💰 $12,344.38/$39,834.28 (fairly compensated for time)
🖥5,????/10,000 active installs (on-par with other print button plugins)
What Happened This Month
Downloads
No releases to WordPress.org this month, or actually to Freemius either (just a few beta versions).
Mailing List Stats
Stats from my MailChimp mailing list.
Went from about 2,000 to nearly 2,200 subscribers this month. But no emails are going out because I need to upgrade plans… 😤 ouch I just re-checked and they’re actually wanting $69/month. That’s about double what I was hoping to spend…
Website Visits
Stats from my site’s Koko analytics (don’t need no Google Analytics, thank you!)
Visits down quite a bit this month, probably related to how MailChimp has disabled sending emails because they’ve reduced their free plan to only 500 contacts (I have over 2,000). The post on making Word Documents is ranking nearly as high as my homepage. Sheesh
Freemius Stats
Sales
Huge sale at the start of the month caused this month to be about 4x my average. The huge sale was someone buying an annual business license for 20 sites… lest I think this is the new norm, however, the rest of the month was rather slow.
Ok, so actually in addition to that one big payment, there were actually a lot more paymens than usual (primarily during the first half of the month, when my lizard brain had made plans to hire an entire team to handle the never-ending stream of payments.) There were a couple refunds, I really only remember the $120 one though: they had some trouble with the Word documents, thought they’d reached out to support but somehow I never got the message, then thought I’d scammed them, and sent a fairly threatening email. I sent the refund immediately, then followed up offering support and recommending an alternative, but it was kinda obvious there was no winning them back (and I wasn’t sure how badly I wanted to either, because dealing with them looked like it was going to be pretty stressful.)
Again, Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) shot up at the start of the month but then basically eroded almost down to its original level. I suppose quite a few old subscriptions chose not to renew (evidenced by the rather high churned revenue, nearly a quarter of my monthly revenue.)No net improvement in active subscriptions though.Still mostly monthly subscriptions, although annual is up. The income from annual licenses was much higher this month though…Payments by plan for the past 12 months. Even though there were a ton more monthly payments, the total income from annual licenses is about double that of monthly licenses. So, while it’s nice to have the monthly option, I feel like incentivizing new buyers even more toward the annual license (right now they’re all 3x monthly, maybe I should change it to 2x monthly).
Audience
Less growth this month, but still a little. Also slowly crawling out of the negative active installs (Freemius bug, yes it’s been reported).Nearly same as last month again: lots of growth but lots of churn.Interesting note from this month: apparently there’s a link somewhere on my site to version 3.3.0 of my plugin (which is nearly two years old), which is probably why there are so many 3.3.0 users. But I haven’t yet found it.WordPress 6.2 is approaching 6.1 for the most commonly-used version. I need to declare that PMB works with it (been slow on making releases for two months because I switched machines and haven’t yet set up my environment for easily making releases again.)PHP 7.4 continues to have the largest absolute growth, but 8.0 is still accelerating the most.USA still biggest by far, but Germany is still significantly over-represented for its size.All languages growing pretty evenly; Dutch was relatively very high though. Still need to translate that.
Finances and More Plugin Stats
The Detail
Massive Bulk Purchase
One customer purchased an annual Business License for 20 sites, the most expensive option I have, for nearly $1,600. When my average monthly income is about $500, that’s a huge jump.
The big purchaser first purchased an annual 20-site Professional license ($359.96), then immediately upgraded to an equivalent Business license ($1,215.00).
This was also one of my first bulk-license purchases like this.
I think this really big sale was thanks to some pricing adjustments I made late in March, where I drastically increased the bulk license discount, as well as the annual discount, based on feedback from Freemius’ CEO, Vova Feldman.
The intention was to make bulk and annual licenses more attractive, and I think it’s working a little (annual licenses have increased), but I suspect it could be increased even more. Bulk and annual licenses are good for my income, but they’re also less stressful for users. I just need to price them so they’re an obvious choice for buyers.
No Releases to WP.org, Small Release to Freemius
This is the second month with no releases to WordPress.org, and only a small release to Freemius. There are a few reasons for this:
I switched laptops, and from Windows to mac, so I’m a bit slow on adjusting my development environment. My beloved Laragon isn’t an option on Mac, so I’ve switched to Docker, which I’ve heard so much about, but am finding it a chore (e.g., I had a composer script for preparing files for release, but I can’t get the file out of the Docker container)
a Business client has been asking for some adjustments to their custom Word document template which have been more time-consuming than I’d like (adjusting Word’s XML format is quite a chore, it’s very verbose and I’ve never found any documentation)
that Business client is also waiting for me to build the Pro Print Buttons (or at least a button from the WP admin to quickly create a Word document from a single post, rather than needing to go through all the steps of creating a project each time they want to make a Word document.)
My other job, doing basically all IT for an online school, has gotten really busy over the past 2 months, as they’ve had a surge in students alongside staffing difficulties. That seems to have calmed down over the past couple weeks, although isn’t totally better.
Thinking Out Loud
It’s a little ironic that the month with the highest sales is also one where I’ve had the least time to develop the plugin itself. Doing customization work is probably good, but relatively very time-consuming. And I think pricing changes are doing well (increasing the annual and bulk license discounts) but I may want to make them even more pronounced (like increasing the monthly price, and increasing the bulk discount.)
What’s Next?
I’m still working on buttons to quickly download a single post as a PDF or Word Document. Adding a button itself is, of course, really easy. But the challenge is rewriting all the behind-the-scenes code which expects you to go through all the steps of making a project. Anyways, that’s what I’m up to.
