It’s been really busy since our Founding Partner Lifetime Deal ended on 31 August. And I wanted to sit down and recap everything that happened, what I’ve learnt, and what we’ve shipped since then.
Founding Partner Lifetime Deal
Why we did it
The worst thing a founder can do is sit in a hole and build features without talking to customers.
However, it’s impossible to get customers in the first place, if we don’t build lots of features.
This meant we had a chicken and egg problem.
The Founding Partner Lifetime Deal was the perfect solution as it allowed us to circumnavigate the “customers will buy when we have lots of features” side of the problem by removing the time constraint of a yearly subscription. With the lifetime deal, customers can buy first, and use later when we’ve built everything they need from us.
Also, with the lifetime deal, we get some cash upfront and validation that we’re on the right track.
How we did it
T – 3 weeks: Plan and prepare assets
This included the landing page, making a promo video, researching pricing, and coming up with a list of where I would post about the deal.
Key takeaways from this stage:
- Research pricing and different LTD promotions as much as you can. You can’t change the deal once you’ve announced it, so you need to be sure before you announce.
- It’s impossible to get your landing page perfect at this point. Just get it done.
- Make your list of places to promote as long as possible.
T – 2 weeks: Promote LTD
At this point, there was no LTD available to buy. You could only sign up for a waiting list in order to find out the LTD pricing. I also had a countdown timer to tell people when the deal would be available.
The waiting list idea was something I learnt from Alex Standiford’s LTD that he did for Siren Affiliates. It helped build a sense of anticipation and my mailing list 😉.
Key takeaways from this stage:
- The waiting list idea is a must steal. If you’re launching something, make sure you have a waiting list.
- I spent a lot of time trying to sign up and get into Facebook groups. This takes longer than you think, so start early.
T – 1 week: Keep promoting!
At T – 2 weeks, I posted on some Facebook groups and received negative feedback. This hurt initially, but it was valuable hearing raw, uncaring feedback from strangers.
- Someone said my landing page was ugly: This led me to fix design issues I was procrastinating on.
- Some had questions or complained information was missing or unclear: I added new sections, improved copy and added more questions to the FAQ.
At the same time, we also worked hard to fix any bugs we could find in the plugin. After all, it was possible to try a sandboxed demo of the plugin on the site, and I didn’t want someone’s first experience of the plugin to be buggy!
Key takeaways from this stage:
- Keep a cool head. If you’ve posted in enough places, you’re bound to find people who don’t like what you’re doing. Find the feedback in the complaints and see it for the gift that it is.
- Make sure to double and triple check your checkouts and your discount codes. You don’t want anything to fail when you go live.
T – 0: It’s alive! Keep promoting!
Once the sale was live, work doesn’t stop. I continued to get in touch with newsletters and Facebook groups to promote the sale.
I also made sure to email the subscribers to let them know the sale was alive.
I had an additional 20% discount code on top of the deal for the first few customers. This helped ensure we had some early sales, which was a boost for our morale.
For 3 weeks we operated in the dark all building up to this single week of LTD sales. Until the sale is live and people could actually buy, we had no way of knowing if people were going to buy our plugin. So those early sales at the start were a big morale boost.
Key takeaways from this stage:
- Keep things exciting for everyone on your mailing list. I didn’t do this, but I wish I had planned a week of content and promotions to keep the excitement and fun high.
T + 1 week: Talk to customers and keep building
Throughout everything, we never stopped building and improving the product.
Once the sale was over, we could finally take a break from the hectic sales promotion.
It was also then that support tickets start rolling in. I never thought I’d say it, but it felt good to have support tickets, because it means that our product has actual customers!
Key takeaways from this stage:
Your customers are most engaged when they’ve just purchased. I didn’t do this, but I wish I had: My waiting list form had some questions that I used for user research. I would have reached out to the users who I wanted to learn more from and requested a video call. Feedback is oxygen for a new product!
Overall thoughts
What works for one person, might not work for another
I had the good fortune of speaking to many people before I ran my promotion. I learnt about how to price my plugin, what the deal terms should be, which Facebook groups get the best results, and much more.
And, after listening to everybody, it turns out my experience was completely different from everybody else’s. Some people highly recommended certain Facebook groups and said they got 5-figure revenue from them – I didn’t. One person would insist I’m pricing too high, while another person would insist I’m pricing too low.
Ultimately, while it’s great to listen to everyone’s advice, you have to set your own guiding principles and use your own judgement.
Thank you for your support
Running this LTD was so fun! I worked mornings, noons, and late into the night. I don’t like maintaining a schedule like this permanently, but doing it for a short term promotion gave me an adrenalin high.
Despite the mistakes and complaints, the LTD was actually a big success. We got more money and customers than we expected, and this has given us a tremendous confidence booster. If you participated, helped or purchased – THANK YOU!
It’s also made me really keen to explore new marketing campaigns. And be more creative about promoting EventKoi.
WP Product talk
If you’re interested to learn more about my LTD experience, I was on WP Product Talk talking about this exact topic.
EventKoi Lite on WP.org
The next thing we did was launch EventKoi Lite on wordpress.org. If you haven’t done so yet, please check it out (and leave a review if you like what you see).
Now begins the fun of trying to get installs and reviews up. I found this post by Nick Hamze helpful on this matter.
If you find anything broken or missing, please be like Jamie and let us know in the support forum.
Product changelog
We’ve been working really hard on improving the overall performance and stability of our events and calendars.
I know people want us to build exciting new features, but building a fancy mansion on a foundation of sand is not my idea of a good plugin or a good time.
To that end, we’ve made lots of unglamourous improvements including:
Accessibility
You can now use your keyboard to navigate our entire calendar. We’ve also added aria labels and use proper header formatting. Colour contrast should also be high (although there are elements which are reliant on your theme colours).
Localisation
We have improved localisation support across admin and frontend interfaces and improved date/time formatting consistency.
Calendar display
Our calendar now displays 12/24 hour clock that is easy to select both in the admin and frontend.
Users can select which month and date for the calendar to display (if you don’t want to display today’s month).
Our calendar is fully responsive.
Changelog
To see a full list of everything we’ve worked on, head to our changelog.
Product roadmap
Thanks to the feedback from the lifetime deal and talking to many of you, our next steps are clear and have been for awhile.
It’s taken much longer than anticipated to improve the accessibility, security and performance of the calendar, but I’m glad we took the time to build that foundation.
Looking ahead, we’re going to be focused on event templates, blocks, and page builder integrations.
After that, we’re going to work on importers (from The Events Calendar and Google calendar).
Then submission forms (probably integrations with Gravity forms, WP forms, and WS forms).
Then finally, we will start work on tickets.
If you think we’ve missed something out. Or if you need something specific from the list I’ve shared above, please don’t hesitate to share a feature request.
Reflections and wrapping up
That’s it for this product update. It’s been a big and busy few weeks.
To be honest with you, I wish we were going faster. I thought we’d be firmly in “templates, blocks and page builder” phase by now, but we’re still 1-2 weeks away from it. And it seems like we are perpetually 1-2 weeks away.
I’m aware about the trade-off we’re making by investing in our foundations at the expense of new features (and new customers). It might make sense now, but at some point, the trade-off must be made in the opposite direction.
I can’t wait to start building more integrations and getting new customers.