LearnDash is now part of the Liquid Web family of brands, I learned a ton along this journey.

Selling my business was one of the most stressful and challenging things that I have ever done as an entrepreneur. In the end, it took just about a year from start to finish (October 2020 – September 2021).

If you’re interested, you can check out the official announcement on the LearnDash blog, or check out Liquid Web’s press release.

LearnDash started making sales in early 2013. It was meant to be a lifestyle business for me, initially. But slowly over time the company grew into something more than that. With employees and customers from all over the world, LearnDash carved out a unique space in both the WordPress and e-learning industries.

When the pandemic arrived in 2020, LearnDash was very well poised to be found as people scrambled to create online courses – be it for extra income or to augment their entire business model. It was an insane time in more ways than one. The already healthy company grew even more in team size and in revenue. It was clear that the business was bigger than me, and far from the lifestyle business I created.

It didn’t take too long before I started receiving offers for LearnDash from venture capitalists. Truth is, this has been the case for the past few years, but during the pandemic that interest skyrocketed. I would get contacted literally every other day from investment firms looking to get a piece of the e-learning pie.

Now, I have always been one to pursue happiness, and this was the main driver for selling LearnDash. The truth was that I no longer had the same inspiration that I did for the industry, and this meant that I was getting in the way of the company’s true potential. LearnDash is bigger, and more important, than me. It deserved more so that it could reach that next phase of its potential.

The continued growth trajectory for LearnDash is huge, especially since it straddles both the WordPress and e-learning industries so well (which is unlike any other WordPress product, ever). Both the WordPress and e-learning markets will continue to grow in importance, and LearnDash will continue to be a leader in that space. Even more so with the backing and leadership of Liquid Web.

I hired investment bankers to market and sell LearnDash.

Given LearnDash’s unique position across two industries, I felt like professional representation was needed for the sale. In October 2020, I was introduced to the investment banking firm, Angle Advisors. I can say with confidence that had I not done this, LearnDash would have never found its new home with Liquid Web.

These folks are incredibly smart. Much smarter than me. We spent the remainder of 2020 preparing the financials and creating a management presentation. In January of this year, Angle Advisors reached out to hundreds of potential buyers. A large percentage of these companies were interested in learning more. They indicated this by presenting an offer for the company (usually a range). Those that made respectable offers were invited to a management presentation.

Let me tell you something about management presentations: they are stressful, and they are long. Each one that I gave was about two to three hours long, and in it, I discussed everything about the business. Its history, its present status, its position across the markets, the growth opportunities, and so on. It’s an informative presentation and a sales presentation all in one.

When all the presentations were done, the stopwatch began. The companies had to decide if they wanted to make a formal offer. Only three companies decided to drop out of the process. The rest submitted offers.

Moving into the due diligence phase.

With Angle Advisors’ guidance, an offer was accepted and the “one-on-one” relationship with the potential buyer could begin. I know that I said the management presentation is stressful, but honestly the due diligence phase is the most stressful part of it all. Just because you enter into this phase doesn’t mean that you will for sure close the deal. Either party can decide to move on for a variety of reasons.

In this phase, you set an agreed upon closing date for the deal. Leading up to that date, you have to provide the buying company with any piece of information that they request. Information on financials, market, product, legal, and so on — reaching back three to four years (sometimes longer). There are meetings, many meetings. The days are long and tiring for everyone involved.

In the latter stages of this phase is when the lawyers really start to get involved. Luckily for me, I didn’t have to worry about that too much since I was working with Angle Advisors (and they brought in Varnum Law to provide the counsel).

Once all the requested information has been shared, all questions answered, and all contractual agreements made from a legal standpoint, the closing can occur, and the buyer becomes the new owner. You finally can “hand over the keys to the house”.

LearnDash is in the perfect home with Liquid Web, and holy crap are they ready to take it to the next level! I’m especially thrilled that Chris will be taking an active role as General Manager. He is incredibly smart, and has deep roots in the online education space. He gets it.

What is next after you sell a business?

This is probably the most common question people have for a founder after they sell a business (besides curiosity on the sales price, which I am not sharing, sorry).

As I mentioned earlier, I live my life by prioritizing happiness. This has led LearnDash into the Liquid Web portfolio, and in the near term I am still very much part of the LearnDash team. I am in the middle of some exciting initiatives that I’ll be helping to see to the end (LearnDash 4.0 being one that I’m very eager about getting released). I will then be an active advisor to the company.

I get excited about new challenges. WordPress and e-learning have been good to me, but I’m running on fumes at this point. I’ve been involved in these two industries my entire life (e-learning since 2004 and WordPress since 2006).

I have interests outside of software and WordPress that I will have time to pursue. One in particular is starting a fitness brand with my wife, Lorena. I will be documenting this journey, so if you’re interested in hearing about the ups-and-downs of that adventure, check back here often.

I have learned from people sharing, so I plan to do the same.

I have learned a lot over the years about running (and now selling) a business. Things like competing, brand positioning, driving sales, and more. I plan to share these lessons learned on this blog. I’ll share exactly what it takes to build a multi-million dollar WordPress business across two industries.

Think of it like a conversation between friends. I had so many questions when starting out, and while there is no substitute for direct experience, a little guidance from someone who has been there before can be reassuring.

I won’t be selling courses or products, just writing. If you would like these insider tips, then just sign-up below. By doing so, you can also email me at anytime with your questions. All you have to do is click “reply” on a new post, and it’ll land in my inbox.

#WordPress #entrepreneurship

WordCamps will eventually become a thing again. The clock is going to be re-set a few years.Remember when WordCamps were a thing?

It seems like so long ago when people would pack up for a long weekend to attend talks and cruise sponsorship tables.

The idea of a WordCamp now sounds pretty nice. Especially because every conference since COVID has been a virtual event. People are burnt out of those. Virtual events are flat-out boring.

But you know what? Before COVID, I remember people getting burnt out from the WordCamp experience. The same old talks, same old swag, same old travel issues, same old tiredness due to staying out too late.

When we get through the worst of the pandemic, WordCamps will feel special again.

We were at a tipping point for WordCamps before 2020. Something needed to change.

Organizers were struggling to find ways to make their event special, always trying to “one-up” the previous year. Speaker & sponsor dinners, after parties, and free stuff were all starting to lose their appeal.

This is not to imply that they were poorly organized. The folks planning these events put in a lot of their free time and energy to make them happen. Some of my close friends in WordPress were organizers. They wore themselves out in an effort to make the event enjoyable for everyone.

The problem was that the organizers were almost too good. They all leveraged the same winning formula for the event experience and flow. It worked, but it was predictable after the third year.

As a result, WordCamps started to lose their uniqueness. The presentations themselves were going too broad instead of deep.

All that said, in (what looks like) 2022, that slate will be wiped clean!

If there is ever a time to be a WordCamp organizer, it will be in 2022-2023.

People are aching to be back to normal. They want to mingle with others, chat in hallways, attend talks, and network with handshakes (okay… elbow bumps) instead of Zoom. Sponsors will have dollars to spend as well!

The events will be a breath of fresh air! No need to try to “one-up” the previous year. Getting back to basics will be perfectly fine.

Sure, some new health and safety guidelines will be in place, but those will make the experience all that much more enjoyable.

And by 2025, we'll need to start thinking again about innovating the experience. How that looks, I don't know.

One option is to go smaller instead of going bigger. Stop trying to outdo the previous year. Get back to basics and focus on the content.

#WordPress

The answer may surprise you.

If you are creating a WordPress plugin today, then you probably have just assumed that you should have a free version. I mean, it makes sense. You can potentially get a ton of exposure right away from the WordPress Repo.

But what if you don’t?

What if you experience the fate of so many others where you put your heart and soul into your free plugin, create a “pro” version, and adoption rates are low? What is your Plan B?

Most WordPress entrepreneurs don’t realize that there is another way to approach the market, and that’s by creating a paid (premium) offering only. It’s more work, but the work that you do can pay off big just like if you had a free version that became popular on the Repo.

I should clarify that this post does not necessarily apply to plugin creators who have created an add-on to another plugin. That said, it could apply as I have seen folks have success with this approach.

LearnDash has never had a free version.

This comes as a surprise to some folks. LearnDash has never had a free version. The choice was out of necessity more than anything.

When I started LearnDash, I was working as an e-learning consultant. My days were full already, so I couldn’t spend my time supporting free users. I honestly never even considered having a free version.

Instead, the year prior I spent all of my time building up a search engine presence though blogging, and that paid off. But not just in a monetary sense. It allowed LearnDash to venture into “non-WordPress” markets more easily because the brand recognition wasn’t dependent on the WordPress Repo.

What I often see today is that folks will create their free version and really depend on it for getting traction. It’s not impossible by any means as there are plenty of popular plugins and themes that have started this way. But, it’s putting all your eggs into one basket. On top of it, it’s a basket that you have absolutely zero control over.

The rating system on the WordPress Repo sucks.

Before you jump all over this comment, let me say that I am not implying the volunteers who manage and monitor the reviews are doing a bad job. They are doing the absolute best that they can, and we owe them our thanks!

It’s not the people, it’s the process. I have never been a fan of it.

From both a business and consumer standpoint, the ratings on the WordPress Repo are getting close to the point of being completely useless.

That may seem harsh, and perhaps it is to some degree. But it’s the byproduct of the simple fact that the Repo ratings are so easily gamed.

Off the top of my head, I can think of at least five plugins that are gaming it for bogus five-star reviews. You know, the ones where the reviewer just opened the account and that same day left a four word, five-star rating.

It would be so easy to add some measures in place to help combat this. For example, just have a waiting period on an account before it can be used to make any kind of review.

Fake reviews aside, there is something else frustrating about the review system, and it’s a major reason why I have avoided it. In WordPress there is a subset of users who will use plugin reviews as a way to “blackmail” creators at the worst, and to “make a point” at best.

Some of my closest contacts in WordPress have great plugins on the Repo. I’m talking extremely robust pieces of software… for FREE!

They pour their entire energy into creating best-in-class functionality. Yet, every month they get 1-star reviews because someone has a misunderstanding about a setting, and they blow up on the reviews giving it one-star in the process.

There is another benefit to not being on the Repo beyond my opinion of the reviews.

My opinion of the Repo review system is just that, my opinion. Some people agree with me, while others understand that this exists but see the upside to it.

But there is a very real business reason why the Repo isn’t ideal for software creators. It reinforces a certain perception of the software: that its only use is in the WordPress ecosystem.

Since the very beginning, I positioned LearnDash to be a competitor against the other LMS options out there, outside the direct WordPress space. This meant I had to be where my competitors were located, and they weren’t located on the WordPress Repo.

I found that this switch in focus also helped drive the sales messaging and framing of the LearnDash value proposition. It gave a great degree of clarity to the User Models that I targeted in the last brand refresh.

Today, LearnDash competes with the biggest brands in the online course creation and LMS space – and that’s not accidentally. That was 100% intentional from the very beginning of the project.

Again: all about message focus.

This focus extended to support as well. With no free version, the support team could focus on helping only paying customers.

There is something very refreshing about this. The relationship is more clearly defined in that context. Customers (most anyhow) are far more committed.

I’ve seen some outlandish demands and expectations from people asking for support on the WordPress Repo. I honestly don’t understand what people expect… it’s free, of course there won’t be instant access or overly in-depth replies.

That said, you can get a ton of visibility on the Repo.

Today is a lot different from 2012.

When I started LearnDash from a blog in March 2012, getting rankings was a lot easier. Search engine optimization was a different beast. It’s a lot harder today. Not impossible, but harder.

So if I am 100% honest, if I were to launch a new piece of software today that relied upon WordPress, then I would consider the benefits of a free version and gaining visibility from the Repo.

But with a (very big) caveat: the upgraded versions would be SaaS.

This is going to become the next evolution in WordPress in my opinion. We see it to some degree today, but this will start to become the norm. Especially true as we see more and more investment into the open source project from the world’s biggest brands.

The most successful solutions will SaaS-up their offerings, so they can have a little more control over the environment, and more insight into their users. In turn, their products will be better, both from a feature standpoint and support. The businesses will be more profitable and hold higher valuations than plugin and theme businesses today.

So if it were me, my intent would be to use the free version on the Repo to allow for a quicker path for obtaining users and getting real-time feedback. This in turn would help drive the development roadmap for the SaaS.

To make the free version a good sales tool, I would make sure that:

1. It has features that solve a major pain-piont or makes people money.

2. It has a full-time staff dedicated to replying to every support message.

3. It has an eloquent way to nudge people to the pro versions.

Since it will be a SaaS, a two-week free trial of upgraded features would be effortless to do and allow for additional customer nurturing campaigns during that time.

Imagine installing a free plugin and allowing folks to get a free trial of all the Pro features (on the SaaS) with a single click in the dashboard. They get used to the cool functionality and if they don’t pay — whoops — it’s gone. Not against GPL because this cool functionality is being delivered from the SaaS platform. The plugin is merely the conduit.

In order for this approach to work, the free version can’t be bare bones. It needs to provide actual value to people who decide that they don’t want to upgrade.

Right now, there are plugins on the Repo that attempt to do this but their free versions are so limited that it feels like a bait-and-switch. This has to be avoided to gain trust upfront from users.

I like this model a lot because a traditional SaaS is also more “sticky” so renewal rates will be a lot higher than in the traditional WordPress business model. More predictable long-term revenue allows businesses to deliver a positive experience in a more efficient manner for their users.

The WordPress Repo shouldn’t be avoided, but it most certainly shouldn’t be your only market strategy.

In the end, you should not avoid the WordPress Repo entirely. It’s a great marketing channel that can give you visibility quickly compared to the traditional marketing efforts.

And you know what? I have faith that the gripes I outlined earlier will eventually be addressed by the great folks who give their time to the WordPress project, making those complaints a moot point (which would be a great thing).

The key takeaway here is not that the WordPress Repo is bad. It’s that you really need to think bigger about how you market software on WordPress. Who exactly is it that can benefit from your product? And that answer should 100% not be “people using WordPress”.

Think bigger. 🙌

#WordPress

If you are selling a WordPress product then you have some very good options available to you for e-commerce.

Most often I see people sell with either WooCommerce and build their own licensing mechanism, or Easy Digital Downloads (and use their software licensing add-on).

Absolutely nothing wrong with these two options. They get the job done and people have built their entire businesses on them.

Sales of LearnDash don’t use either solution, but instead a 3rd party hosted (off-WordPress) solution instead.

What LearnDash came from.

For a long time sales took place with Digital Product Delivery (DPD). When I first started LearnDash I was working a full-time consulting career so DPD was a good option for quick, no hassle set-up.

I didn’t have a need for licenses back then so it didn’t matter that this wasn’t a feature.

Well, it didn’t matter until it did eventually matter.

I had my devs build a unique licensing mechanism for DPD. It has become quite elaborate over time but the two main things that it did for us:

1. Created licenses with various domain permissions

2. Created an account for the customer on the support site

And as is common place the customer loses access to support & updates when the license expired without renewing.

I really liked DPD. In fact, I still like it. Their team is small but the support is always very friendly and responsive.

Their development on the other hand lagged behind many of the other platforms out there. They do about one or two major updates a year, but in all of the years with that platform these updates never really benefited the LearnDash use-case. Frustratingly, not a single update was for accepting subscription payments.

Selecting the new platform.

I knew a subscription platform was needed, but preferred a non-WordPress option (perhaps a post for another time). So I began researching some of the popular platforms built specifically for subscriptions. This brought me to Recurly, Chargify, ChargeBee, FastSpring, Paddle, and Zoho Subscriptions.

The better part of 2017 was spent going over all these platforms, and Chargify was a front-runner mainly because the popular form building plugin Gravity Forms transitioned to it for their own billing. But something bothered me about these platforms. Mainly is that they are quite expensive for doing something that is rather simple.

By way of example, Paddle charges 5% +.50 cents per sale. When you consider that PayPal and Stripe start at 2.9% +.30 cents per transaction it makes it hard to justify cutting into the per-sale profit just to add subscriptions. At least it was hard for me to justify, so that eliminated Paddle (and FastSpring for similar reasons).

Chargify, ChargeBee, and Recurly were intriguing options. All three platforms are well-known for their service. However, when you consider what I was currently paying for selling digital products and compared it to the pricing of these companies then you can understand my hesitation.

The company paid a whopping (wait for it)… $16/mo for DPD.

No transaction fees added to PayPal or Stripe. Just a flat $16. Predictable and (in my mind) under-priced. I would have paid more as it was quite reliable.

Knowing this, let’s consider Recurly.

Immediately it would cost multiple-hundreds of dollars per month more. Not a big deal. That’s the cost of doing business and using tech that aligns with business objectives. What kept us from pulling the trigger with Recurly (and the other platforms for that matter) was their expectation of getting a percentage of monthly revenue on top of the hundreds of monthly dollars.

Oh, and $0.10 fee per transaction, which literally makes me laugh… For real? Need that extra ten cents to get by, eh?

Truth told I could get over feeling trolled by the $0.10 per transaction, but I could not get over coughing up a percentage of monthly revenue “just because”. The subscription billing industry is really configured like private health insurance it seems. You pay for the right to pay more and you start to wonder what exactly it is you get in the first place.

Landing on Zoho Subscriptions.

I’ll admit. I initially wasn’t sure about Zoho Subscriptions.

I actually came across them in January 2017 but sort of wrote them off. They seemed like a third-tier option and I was early in my research. However, after months of digging I ultimately came back to them because of their cost structure.

Instead of paying hundreds of dollars a month, Zoho Subscriptions is just $60/mo. No additional transaction fees. And most important, no random requirement that a percentage of monthly revenue needs to be forked-over. A PayPal merchant account was needed to offer that payment option, so that brings the total to $89/mo. Still a far cry from the other options.

So for $89 each month I get pretty much everything a platform like Recurly offers without the major fiscal downsides. I spent the last couple months of last year re-building internal scripts to integrate with Zoho (which has a pretty solid API) and went live with it in 2018.

I would be lying if I said that Zoho Subscriptions was perfect. My biggest frustration is the support that they offer.

For some reason they don’t have a real ticketing system (despite selling a support desk solution…).

Instead, they have phone support but it’s not really that good for technical requests. If you call with technical issues, they raise an internal ticket. You don’t get a ticket number or anything. They just say that they will email you (eventually… and after you follow-up). This gets even more conveluted when you have multiple tickets with them. You don’t have a ticket number so you can’t reference it directly – so you end up having to describe the issue all over again when you call to check on a status.

Calling people for support takes me back to the Dell computer days. Seems antiquated to be honest and can be frustrating.

Another thing that I have noticed about Zoho Subscriptions is that there are so many dependencies that whenever you try to do any kind of “delete” action you are presented with an error message. Honestly, more than I have ever seen in any application… ever.

By way of example, my billing rep had to delete a customer record because they requested we remove all info we had because of GDPR. Okay, so delete the profile right?

Didn’t work.

First my rep had to remove all transactions. Okay, they went to that section and deleted the transactions. Then clicked delete on the profile.

Didn’t work.

Oh, my billing rep had refund credit notes associated with the account, so had to go back and remove those. Clicked delete on the profile.

Didn’t work.

I think you get the point. This kind of time wasting makes me livid. My billing rep had to go through and delete everything, and still it didn’t work. So, they had to call into Zoho support. Wasn’t solved on the phone of course, they had to raise an internal ticket. Turns out we stumbled across a bug in their system so they eventually worked it out so the info could be purged. Still, we would have needed to go through all those delete steps all the same.

After some initial growing pains, the team finally got Zoho Subscriptions working with the company’s internal systems. The interface isn’t going to win any awards, but now there are no problems accepting payment and managing subscriptions. And well, that was the main objective in the end.

So if you’re in the market for an off-WordPress subscription solution then I’d recommend taking a look at Zoho Subscriptions. You can create a development environment for free without the need to provide a credit card. This is a nice bonus as you can build everything out first before needing to invest into the system.

My Rating: 7/10

+Great API and docs

+Easy to set-up

+Best pricing on the market for subscription services

-Support is frustrating, at best

-Odd UX (quirky) for certain tasks

#WordPress

Just like “lifetime support & updates”, renewal discounts are becoming a thing of the past.

When LearnDash first started there were no renewal discounts because, well, there were no renewals.

It’s hard to believe but that was where the WordPress industry was at the time. You paid once for your products and you had lifetime support & updates.

Today you will be hard pressed to find any business running this kind of pyramid-scheme pricing.

Unless of course the business is a pyramid scheme.

Renewals are now common in the WordPress plugin & theme space, but for many years it was normal to provide a discount on the renewal purchase.

I will admit that I have never really questioned why this was the case. If I were to guess, I think that renewal discounts were implemented because the WordPress folks pioneering the renewal pricing structure weren’t sure how people would react to having to renew a license. So, they tried to “soften the blow” a bit by offering a discount.

But just as the WordPress industry needed to evolve away from “forever” pricing, it must also evolve to eliminate discounted renewals.

Discounting renewals unfairly devalues your offering.

When you really think about it, offering discounted renewals doesn’t make business sense.

What I realized is that the discount on our renewals was essentially devaluing our future work. That wasn’t fair to our team who worked so hard on creating and supporting the new functionality.

Now, one argument is that the support burden decreases in year two. I completely disagree with this sentiment for two reasons:

1. New features elicit new support inquiries, no matter when someone purchases.

2. There are people who will always ask for support whether it’s year one, two, or five.

I only speak from our experience but I suspect those of you with software products can attest to a similar trend. I think this trend is part of why WordPress oriented theme & plugin providers are shifting to standard annual renewals.

Full-priced renewals are necessary for WordPress products.

Today we see so many WordPress products shifting to the SaaS sector. I’ll admit that I too have been tempted.

Why?

Because support is far more difficult for WordPress plugins and themes than SaaS offerings.

The number of possible plugin and theme configurations coupled with hosting specifications means that troubleshooting can take a terribly long time for a support rep (and possibly developers should it require deeper investigation).

Just consider this (very common) scenario: you push out an update to your software. Person A updates and is super excited about the improvements. Person B updates and suddenly their theme’s CSS is no longer rendering properly on certain pages. They are mad.

Same update. Two different experiences. Two different reactions. This is common place for WordPress and a reminder of what life is like when you don’t control the technical environment.

To bypass this headache plugin and theme shops have decided that they want to control the environment by SaaS’ing their functionality. While this can be good for both the business and the consumer, it also takes away one of the most attractive things about WordPress in the first place: feature flexibility.

Plugins and themes need to remain non-hosted in order to preserve the core value proposition of WordPress. However, this means higher support costs to the business. The logical conclusion is that the renewals need to be full-priced to offset this burden.

This is a major reason why the discounted renewal program was retired.

Who is doing full-priced renewals?

Actually WordPress businesses of all sizes no longer offer renewal discounts. If anything LearnDash was late to the game…

Off the top of my head:

• GravityForms
• WooCommerce
• WPForms
• HeroThemes
• ThriveThemes
• WP SimplePay Pro
• AffiliateWP
• Restrict Content Pro
• MemberPress

And many, many more.

If you are a plugin or theme provider then have a look around yourself and you may be surprised to see how many companies have shifted their policy. You won’t be alone. Quite the opposite. You will actually have some very visible company (see WooCommerce).

The company experienced practically zero friction in this change. In our case the new policy doesn’t impact existing customers. We honor the contract they agreed to upon purchase as long as they remain with us. Should they end their business relationship, then their legacy pricing expires as well.

I can also put your mind at ease on one thing: removing renewal discounts has had zero negative impact on new customer acquisition.

Not so long from now I suspect that we will all look at renewal discounts in the same light as we look at lifetime support & updates, as an unsustainable policy that hurts both consumers and providers.

#WordPress #entrepreneurship