The Transcript

Brian Clark s Lessons From a Decade of Developing Successful WordPress Products

Voiceover: You’re listening to The Digital Entrepreneur, the show for folks who want to discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services. This podcast is a production of Digital Commerce Institute, the place to be for digital entrepreneurs.

DCI features an in-depth, ongoing instructional academy, plus a live education and networking summit where entrepreneurs from across the globe meet in person. For more information, go to Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce.

Jerod Morris: Welcome back to The Digital Entrepreneur. I’m your host, Jerod Morris, VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital, and this is episode No. 15 of The Digital Entrepreneur.

In today’s episode, we are going to expound on the topic of WordPress product development that we broached back in episode 13, so two episodes ago. That episode was titled WordPress Product Development: Start with the Business Problem and featured a snippet from a Digital Commerce Academy case study that I hosted with Chris Lema.

Today, I’m going to pick Brian Clark’s brain a bit about WordPress product development because he knows a thing or two about it, having developed themes, plugins, and now, of course, a revolutionary SaaS application for WordPress called the Rainmaker Platform.

With that said, let me bring Brian in here, of course, the founder and CEO of Rainmaker Digital, so we can pick his brain. Brian, how are you?

Brian Clark: Don’t pick too hard. I’m getting up there.

Jerod Morris: Getting up there, yes, but you have plenty of experience to draw on.

Brian Clark: Now, Jerod. The answer is, “No, you’re still a young and devastatingly handsome man,” is what you’re supposed to say, but that’s okay. We’ll work on it.

Jerod Morris: Okay, so let’s mine this experience of yours, limited as it may be. At what point did you realize that developing products for WordPress would be the right path for Copyblogger back when you launched Copyblogger just as a blog but that didn’t have any products attached to it in the beginning?

The Point When Brian Realized That Developing WordPress Products Was the Right Path for Copyblogger

Brian Clark: Yeah, it wasn’t our first product. That was an online course, which we’ve talked about before, but it’s really a quite interesting story because WordPress started in 2005. I started playing with WordPress with my first site in late 2005 and then launched Copyblogger in 2006, January, on WordPress, totally open source. No paid products, no anything. There was no premium market whatsoever.

All throughout 2006, basically just worked on creating content, building the audience, and all that good stuff. My right-hand man at the time was Chris Pearson, who was my designer. He designed a really cutting-edge design for Copyblogger that really made a name for him in the design community. But he really didn’t want to take clients, and of course, I didn’t blame him. At that point, I was leaving any kind of client-based business and was looking for a different business model.

You go to 2007, and of course, that’s when we launched Teaching Sells. So it was 2008, and Chris had been developing themes for another project, a video project that we had. At that time, everything was free. You would develop a theme and give it away for free, and you would have links in the footer that would go wherever you want.

At that time, you may remember those good old days, Jerod, that was a hell of an SEO strategy, so that was really how you got paid with WordPress themes. I don’t remember the name of that theme. That shows you I am getting old, but it was massively popular. That’s because we distributed it off of Copyblogger. Makes sense.

We sold a property, the video property, and included that free theme with all those links for six figures. I used that money to basically support myself to develop Teaching Sells, so I didn’t have to take side projects anymore. Pearson went off and, I think, invested heavily in hookers and blow for a while there and then kind of disappeared. I’m just joking, Chris. Maybe I’m not. I don’t know.

Then Chris comes back, and he’s like, “You know what? I’m not making free themes anymore. I want to sell themes,” and I’m like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Is anyone doing that?” And he goes, “Yeah, there’s this guy, Brian Gardner ” For those of you who are not making the connection, he’s a partner in our company right now. Brian is, not Chris.

He’s like, “Yeah, Brian Gardner is selling themes, making $30,000 a month,” and I’m like, “Okay, I’m listening.” That was the beginning of the WordPress premium market, Brian Gardner, our guy, and then we jumped in it pretty quickly thereafter, but we didn’t build a theme.

We built a design framework, and that was called Thesis. Chris started it on his own. Then he came to me, and he said, “Look, I want to make this big. I don’t want to do marketing. I don’t want to do anything. I just want to do the development.” I said, “Okay.”

This was in 2008, I believe, coming into the fall. We formed DIYthemes and he was doing about $10,000 a month in sales. We partnered up, and pretty soon that was $10,000 a day–and there you have it. The interesting thing there is that the premium market really blossomed because people were really paying for support more than anything.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. You know what’s interesting there is, obviously, you talked about the partnership. You partnered with somebody who was really good at the development part. You were really good at the marketing part. That seems to be a pretty good formula for folks to follow, for people who want to get out there with a product and maybe feel like they don’t have the development chops. That path of partnering, do you think that that’s something that people should consider if this is an area that they want to get into?

Why Starting with the Business Problem–As Chris Lema Discussed Two Weeks Ago–Is an Absolute Must

Brian Clark: Yeah, because I think there’s an incredibly large amount of rather savvy marketing-type people from a content standpoint. Maybe they have an audience. Look at Michael Hyatt. He ended up developing his own WordPress theme. It’s not like he’s like us and StudioPress. We have the most popular design framework on the planet. It’s on so many WordPress sites it boggles the mind, but as far as Michael is concerned, getting some developers to put that together because people love Michael and want to buy his theme, that’s a good product right there.

There’s a lot of different ways you can come at it without being a developer. Reflecting a little on what Chris Lema has already said, developers know code but they don’t necessarily know business. They don’t necessarily know marketing. They don’t know how to identify the business problem. You know what I’m saying? That’s why it’s such a good marriage.

Jerod Morris: Well, that’s the other interesting part of your story. You didn’t know when you started Copyblogger that you were eventually going to be developing themes, but you got into that. Part of that is because you started with a business problem when you started Copyblogger.

Again, as Chris Lema discussed on that last episode, starting with the business problem is so important, and it’s where people need to start from. In addition to that, and you said that you agree with that, what other tips do you have for where people should start and maybe mistakes that people make as they’re thinking about getting into the WordPress premium market?

The Biggest Mistake People Make When Trying to Create a Premium WordPress Product

Brian Clark: WordPress, for me, has always been, “What’s my problem?” Now, again, there are all sorts of plugins and themes now. Frankly, if you use them, you can identify things that could be better, and that’s a business problem. That’s an opportunity right there.

When we first started, you couldn’t do anything. People that don’t remember what it was like in 2006, 2007, when you couldn’t just enter an alternate title for Google and then have a different one on the page, things we take for granted, and it was stuff like that. It went hand-in-hand with Chris and I.

Chris would look at what made me upset that I couldn’t do it, that I had to ask him. I’m very independent, if you haven’t noticed, so I get mad when I can’t just do something that I think should be easy. Chris would go do it, and he’d laugh at me because I couldn’t code. But then I’m like, “Well, Chris, other people have these problems. Most of the content creators out there are like me, not like you.” That’s what a design framework was designed to do–take the code out of these very simple business and marketing-related functions that come with publishing content, so identifying the problem.

I saw something earlier, I think it was an article about developing your own business or developing a business, and it was, “Sit down and list 10 problems that you have right now, and then figure out very concrete ways how you would solve them.” That’s all we did with WordPress. We were users of WordPress, but here’s the interesting thing. I think this is applicable today as much as it was back then.

When we developed products, the WordPress community at that time, and really, kind of now, that’s developers and designers. Just remember that you are not building for them. The problems I had are not the same thing that they would have.

That’s why we owned it. We thought like businesspeople instead of like developers. Really, I thought like myself because these were my problems. So that’s the biggest mistake, number one, starting with something like, “Oh, wouldn’t this be cool.” That’s a developer mindset. Sometimes you get lucky, and it works–but don’t mistake luck for strategy.

The worst advice I ever see given out there is someone who got lucky and then they tell people, “Well, just make whatever you want.” Come on. Just because you got lucky doesn’t mean there wasn’t an existing market desire. There was. You just didn’t know it. You got lucky. It’s much better to find an existing problem and then solve it. Easy.

Jerod Morris: Luck is not a business strategy.

Brian Clark: Luck is not a business strategy. It helps, but it’s not.

Jerod Morris: So let me ask you this. It’s interesting about WordPress. I remember when I first got into WordPress, and what was so cool about it was, obviously, that WordPress itself was free and there were tons of free themes and tons of free plugins. It felt like you could do all of this stuff for free. And obviously, you realize the limitation of these free plugins, these free themes, and you start to see this premium market crop up.

Yet paying for stuff on WordPress, there was a point there where it was still kind of weird, but there was obviously a big opportunity because there weren’t that many people doing it. You contrast that with now where people just understand that, for a good theme, for good plugins that work and are going to be supported, you’re going to pay for them.

Yet there are a lot more people out there doing it now. It might seem like the opportunity isn’t quite as great as it was before, but people are more conditioned now to paying for things. It’s an interesting balance. What do you think now of the opportunity to get in for WordPress products?

How Brian Views the Current Level of Opportunity in the Premium WordPress Marketplace

Brian Clark: I think it’s awesome. You make a good point because trailblazers can reap some big rewards. They’re the first to the goldmine. They’re also the ones who take the arrows in the back. That part is gone. An interesting illustration here is in the WordPress managed-hosting environment, which we’re part of with Synthesis.

Think about that. When we started out with WordPress, it was just install that was the selling point. “You can install WordPress with one click on blah, blah, blah,” and we always had trouble. When Copyblogger would hit the Digg homepage–that’s dating myself–and just thousands of people just stampeded us at one time, you know how I spent my day? With my hosting admin trying to keep the site up because WordPress is, without being optimized a certain way, and you know this

Jerod Morris: I remember those days.

Brian Clark: Exactly. You remember why you were part of the original team that became Synthesis?

Jerod Morris: It came into being for that reason.

Brian Clark: Exactly, because publishers who were successful would lose their minds if they succeed at their goal of getting viral traffic and then the site goes down. It used to be a real struggle–again, a business problem. That’s where Synthesis came from. That’s where WP Engine came from. Pagely was actually the first one.

It’s that, “Hey, WordPress is special,” in many senses of the word. It may power 25 percent of the Internet, but it has its own issues with its database structure and all that kind of thing. So you had to have hosting optimized for WordPress, not just whatever you want to do, GoDaddy-type stuff.

Again, it was a business problem, and hosting was our biggest problem. I never wanted to get into the hosting business, but once I realized that I wanted to do Rainmaker, I realized we got to get hosting down. I said, “Well, in the meantime, let’s host ourselves,” and that’s how we...