2023 - A year in review - Personal Blog

Welcome to my second year in review post on my blog!
The year flew by for most of us, so I think it’s important to take the time to review what happened.

New projects

OllieWP

Earlier this year, Mike and I publicly announced working together on olliewp.com.

This is my first time working on a theme or a design-oriented product in the WordPress space.
I tend to build products to make complex things simple (static site generation, password protection, file protection..) and not something visually appealing.

Mike and I worked together at Lemon Squeezy, where we shaped the v1 of the official WordPress plugin, and I also helped a bit getting LS integrated with his awesome course over at liftoffcourse.com.

Someday he reached out asking if I would be interested in joining him in building Ollie to shape the future of WordPress, and I agreed.

Onboarding wizard

We integrated a modern and straightforward onboarding tool into the theme, which caused quite a lot of discussion in the WordPress community. If you are interested, here are some of the articles published around that:

Long story short, it’s now a separate plugin that can be downloaded from our website: https://olliewp.com/download/

You can also check out how it works here:

webtozip.com

This project fills a need we faced with Simply Static several times. It’s a SaaS app that can convert your website into a static one by just submitting the URL and the e-mail address to get the link to the ZIP file.

Some people want to use Simply Static to archive an older WordPress website, the problem is that WordPress has changed a lot in recent years, and we try to stay up to date with Simply Static – an improved admin UI, modern PHP support for faster exports and so on – basically the opposite of what people are looking for to archive their website.

Here is where webtozip.com comes into play – it does not depend on the WP or PHP version and can statify all kinds of websites (not just WordPress).

It was also the first time building a fully-fledged SaaS application with Supabase and React. I learned a ton, and we also implemented countless features like export as PDF or TXT, an entire interactive dashboard where you can see the progress of the export, restart it, cancel it, a Zapier integration to automate processes, and so much more – definitely a fun project!

Interviews, Podcasts, speaking at WCEU

I visited Athens for WordCamp Europe this year, which was a huge success in many ways.
I gave a quick introduction to Static WordPress that you can watch here:

I also attended several podcasts as a guest. I often talked about Simply Static, but also about business in general.

Here is a list of podcasts I was interviewed on:

WP Tavern (Simply Static)
WP Builds (Simply Static – 4 video series)
Plugin.fm by Freemius (Business)
IndieBytes (Business)
WildCloud (Business)

Joining a mastermind group

I always wanted to join a mastermind group with likeminded people and exchange ideas, tactics, struggles, and everything else related to operating a WordPress product business.

I struggled quite a lot to find one as most publicly announced mastermind groups ended up too big, or the other folks didn’t match the state of my business. I’m not really starting out, I’ve been building commercial WordPress plugins for about 8 years and with at least some success – so I don’t need tips on how to start out, but how to grow, how to optimize, and how to market.

Thankfully, Cristian Raiber from WPChill reached out after WCEU and invited me into a new Mastermind group with a bunch of lovely people! We meet twice per month and I learned so much! It’s hands-down the best idea to join a group if you are serious about running a WordPress product business.

Growing the team

In my last year-in-review post, I talked about the struggle and challenges of finding someone to help with support.
Well, that’s now a thing of the past – if you came into the support, you might have already met Scott, the latest addition to our team, who is doing an incredible job helping our customers succeed!

Getting into numbers

While I never share the exact numbers, I love to keep you guys updated on the overall growth of the business.

I will take a look at my two plugin shops – patrickposner.dev and simplystatic.com – I decided to separate them as Simply Static is growing quite quickly, and I wanted to have an easy way to check how we are doing.

patrickposner.dev

Traffic

Traffic was down quite a bit, but there is a specific reason for that: I moved Simply Static to its own domain (simplystatic.com) in early March, after acquiring it for almost $3.5k – I never registered a domain for one of my plugins before, but it turned out quite well (see the traffic chart for Simply Static below).

Net revenue

As you can see, revenue stayed more or less the same compared to last year. What’s interesting here is that the numbers per plugin changed – while Passster has grown, Filr declined, and Qyrr is taking second place in terms of total revenue.

MRR

Also interesting is that while the net revenue stayed more or less the same, the MRR (monthly recurring revenue) was increased by 6%:

More and more people decided to use the annual subscription rather than the lifetime option. This makes sense, as most of my products are utility plugins that solve a particular problem, and the lifetime options are too expensive for our average customer.

Churn

I managed to decrease my churn by 13%, which is part of the reason why the MRR climbed up.

Support

With the new admin UI and an overall focus on the block editor, I narrowed down the number of potential customers, but I could also laser-focus on providing the best UI/UX possible for a very specific user group, and that showed!

I reduced the number of support tickets by almost 50% with the new UI and improved documentation:

Summary

While those numbers don’t look too exciting, it was kinda expected. This year I’ve done a huge facelift for almost all of these plugins, and that usually results in less revenue before finally picking up again.

I also decided to get rid of all those page builder integrations and go all-in on the block editor.
The result is a way more user-friendly admin UI, blocks for all the plugins, and way less overhead in support.

I’m happy with how it turned out, but I also know there is a lot of work to be done to improve these numbers.

simplystatic.com

As most of you know, Simply Static is my main product. It gets the most attention; I speak about it, I teach about it, and people almost only know me due to it 😅