awesome family vacations (like Europe this last summer)[ref]If you haven’t heard this before: buy memories, not stuff.[/ref]

A Chart with some history

I’m going to talk about this chart in more detail in a soon to be published post. A short overview for this the sake of this post would be:

The first six months of Sprout Invoices was brutal, and my trend line has finally hit my monthly goal.

Guarding the Goal

I expect over the next 6-8 months to be rather difficult. The business took a hit in July (review-gate) and after expanding some marketing efforts (i.e PPC) the big June hasn’t been reproducible. Sprout Invoices and Sprout Clients have features coming that will not be easy to develop and will take months, all while daily support increases. However if this trend line continues, I’ll be able to hire some help (without slumping below the net goal).

All That Said…

I’m extremely lucky, seriously. I have a supportive wife/friend that pushes me to pursue growth, personally and professionally. She’s the reason I was able to quite my job 8 years ago, and without her trust over two years ago I couldn’t have pursued this business.

My true “sweet spot” is being able to have a business that supports our family, and providing me the time to spend with them.

Hopefully it’s a place I can stay for a while.

I survived and the episode was recently published, so go check it out (and the many other great interviews).

Our conversation was wonderful, it really was. Even though I was still a little sick, which is why my voice is so rugged, and I found myself lost without an answer (remember I wasn’t feeling good), I think our conversation could end up being beneficial to a few of his listeners.

Here are some notes:

• Matt’s intro is awesome and I’m not offended at all. A “blue collar” WP product guy is right on: I worked hard to get to the point were I have a business that provides for my family, and I don’t have those world domination goals that the opportunists bring with them when building a product business using WP as act one.
• I did make $6k in that first calendar year of Sprout Apps. It was rough, and in the beginning of 2015 I was very close of giving up until I read this post from James Laws at Ninja Forms. There was another blog post and some conversations about the early day struggles of WP product businesses…anyway, I was able to learn from others that if I wanted to make Sprout Apps succeed I needed persistence.
• Matt talks about intimidation factor by hearing about the successful folks in WordPress a lot…then I reiterate what he says as if I wasn’t listening. Which is sorta ironic because I talk about mixed messages…haha, hey I was sick!
• I threw out arbitrary numbers of for my goals, I don’t have a goal for “$15k a month” because I don’t have a plan at the moment to get there…
• …at the moment I’m fine tuning my business process in order to continue to grow at 15-20% without having to put in 15-20% more work. In fact I want to decrease my workload and continue a stable business. If I end up having to work really hard later because I took my “foot off the gas” than so-be-it.
• I wrote about the “review gate” stuff here. I don’t want to rehash that debate, I only brought it up to show how something like this affected me personally rather than it affecting only my business.
• I wrote about the Freshbooks squatting on “Sprout Invoices” here. It’s a better read than a listen, since I was obviously was unprepared to talk about it clearly.
• Here’s a email marketing blog post, which has more detail than what I talked about.
• I briefly forget what content marketing was until…yeah, thanks for listening this far into the show. Oh and I said, “I know…I think” while talking about something.
• My multi-pronged marketing approach: WP.org (free download marketing), e-mail marketing, (very little) affiliate marketing.
• I was asked about content marketing and I meandered into how I do email marketing, so I never really answered the original question. The point is that I don’t do content email marketing to I grow a subscriber list. I only do email marketing to convert.
• My method to convert (via email marketing) is starting to create a conversation, with a basic promotion or asking them how I can help.

Thanks Matt for the opportunity!

A couple months ago (June ’16) it was brought to my attention that Freshbooks was squatting on the term “Sprout Invoices” on Google, which is perfectly fine although this wasn’t.

Not cool dudes!

The resolution was to go through the process of a trademark claim, which took about a month to process. The sad thing is I had to reach out to Google again about this particular ad, I guess they don’t retroactively remove ads, which is a shame.

Today the ad is gone…now Freshbooks is outbidding me for “Sprout Invoices” — which is flattering.

Be warned: while I like numbers, statistics isn’t a strong area of mine; and while I tried to be objective about these numbers it’s sorta impossible when my intent is to prove a point.  So take the data that you can find on the stat’s page of Sprout Invoices (and any others) and let me know what I got wrong/right, I don’t mind.

Question 1: Do negative reviews (sub 2.5 stars) affect download counts?

On June 28th and 29th SI had a rating average of 2.2: downloads counts for those two days were down ~30 & ~18% respectively.

Notes:

• I used another invoicing plugin in the .org repo to act as a control. So that the decrease could be applied to a WordPress user deciding to download X instead of Y based on the difference in reviews.
  • The numbers show that the percentage of downloads decreased for SI while the percentage of downloads increasing for the other plugin. The trend line looks like an x, displacing downloads from one to the other and the assumptive cause is the reviews.
• I understand this is an extremely short sample size and since SI received a single positive review on the 1st of July I can’t extend this any further.

I’m fairly confident that the answer is “yes”, that’s a no brainer. However, I don’t feel confident providing a percentage, other than to say it must be more than the percentage decreased based on the second question…

Question 2: Do more positive reviews affect download rates?

Since the 28th (until yesterday) I’m finding a 15% decrease in downloads.

Again, this is controlled by the average download count[ref]Adjusted for releases and balanced for anomalies in total download counts for the day[/ref] that uses a similar plugin to see if the downloads went to the plugin with more or less positive reviews. In this case SI had one single 5 star review, the other had on average 26 reviews with a 4.9 rated average.

Question 3: Does it matter if you’re selling premium upgrades?

At this point, I don’t know. In order to draw any conclusions I’d first need to know the time it takes for a free user to convert to the paid version, and I’m not going research that anytime soon. More importantly, the data set would need to be large enough to create a median so that poor/good conversion rates don’t skew the results.

Last week I received an email from the WordPress.org plugin review team that Sprout Invoices “has been found to be in violation of the repository guidelines, found at https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-org/detailed-plugin-guidelines/“.

Turns out this was the issue:

What did .org do?

Since I was accused of compensating reviews through “bribery”: Sprout Invoices was immediately pulled out of the repo until that link (and the page at the other end of “send us the link”) were removed.

Also all 5-star reviews were deleted; all of them…

“The reviews that have been associated with this method have been removed from the system in order to restore equilibrium to the reviews.”

Was I compensating reviewers?

Obviously yes; through a discount of a pro license, I figured it was alright to compensate their time.

 Was it “Bribery” or did I “Pay Reviewers”? Why does that distinction matter?

In no way was this “bribery”!

Semantics are important, as are my ethics (business and personal) . In no way did I try to persuade a reviewer to provide a good review by offering a discount. Never did I tell a reviewer that submitted for a discount that s/he should change their review. Never did I pay for a review. In fact, the entire system was automated: form submitted, auto-reply sent.

The .org team telling me that I “bribed” users and attempted to “defraud a system” is was is insulting. It’s too bad they continue to use that type of language instead of broadening their understanding.

Did I know that this type of compensation was against any guidelines?

No.

Should I have known?

No, since there’s no guideline.

What do you mean there’s no guideline against compensating reviews?

There isn’t. Check for yourself – https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-org/detailed-plugin-guidelines/

Nor is any of this mentioned in the TOS.

Although, this was offered in our conversation, “If it’s not clear enough, we’re serious. We even posted on make/plugins – https://make.wordpress.org/plugins/2016/05/31/reminder-do-not-compensate-reviewers/“; a Make blog post shouldn’t be required reading for plugin authors.

Does it matter to them if I knew or not?

No, since the reviews are considered spam.

“The question I have in such a case is: Why do we care what you knew? In our view, you spammed us.”

Does it matter to me (and by extension us)?

Yes. Otherwise any wrong doing can be concluded by opinion, regardless of community feedback.

It’s why the best thing to do IMO (in my case and others) was to reach out first, letting me know the link could be judged as spam inducing.

If the Make blog post was the team’s way of reaching out to everyone: fine.

Are these reviews spam?

This is where opinions diverge.

I agree that they can judge all SI reviews as spam, they can set the conditions for “spam” to apply to any review in the system.

However, were they spam two years ago when there was no guideline, no Make blog post, and no public conversation was had about compensating for a review (regardless of rating)? IMHO, no.

How should they have handled it then?

They could have pulled the plugin from the repo until I fixed the link, explaining that compensating for reviews is deemed as spam and against a guideline (that’s “yet to be published” and then publish something). Warning me to never ask for reviews in this manner again.

So, reviews shouldn’t have been deleted?

No, and for two reasons:

1. The “guideline” that I was breaking isn’t a guideline at all. So for me to say that I was unknowingly breaking a guideline for two years is perfectly valid.
   1. They mention there is precedence and “I’m not the first” but I’ve never heard of this happening before and I’ve been around for a very long time.
   2. The precedence I see while searching “bribery” and “compensation reviews” in the Slack channels show incidences where only a single review was removed, even though it seems like the plugin author was a repeat offender.
2. Their intent was: “the reviews that have been associated with this method have been removed…”. Instead they deleted all reviews because there was no way for them to know if a review had received a discount.

Is there a way to find out if a review was associated with a discount?

Yes, and I provided it to them (since it’s a basic list of form submissions, including their review link). Since November of 2014 — 34 submissions were made, 8 of those submissions didn’t review the plugin (although they still got a discount).

I asked that instead of deleting all 110+ reviews the 26 (that can be associated) be removed instead, they disagreed .

Did they overreact?

Absolutely.

I get that the .org teams put up with a lot of shit, and they need to be dogmatic. I also (honestly) respect their time and effort.

I just wish they reached out to me first. I can’t imagine their original thought was “Dan is spamming our system” with reviews. I had around 120 reviews in two years and thousands of active installs, those numbers prove I’m not a spammer trying to just sell a pro product.

The reviews are from real people that shared their experience.

“We’re basically at odds with people trying to use our directory to sell their wares here, because we’re not a place to sell things in the first place. This is why we have such strong opinions on the matter. This is why we require GPL compatible everything. Because we’re all about community, and the community frequently is hurt by competition, but benefits from collaboration.”

These specific reviews (26 of them) for Sprout Invoices were not spam, they were reviews from SI users that wanted to pay for the pro version because they liked the free version (after using it). The free version in the repo is by no means a trojan horse to force users to upgrade, active installs bear that out. These reviewers are pieces of this community too, as am I.

Update: The reviews are still in the DB but they can’t be updated/edited/published.

I was contacted by one of my users that wanted to edit his review. I asked the .org team and the response was: “No, those reviewers can never leave reviews ever again [on that plugin]. Reviews are a one-time deal.
Again, this is why we tell people not to buy reviews. Not only are they all deleted, but the people who left reviews now cannot do so again [on that plugin]. They left a review, it got deleted, and now, they have lost their opportunity.”

This is rather sad; I can easily explain why their review was deleted, “I unknowingly broke a guideline and offered a discount for reviews…the .org team couldn’t conclude if your review was one of them so all were deleted…”, I can’t easily explain how that relates to them now that they want to change/edit or resubmit a new review.

Indefensible?

Apparently not.

I’ve tried. I made my points clear, maybe not concise, but I was nice and respectful throughout (except at one point when I said the response was “vitriolic” but I quickly apologized and pointed out the hypocrisy since I had/have such an issue with “bribery”). I shared that I would respect their decision but I would like for the decision to be fair.

I’ve been told there’s a “zero tolerance policy” for compensated reviews. Regardless if the policy in question is undefined and it’s unknowingly broken. It’s [scare quotes]their system[/scare quotes], which I get — to a point.

I just don’t think the result is fair, even if my opinion is that some reviews can now be deemed spam.

And as a plugin author I shouldn’t be nervous that something I’m currently doing is later deemed malicious, i.e. asking for a review at all or advertising a pro version.

What would have been the result if I read the Make blog post from a month ago?

Nothing! This is the most depressing part of this entire incident: the thought nothing would have happened if I learned about this before last Tuesday is maddening. Sigh.

What next?

• I somehow stay proud of all the hard work I’ve poured into the project — which those reviews proved but are now deemed “dishonest”.
• Track whether ratings affect for download counts; spoiler: they do and I’ll write about that later.
• I somehow prove that some changes need to be made (including the process) and my suggestions below are considered.

What I’d like to see (i.e. suggestions):

1. The guidelines updated to cover compensated reviews.
   1. Clearly defining what is and what isn’t considered.
   2. Possibly the repercussions; not a first/second offense plan but a “we will delete all reviews if we find you’ve broken these rules, and without warning.“.
2. Expectations for plugin authors to keep up to date should be provided, unless a written warning is to be expected now.
3. A disclaimer for all below every review submission to not review the plugin if: “You have or will be compensated in anyway”.
   1. Other disclaimers that all plugin authors have been begging for can also be added, i.e. “A review is a place to ask for support, or demand a feature not present”.

Personally…

This entire incident still really bums me out, to the point of wanting to throw my hands up and walking away; is hard to find joy in my work at the moment. It’s hard to reconcile that I can still be proud of all the hard work if all these opinions/reviews are labeled dishonest from a respected team. Being accused of “bribing” my users, and “defrauding a system” that I respect and I feel I’ve contributed to, is rough.

Should you (and I) be outraged?

Haha, no. I’m upset by their decision and tact but that doesn’t mean much more than I hope I prove a point so things can change for the better. I also care about people and can see past our disagreements to enjoy a beer in the (hopefully near) future.

So don’t make this out to be fuel for your own personal dumpster fire against .org, or the community. This is my rant to try to improve things for everyone.

• It looks like they won’t start the buyback process until October and the’ll go off Sept. KBB rates.
• The $5-10k compensation will be on a sliding scale (which means I will likely get very little).
• There might be a way to “fix” the emissions issue but from what I’ve heard (friend/audi-mech) it’s not possible on the smaller cars.

It’s bittersweet for me: I love this car (super fun to drive, comfortable, they don’t make sport backs anymore, …) but if I need to turn it in I rather rip the bandaid off sooner rather than later when I start getting too attached.

aside: while the pic isn’t my car, duh, it is the same exact model, year, make, color, without the big TDI on the side

Wow, 13% of sales were refunds. I was expecting a high number (by comparison) but not by that much. Then I immediately noticed that it’s more like 16% (seen in the second chart) because I included Abandon/Failed. Oh my!

Digging a bit more I wanted to know what the refund % was based on sales value (not based on total sales). This way I could determine if  smaller purchases (which are less likely to be refunded) are skewing the percentages. Put another way, were refunds more of an issue with sales of Sprout Invoices or Help Scout Desk (which are $60+), or with add-ons.

The percentages above show that the refund rate is slightly worse with those more expensive purchases…which was no surprise. Still though., sigh.

What does this mean for revenue? Since there are percentages of percentages above, the numbers get a bit convoluted, so I wanted to see what percentage of revenue is refunded and found it’s slightly better than I thought…

This shows that with every $100k is sales, that I’m refunding 11%.

Why are my refund rates so high?

I think it’s a combination of the money back guarantee, how I market it as a selling point, and the use of a timed offer. A recent customer that recently received a refund noted:

“I probably should have tried the demo first…I was just meaning to do some light research yesterday (not buy) but the 25% discount timer got me. If it wasn’t for the discount timer I would have waited and tried the demo today before buying. But the 25% off plus the 30 day guarantee made me think “why not? Lets go for it”.

Here’s that special timed offer that we’re referring to. It’s something I offer to hesitant customers[ref]There’s a lot of logic that goes into showing this promo. It’s not just available for everyone, there are certain actions that need to occur on the site first.[/ref] onsite (and via email).

Knowing that this combination has exponentially increased sales for Sprout Apps last year I have no qualms with the refund rate being so high. I can convert customers better than visitors. Simply, a customer purchasing with the intent to trial the product will convert more than a visitor that demos before purchase.

I hope this doesn’t come off as deceptive marketing; To be completely honest, it’s slightly manipulative but not deceptive. Manipulative in the good way, since there are no downsides since I offer a 30-day MBG.

Obviously my goal is to convert visitors to customers, so that they can see the value of my products, and I can prove how awesome the support is. Things a website full of screenshots and text can’t do very well alone.

So that explains why refund rates are relatively high, now what I’m really worried about is the abandoned/failed purchases. This number is something that I’m going to work on decreasing over the next year, there’s no apparent reason for it to be that high. Although I first need to validate if this number is a concern since I’m already attempting to convert these to customers via Customer Segment, and abandoned/failed checkouts aren’t removed if they do end up purchasing later.

What’s your opinion?

My hope that it would be easy to do a simple overview of Sprout Invoices was wrong. Sounds easy right? I ended up stumbling over the first few slides, my mind filled with doubt and evaluating everything I say. It was stressful.

Much like my podcast interview I did with Apply Filters (a long time ago) it didn’t end as badly as it started, somehow I got comfortable and was able to get some sensible words out, at least I hope that’s what happened.

I need to figure this out, it’s most definitely a fear that I need to get over, hopefully jumping in and speaking a couple times next month will help. Although, those talks are going to be much longer, and one is at a local meet-up and not to an audience I can’t see.

I just have so much to do; Sprout Invoices’ next release keeps growing with “must do” features and Sprout Clients is screaming for v2.0. With the year’s end looming, I’m not going to hit my goals. So I reset, again.

Many of my personal obstacles transitioning from services to products are no longer around, easily attributed to creating routines/scheduling, automating marketing, and approaching things differently. However, whenever I need to “reset” my goals I get almost depressed ( bad, not ☹️ or  bad ).

It’s really a no-win situation for me, the reason I need to reset is the untenable schedule I’ve set, and when I plan for a more reasonable schedule I feel guilty (and almost ashamed). Thats my struggle.

I know I need to rethink my approach, honestly I’m doing that now. I just don’t want to lose my drive of building awesomeness, otherwise I fear of falling into a lazy daze of hopefulness.

So I pass an attachment that’s a json encoded array that will intentionally fail.

View the code on Gist.

Since the attachment failed I’m looking at the error, retrieving the data passed and then using AddStringAttachment directly with the newly created string.

View the code on Gist.

Hopefully this can be easier with this ticket.

I opened a hosting plan with SiteGround a while back because I needed to test Sprout Invoices after a customer complained about some issues. Everything went well, I was able to setup a site fairly easily, test SI on a default configuration, and report back to my customer. Since I had paid for a year of hosting[ref]I figured I might need to test on it again at some point because their setup is no ordinary.[/ref] I just let the site sit.

Months later I found myself with a charge for “Premium Support”.

I don’t know what this charge is, it’s surely not a renewal since this is my complete billing history.

I did end up live chatting with their support, after a half-hour of back and forth they couldn’t/didn’t reverse the charge. The best they could do was credit my account, seriously WTF. I was under the impression from my conversation with him that SG pulls this all the time and by working in support he’s used it people bringing it up.

I still don’t understand their reasoning for the charge. I never used their support services. My logical guess would be that they’re re-couping their cheap hosting cost with up-charging, unbeknownst to their customers. The crazy thing, I’ve experienced this before with other companies and they’ve always refunded the payment. Sigh.

In case you’re wondering this is my support history! Nothing.

Update

Talked to another support person in billing and they were able to refund the charge and make things right. They said that the Premium Support service is an option on the order form…which I know I didn’t check but oh well, it’s figured out now.

If you want to know more about all the things that happened over at Sprout Apps I’ve published (some-what of) a year in review. I tried my best to show how much Sprout Invoices has grown as a product, something that I found is rather hard to do without busting out stats on commits and code base changes. Anyway…Sprout Invoices had 10 major updates, Help Scout Desk had a few, and Sprout Clients was released.

On the business side I learned a lot — so much that I’m only able to cover a couple biggies.

A Monthly Subscription was a horrible idea.

I wrote about the pricing structure and the reasoning before launching…

[I] wanted to create a monthly recurring rate for Sprout Invoices for a few reasons…[I] think people can better relate to a monthly recurring charge…a similar pricing model will be easier to match up against the invoicing services.

…I also had two other business reasons:

1. Low entry price would bring more customers.
2. Monthly payments have a naturally higher renewal rate over a longer term.

I’ll let you in on a secret that I’ve only told a few others: both were  ideas in practice. After about eight months I determined that the having this mixed monthly and yearly licenses caused some major issues:

First, it confused customers. While I had thought people would be appreciative of the monthly rate, especially since I wanted to pull the majority of customers from Freshbooks and Harvest, it constantly led to inquiries asking about the basics. It wasn’t a matter of messaging either, with an A/B test of the pricing page in April I found people either couldn’t find the value or felt overwhelmed with the mixed subscription option.

Now, I only offer a yearly license (which renews) and conversions are up, a lot.

Second, I found out with the customer value being so low to start that support was an issue and it would always be an issue. Regardless if the lifetime value was estimated to be $XXX, naturally having the majority of support front-loaded wouldn’t be cost efficient unless customers never cancelled. Never isn’t possible.

Third, the entry price being so high was mitigated by a “hassle free money back guarantee”. This allows prospective customers to give it a shot and hopefully find the value within 30 days.

Money Back Guarantees work!

My sense is that a MBG frees the customer to love the product, and find the value on their own. No one wants to be “stuck” with a product they bought regardless of great value, instead finding the value in something creates loyalty.

I’ve found that refund requests are down from before, reasoning:

• People are waiting longer to ask for a refund, which allows for…
• People asking for help. Providing support within those 30 days are unlikely to ask for a refund because…
• Great support is a feature that customers don’t value until it’s seen.

I’ve had numerous incidents when a customer has asked for a refund only to change their mind after I simply asled “before I process your refund I’d like to know if there is anything I can do to help…”. Goes to show that customers are impatient with the help they need with a product they bought for a reason, and providing great support allows them to see the value in their purchase.

Discounts and E-Mail Marketing For the Win!

I wrote about this a while back, it simply works. Discounts work too, duh.

Discounts that don’t work: ones that discount the initial payment of a monthly subscription to about nothing. That was a terrible idea for just about every reason you can think of; now that you know relying on lifetime value to offset support costs is a dumpster fire of a strategy.

WordPress.org Reviews

Asking for reviews to “help the growth of” your product is not only being honest with your customers but surprisingly effective. Not only do our happy customers write reviews but those reviews create paid customers. As you would have guessed the majority of sales come from Sprout Invoices users that downloaded from .org, with our rates so high it helps people decide between a plugin with terrible reviews and mine with great reviews. The strategy to focus on pushing happy customers to review helps combat the long term problem we will have with the competition — those damn “installs” count.

Growth

With those changes in late April I was able to turn the ship, as you can tell from the graph below. As you can tell earnings have drastically increased, which can obviously be attributed to removing the monthly subscription [ref]sales have also increased (it’s hard to tell with this graph since it includes sales from free products).[/ref]

The most important point in this report is the yellow dot for July, only because that was the first month Sprout Apps hit a profit. Meaning, since Sprout Apps has been a full-time job for me for this last year, a “profit” simply means I didn’t have to dip into savings to pay myself for the time, instead I could write myself a full pay check.

Goals, am i right?

This has been a long time coming, it just so happens to be a year of a lot of work — taking twice as long as I would have hoped. Here’s to another year, hopefully with some help to grow faster.

Cheers!

Since early February most of my free time has been committed to Little League baseball. Managing my son’s team, volunteering as a board member, and now managing a 6-7 All-Star team [ref]Which I’m very honored/lucky to manage[/ref]. It’s been awesome managing/coaching, truly grateful, even with the 11 stitches in my face from being stupid at a practice. Dealing with the parents is another story…a long winded story that I won’t bother talking about here.

It would be very easy for me to draw a bunch of correlations between managing a team of eleven on 5 month project  and managing eleven 6-8 year olds playing baseball. So easy that I’m sure you can do it too; just let your imagination roam, knowing your assumptions of whatever went right and wrong for me this season are correct.

Here’s to three more fun weeks with this kid I love so much. Hopefully this time I can help him get a well deserved trophy.

What I am ashamed of is not getting around to adding pagination to SA until today

View the code on Gist.

Before you get too far and start wondering [this isn’t a comprehensive post about how I can really figure out which API to use], it isn’t a comprehensive post that will help everyone. Instead the point of this article is to help developers specifically looking to use PayPal for basic payments and subscriptions with one basic rule…

Don’t ever use PayPal Payment Standard. [ref]Not to be confused with the customer product of PayPal Standard.[/ref]

Why? There are a lot, seriously a lot but the main reason is the deficiency of PayPal IPN.

PayPal IPN can’t be trusted and if you’re relying on it to validate a purchase you’re going to have some unhappy customers.[ref]This is why I built EC into Sprout Invoices as the default payment processor. SI doesn’t even support PayPal Standard Payments. I can’t imagine the customer support that IPN incurs on other developers distributing a product that relies on IPN, e.g. EDD or Woocommerce.[/ref]

If you’re handling subscriptions it’s even worse because there’s no way to validate the payment profile from a subscription payment made via Payment Standard. You need to rely on IPN 100% of the time to update the status of a subscription, which can easily cause a subscription to inadvertently expire[ref]Expired account issues has been a real issue with Sprout Apps, since it uses EDD and for months ran the PayPal Standard because the EC extension didn’t support subscriptions. I’ll post about how I updated it another time.[/ref], IPN issues can also cause a subscription to continue after it’s been cancelled[ref]Over at Smart eCart we had around 100 active “subscribers” with cancelled accounts because of IPN[/ref].

Instead use PayPal Express Checkout.

With EC you can validate a purchase, check payment status, capture a pre-approved payment, and manage a recurring payment profile including checking the status. All you need to do is make a single API call with the transaction id, there’s nothing special, nor is it much more complicated to develop.

There’s are lot of misconceptions with Express checkout. One being that it requires that the PayPal merchant pay for PayPal Pro, this is wrong. The merchant will only need Pro for onsite CC processing.

Another is that Express Checkout requires the customer to confirm their payment on your site before processing. This is the feared “extra step”, the extra step that would cause people to reconsider their purchase, the extra step that someone might not notice because they thought they were done. Sorry but I don’t like these excuses one bit.

Extra Step: If the customer is going to reconsider their purchase and leave the checkout process without ever coming back because of the final confirmation page is absurd.  Yes, it’s likely to happen; do you want these customers anyway? Highly unlikely because they’re the ones that will ask for a refund a day later after causing hours of support. I want customers that truly want to purchase the product, you should to.

UX: You should be able to easily signify that the customer needs to finalize the payment by submitting the confirmation, if you can’t there are other areas of your site that need your attention. I “know of some” that have contemplated doing an auto submit after X seconds or just skipping the confirmation and eschewing the PP policy, “they” never did go that route because the numbers didn’t show a drop the purchase funnel.

Falsities: I’ve heard that EC limits payment methods, something to the effect that the customer couldn’t use a credit card, which is nonsense. The only difference that I’ve noticed is that the checkout pages at PayPal use their new design…which is great.

Anyone using PayPal Standard over Express Checkout? I’d like to know why.

Obviously this was a rather frustrating support thread because I don’t want anyone’s first time experience with our products to be confused, especially this early.

Resolution

What I’ll be doing is working on the on-boarding experience via triggered emails after purchase, improving the email receipts, and documentation.

Not an Oddity

That said, I’m still a bit nervous that WordPress users without (most of) our personal history with the platform that the ease of use is harming premium product sales. Consider that the new customer I described above isn’t an oddity, he’s definitely not; as WordPress becomes more user friendly to broaden it’s reach people will expect that the only place to get a plugin[ref]This includes themes.[/ref] is via the admin. Improving the on-boarding of these customers can only go so far.

Resolutions

I don’t expect .org having a plugin marketplace anytime soon, or while I’m still in the WP product business. Which leads me to a couple ways that I could prevent this type of issue again and improve the overall experience of purchasing a premium product:

Drop the freemium model – Like so many others don’t offer an upgrade at all. Build a business around a free product with extensions/add-ons, i.e. easydigitaldownloads. Link to your own marketplace or build one into the admin that allows for purchasing and easy installs.

Build an upgrade routine into the free product – I want to dislike this idea because it means that the free plugin (from the repo) would need to either: download the pro version from an external source, activate it, and then delete itself; or download & install files from an external source into itself. I could see this as being an issue for any plugin review team member.

Have the free version modify the search results – Have the search results return the pro version, which links to a download (or purchase) link. I don’t ever see this passing the plugin review team.

What am I going to do?

I already have plans on building the add-on marketplace into the admin, which will permit purchasing and easy installations/activations. That solution (I believe) resolves familiarity issue, where installing plugins from the admin is easy. The issue of someone expecting for those add-ons or pro upgrades in the main plugins search results will likely always be an issue regardless of how much I improve my messaging.

To have a team committed to the security of our sites and millions of others strengthens WP’s legitimacy (period). IMO forcing the update to millions of people, wether they knew about it, wanted it, or didn’t care, has more to do with a perception of security than any concern over a single site being hacked. Maybe the individuals on the team are more idealistic; regardless the bigger picture is that WordPress has had a stigma as “not being secure”, auto-updates has helped fixed that perception and actions like these will only help improve WordPress as a whole.

Now Fight!

Now, if you’re in the echo chamber that is the WordPress development community you’ll see that some valid concerns have been raised. I especially like the healthy debate on twitter from this tweet…

The more I think about it, the more infuriating the auto-update of WP SEO gets.

— Underdoug (@zamoose) March 12, 2015

All of which can be boiled down to false expectations, hopefully now those expectations are being reasonably set, certainly looks like it.

Misdirected Frustration?

An indirect argument that isn’t getting traction is the increasingly distrust for WordPress SEO plugin, instead it’s a piece of the broader argument of trusting auto-updates. I strongly believe if WooCommerce or even All in One SEO was updated yesterday we would not have heard this outcry. I’m not alone in thinking that we can’t trust a WP SEO update.

So, I pose the question to those that were immediately concerned with WP SEO being updated yesterday:

Did you really have issues with your site receiving a security update to a plugin OR was there a fear over an WordPress SEO plugin update?

I would imagine the majority invested in this issue would agree with the later.

Let’s expect more from plugin authors, and appreciate the teams working hard to making WordPress more secure.

Update

As I’m catching up on twitter and reading some more posts I’m seeing some great reactions. Tom’s “Is there a Lack of Integrity in WordPress?” compliments my post well.

If that is your reaction to someone saying “email marketing” or “drip email marketing” I want to be your friend, I have the same reaction too but I’m going to get through this…

…and before I go into how I’m using Customer.io for Sprout Apps, I’d like to share some personal history about why I had thought the only way for me to be productive in  “email marketing” involved watching a piece of my soul being slowly peeled off like a bandaid on a three year old, and eventually hating the monster I had become.

I have an idealistic stance on sending marketing email, it’s simple — it should never be sent.

The pointed eared hairy footed trolls in marketing think differently, they see the value of sending unsolicited e-mails. E-Mail is astonishingly cheap for customer acquisition when compared to any other channel; CPC (adwords, Facebook ads, etc.) isn’t just expensive, it’s tough to get right even with single digit conversion rates.

That’s why when I was a Director[ref]I was not officially in a “Director” position, although I had the same responsibilities without the paycheck.[/ref] at my last real job, “real job” means I was required to wear pants, I was tasked to send out millions of emails a week. Yes, millions; I’m not kidding. A lot of which were to people the company had absolutely no relationship with, past or present. Their idea, or belief, was an email address is simply another mailbox for them to stuff junk into; some people will bite just like some respond to junk snail-mail [ref]Obviously, a lot of companies do this, not the dirt bags I worked for.[/ref].

I cringed every time I scheduled those “blasts”. The result they saw and wanted: five figure returns on every blast, on a list they bought for very little; the result I saw, loyal customers unsubscribing from the bombardment, the company not caring because they could “buy more to fill the list”, ultimately a shit load of people now seeing the company as “spammers” & untrustworthy,[ref]The company is still around, I’m not sure about their financials but I’m willing to bet their still cornering their market, spammers or not.[/ref].

E-mail “marketing” can be different.

Before Sprout Invoices launched I was directed by a few people that I needed to “build my list”, I threw up a little in my mouth and shook it off. Then came Pressnomics[ref]That conference was awesome. I wish I had wrote a post about it a couple weeks ago…maybe in the future.[/ref], where I was able to talk to a few others on how they’re using services like customer.io and I soon found out that it’s possible to send an email to a prospective customer with respect.

Build a relationship first, or partner with someone that has a relationship with the people you want to contact.

I don’t send e-mail to people that didn’t explicitly give Sprout Apps their email. Simple as that. I’m not about to buy a list and blast out an email to thousands of people that don’t know about Sprout Invoices or other Sprout Apps; leave marketing to those individuals to those that have a relationship already.

For example, tidyrepo.com recently sent out an email reviewing Sprout Invoices. Their users have a relationship with tidyrepo, so when those read the review, there’s weight behind it. If I were to send an email to that same list, an expected response would be “who the hell is this…where’s that spam button”, that’s not a first impression I would ever want to make.

Introduce yourself and offer help.

At the moment I only have a few triggered emails setup for  Sprout Apps; one in particular sent to someone that received errors during checkout and didn’t complete their purchase in the last 30 minutes. With this triggered email I’m not only helping someone with their purchase but I’m hoping to get their attention while they’re still considering purchasing; otherwise, they’ll just forget about it and move on.

I’ve found introducing myself helps, letting them know who I am shows I’m personally engaged.

There are a lot of creative ways to help your potential customers, one might be to send an email with a discount if they’ve reviewed the pricing page after reviewing the product details page for an extended period but never added the item to the cart.

If to help is promotional, bury the lead.

That last “creative way” of sending a message to help someone is on the verge of spammy. Remember, I want to build a relationship with the customer. This is especially true before trying to motivate them via a “discount”. Maybe I’m overthinking this because of my idealistic take on sending email, that’s why I’m currently running an A/B test to see if throwing something like “Hey you, here’s an awesome discount for my shit because I noticed you can’t afford it. Any questions let me know…” is better than “Hey, I’m Dan Cameron and I built this shit. You have any questions?…PS, I’d like to extend you a limited time offer…”. If the former wins I’ll question everything I believe in humanity, as if I just read comments under a political article.

Be personal, gain trust, bury the promotional motivation, and start small.

This is how I started…slow[ref]That blip at the beginning can be attributed to testing and holding off a triggered email to be manually sent instead of automatically.[/ref].

I only have four triggered emails at the moment, one is not automatically sent instead a draft is created. I can then review the user activity and understand if the person could be helped with the email, if not it’s deleted.

Don’t half ass it.

If you wanted to be a dick and just send out a bunch of email you would have stopped reading a while ago, maybe because they were offended with me calling them hairy trolls or they’re busy making google work off a “purchase e-mail lists for cheap” query, instead you’re vested. Reading this post proves you can take it slow and build write the introductions you need.

It took time me a while to write the integration I wanted; luckily for some I did the work for you. That said, the hardest part was writing all the emails for each triggered email and A/B split. Getting the introduction right is tricky, I don’t have the answer for everyone but helping people works.

It really does work.

On a pure marketing level, when compared to CPC and other channels these numbers are awesome. Not shown is how I’ve been able to get valuable feedback from the conversations started with these triggered emails, the hidden upside hidden from the “Converted” column.