Our plugin celebrates its first anniversary this month. What experience can we share with you?
Quite a few things, all shaped by 30 releases, 25 000 active users (guesstimate), 200 000 downloads and plenty of visits to WordCamps.
At the end of this post, I’ll also cover what to expect in the next 12 months.
Two different user expectations
Free and paying users have been waiting for a quality plugin for newsletters for a while. Both have different expectations.
WordPress users have come to expect lower quality from free plugins: complex user interfaces, little or no support, or relinquished code. It’s not a criticism. It’s rather the nature of a directory of free software, without understating the recent explosion of the Premium.
At the other end of the spectrum, are the customers of online email marketing services. We’re talking about Aweber, MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, MadMimi and Constant Contact. The competition between these players has raised the bar in terms of quality.
Their customers discover an alternative called Wysija, both simple and cheap. They expect the same firepower.
Operating within WordPress gives us a huge advantage. But it’s also our Achilles’ heel. WordPress plugins are affected by plugin conflicts (hello ThemeForest!), WordPress versions, and weird server configurations, not to mention that nearly all popular hosts are blacklisted for sending. It’s not always smooth sailing for our users.
Freemium works on WordPress
This is no secret. What’s there to learn, then? It took us 15 months to become “profitable”, and yet, we guesstimate that 99% of our users are running the free version.
There are 3 good reasons to go Freemium:
- Competitors have free plans, like MailChimp
- Give back to the community
- More users, more feedback
Our Premium customer base needs to grow if we want to slug in the big leagues. Our plan was to first build a solid free plugin, then work on features and services for the Premium. This is the phase we are entering now. Let’s play hardball. You pitch, I’ll swing.
We polled our customers recently on why they purchased the Premium. They felt more compelled to pay to encourage us than to get priority support. Maybe our free support is already too good?
The main reason to buy was our limit of 2000 subscribers. This nearly got us kicked out of the repository and killed our business model. Understandably, we walk on a fine line according to the guidelines. We strongly believe that the plugin and theme repositories should remain totally free. Is it ironic? Not really.
Coupons and affiliation
We’ve shied away from coupons. We already give a completely functional plugin for free. Users seldom pick an emailing solution based on a discount, but rather on user experience and features.
We’ve relied on our users to promote our plugin, and shunned affiliation. It seems to work. How? We point our satisfied users to this page which gives tips on how to promote us.
Word of mouth is slower than blatant affiliation. When it does finally pay off, it’s the best organic SEO.
Could we get more sales from affiliations? Probably so.
If you want to run fast, run alone…
If you want to run far, run together. This African proverb brings you to my following tale.
This past summer, I ran the San Francisco marathon. My first. Two things kept me going when my legs ditched: my jogging partner, a cerebral mathematician at Google, and my mom’s spirit. She was a formidable athlete herself who lost a long battle to cancer 6 years ago.
Wysija is the marathon I’m running with Ben, Jo and Adrien. We’re holding together by a similar determination and faith. We’re in it together, same pace. Our users are like the crowds cheering the runners on.
Coming to this year’s end, yes, we’re tired. Our rhythm has wavered and we’re a bit out of breath. It’s challenging to prioritize tasks with 4 equal partners.
Positives are plenty. We have heated debates, but never yell. We share our mistakes. We adapt to each others’s quirks. We apologize when we screw up. We help each other out. It’s part of going further together.
It’s sincerely a pleasure to share this run with 3 other guys I barely knew before. I’m certain today that we’ll go even further together. I dare say: the best is yet to come.
Pick a better name
Wysija. How do you pronounce it? How do you spell it? What does it even mean?
For the record, it’s an acronym: what you send is just awesome. Like Wysiwyg, which we still have to spell in our heads while we type it on the keyboard, right?
Propose a cooler name and we will take it. We’ve been trying for 3 months ourselves, to no avail. My partner Ben is nearly bald from pulling out his hair.
The next 12 months
We want to grow our user base. We want to make a better product. We’re ambitious.
There are 4 challenges to tackle in 2013:
- Ensure deliverability ourselves. Users blame us when their emails fall in the spam traps. And why wouldn’t they?
- Shorten the configuration time.
- Keep simplicity while adding new features
- Scale the team. We’re hiring. Interested? Get in touch.
What we’re currently working on:
- we’re training a new support staff called Ami.
- 2 new licenses before the end of the year:
- 4 Premiums for $299 / year
- unlimited sites for $599 / year
- form designer with custom fields (gender, phone, etc.). This is a biggy, so it’ll be released in waves.
- better settings for WordPress multisite
This coming weekend
We’ll be relaxing. Talking it real easy. It’s been a long 53rd week!
Keep the name!!!
I agree with Diana.
I finally can remember the name (it’s not that hard!) and I like it.
Great post – I will be upgrading once I near 200 subscribers. It’s an awesome plugin.
Congrats on your accomplishments and what you’ve learned thus far, and thank you for sharing your experience. Good luck!
I agree, a name change may be necessary. I’ll think on it.
Enjoy the much-deserved break.
Cheers!
once you picked a name – do not change it. If your product is great, you can call it whatever you want.
It´s good you did not choose a name like news3000 oder w-news pro….
Focus on flexibility, service, pdf reports (auto generated if needed) and on functions like others like mailchimp offer.
this is your way you should go and you generate a really great income with that.
I don´t think you can get a lot of customers with 599,- a year. Too expensive.
Thanks for the feedback on price. It can be indeed expensive to some. Then again, there’s a completely free version with almost everything in it, right?
Any name is better than wywywiga.
Ryan, we’re secretly counting on you to come up with the name since WordCamp Lisbon.
Great name, great experience don’t change.
Enjoy your rest, guys and come back encouraged next year.
We see you in 2013!!
John
Good to see our early adopters still following us. :-)
There is a split opinion on the name, sounds like a deja vu :)
Anyway it has been great sailing with you 3 so far. Hopefully 2013 will be as exciting and enriching for us.
Thanks so much to all of our users!
It has been great to see this community building up during the year. All the reviews, critiques, feature ideas, bug reports, translations, etc… that you guys made have had a tremendous impact on our work. Thanks to you we’re still here and we’re ready to get better at what we do.
Cheers!
keep the name, once you learn it, you can never forget it (it’s so unique).
Keep up the great work, we’re up to over 30,000 subscribers using Wysija Premium!!
Thanks David! Happy to see your growing insanely.
Keep your name as it is! I love it. Congrats on your first year. Great product, great/excellent support. It is a pleasure to see something like this succeed. It is nice to work with real human beings. Keep doing exactly what you are doing. It is appreciated and valued.
Best,
Jerry B
Thanks Jerry, that’s very nice words to read.
Hi Kim,
First of all heartiest congratulations on completing 1 year. You are doing a great service, keep it up. A WordPress-based newsletter plugin is truly awesome and is far cheaper when compared with the pricey alternative like Aweber etc.
As far as click statistics are concerned there seem to be some bugs. My newsletter stats show very few opens and comparatively very high clicks which is completely improbable. This is just one report of open-clicks-unsubscribed: 21 – 480 – 5. Clicks are so high but opens so less from the 826 sent so far.
I hope these minor but critical bugs are fixed going forward. But this does not take away anything from your achievement. I have finally found an affordable and long term solution for building my list growing at more than 2000 subscribers a month!
That could be a bug. Let’s confirm and then fix it, if it’s the case.
Please get in touch on http://support.wysija.com/
Just so you know we count the statistics by level.
Basically there are 5 levels:
1st – sent : email has been sent to the address
2nd- opened : email has been opened by the user, this is detected once the subscriber displays the images in the email he received
3rd – clicked : the subscriber opened the email and clicked on it. Very good! that’s really this stat you want to be the highest
4th- unsubscribed : the subscriber opened your email but doesn’t want it anymore so he unsubscribes
5th – bounced : the address didn’t exist or autoresponded you so it bounces back(only available in premium)
This means that each subscriber can only have one of those level, it doesn’t make sense to count that one user who clicked also opened the email because we know he did. I think it’s more interesting to know at which level people stopped.
basically you have 21 people who simply opened your newsletter and then were not interested in reading more.
And then 5 people opened your newsletter but were not interested in its content anymore so they unsubscribed.
Finally you have 480 people who opened your newsletter and then wanted to know more so they clicked on it.
This said out of the 826 people it could be that more people opened the newsletter that you just don’t know of, simply because we can detect the open status only when they show the image of your newsletter.
Overall I think your result is just great! Congrats, loads of people were interested by your newsletter, and just didn’t stop after opening your newsletter they also clicked on it.
Hope this clears things out!
Cheers and Merry Christmas!
Ben
I like the way you guys do things and your support for the free version of Wysija is better than most all paid offerings I have dealt with — including licensed applications! What I like is that you have both Personality and Passion along with a good, uncomplicated solution for the little guys. Rest well and then start the marathon again!
I’m planning to run the Paris Marathon in early April. Helps my mind rest from Wysija! :-)
Keep the Name as I think it has an international Cool feel about it! Look forward to watching your growth in 2013.
Thanks
Mark
Congratualtions for the plugin, I see it more as a cool and completly tool than a plugin!!
I’m running the premiun version and is great.
The only thing that worred me is the deliverability…
Pelease, make your best!
The name is perfect, we’re from Spain and at first light we thoght that the company was Russian.. Just joking ;)
Later, I have discovered the real meaning… You are awesome!
Congrats on your first year. I was so thrilled when you showed me the beta back at WC Montreal, and knew at once this was the tool we needed for our customers at Zeitguys. I can’t tell you how happy we are to be able to finally uninstall MP (you know which plugin I’m referring to) and move forward with a progressive newsletter and mailing solution that’s being so well supported. Keep up the great work!
Tom, thanks! That means a lot. Your feedback has been great.
We still need to figure out how to best port from a dev to production server. One of the many, many things we need to improve.
Congratulations on your first year! I can’t even begin to tell you how long I’ve waited for a plugin like this. For as long as I’ve been using WordPress…. 7 years.
Yes, definitely keep the name! It’s quirky, but it works.
From a licensing perspective, we install the free version in our clients’ sites. They understand they get 2,000 subscribers for free and if they choose to upgrade to premium, we leave that up to them.
The selling point, of course, is that the only other newsletter service that has a similar option is MailChimp. We can save them money since they wouldn’t need Aweber, Constant Contact, etc. and everything is right inside their WP dashboard.
For us to license $599 a year for unlimited sites… I’d have to run our numbers to see if that is something worth it to us to offer the premium version right away to our clients.
I know it’s a different product, but the dev option for iThemes plugins is just $150 for unlimited sites and 20 different plugins.
Thanks Patty for the comment.
As Wysija improves in the next 12 months, it’s value will raise, but not its price. We know some find it expensive, then again, there’s the free version which is in essence a complete plugin.
I’ll be looking to see what additional features you have planned. I love the plugin!
The free version is awesome, and I definitely understand you are in business to make money.
For us, allowing our clients to decide if they want to upgrade for the $99 a year, that’s still less expensive than what they would pay for Aweber or the others on an annual basis.
I do think that being able to give our clients the premium version included in what they pay us is a huge selling point, too.
Our company works on a membership type model, so for our clients paying a small monthly fee AND having a built-in newsletter/autoresponder is a huge bonus for them.
Hi Kim,
is there a way we can check the Premium themes before buying the Premium feature?
Also, how many premium themes are there, anyways?
GOOD JOB on the WYSIJA… it seems great.
- Hander.
Hander, to see the Premium themes, install Wysija. Go in your visual editor, and click on the themes tab.
We’ll soon add them to this site as well.
We actually just added them our site now:
http://www.wysija.com/review-newsletter-plugin-wordpress/
Hi, everytime I send emails with Wysija, it ends up in SPAM, pls help me how to prevent it
Ron, to improve your deliverability, we recommend sending with professional SMTP services. Read more here: http://www.wysija.com/email-service-providers/
Great Plug-in. Absolutely first class. Keep the name and keep building the plug-in. What you build should be just awesome too!
Love it,
My 2 cents is to LOWER the prices and convert more people to premium. I think you’ll get many more premium subscribers and make more money anyway.
I realize $99/year isn’t that much but all the little fees out there in the world add up to thousands of dollars every month. At $5/mo or $60/year many more people would pay.
For an unlimited websites option targeted at web designers $599 is steep. I would suggest $299 ($25/mo).
Thanks for the input. Price is delicate since we can’t increase it without causing a user backlash.
As the Premium features start rolling out (custom fields, stats dashboard, etc.), the pricing will make more sense.
In the meantime, you can use this 25% coupon for January only: january2013.
New Name: inTouch
… but ouch, somebody’s already got the .com
“inTuch” available on auction right now, which means it’ll probably come up for grabs sometime soon
but would that be pronounced in-tewk?
Just for the record about the name you picked up – Wysija.
There is a word in Bulgarian – ‘visija’ and it means “vision” (My wife is Bulgarian, this is how I know about it) and I am German, so I tend to read ‘w’ as “v”.
So, actually, we really thought that your brand name really means Vision and we liked the idea a lot :)!
In a way it is actually like this, because your product is changing the whole way of dealing with Newsletters and WordPress. And you created it because you have a vision of something greater, isn’t it.
Sometimes, when the main part of making sales for our clients is via newsletters (very often in B2B), we actually advise them to migrate to a WordPress based website, simply because they can use then Wysija.
One thing which is a big big plus for Wysija is that the admin menus and options are in German (something which MailChimp doesn’t have) and this is crucial point for our business.
So, thanks and looking forward for next tons of awesomeness from Wysija!
That’s rather insightful and encouraging to know that, at least, in Bulgaria we have a good name. :-)
We’re seeing more and more people install WordPress sites with the sole purpose of sending newsletters. It’s easier for some to install WordPress and Wysija than to deal with third party email solutions.
With all the new features planned in 2013, we believe this trend will evolve. Stay tuned!
The Premium version of the plugin for developers is about $300 per annum overpriced. It is all about scale.
At $299 per annum it is a no brainer and at $599 per annum it is a “look elsewhere” especially for smaller developers.
I have purchased one premium, but now I direct my clients elsewhere.
Change that and you have me! Gravity Forms and other premium plugins are way less and are used daily by websites.
It is all about scale, and I hope you reconsider!
Peter, you say “I direct my clients elsewhere”. Where is that? Our free version?
For unlimited sites $299 is fine. For 4 sites it is too much. I too have purchased 1 premium version but I can’t imagine doing it for 30 – 40 client websites. I’m confident you will do much better with a fee of $49 per site or something like that.
$49 x 100 sites = $4900 for you
$99 x 10 sites = $990 for you
Which would you prefer?
Hi all,
First of all, after having tested several other tools like yours (is there any ;))) ), I decided to use Wysija! Full of wonderful features and easy to handle. Perfect!
Yes, and about pricing: As I would like to use all the tracking and statistic features I should buy a “One-Year-Single-Site-License” for about $99. As I own 4 Sites on which I would like to run Wysija it would be at least an investment of $299. Thats really too much for small “niche” sites starting their business, even as I have only app. 100 subscribers per site up to now (hope it’growing in the near future… ;)
So, what I want to suggest is a license-model, which is depending on the max numbers of mails sent out, or limited to the number of sites I OWN. That means in my example, I own 4 sites and pay e.g. 100$,, where this fee will not cover sites, which i do not owm but my clients, got what I mean?
Sorry for the bad english,
withe best regards,
jens
Jens, thanks for your feedback.