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  • #221868
    Tom
    Lead Developer
    Lead Developer

    I think it was less about the pricing/structure and more about how I set it up – it was a little too confusing.

    A week isn’t very long, but it can’t paint a pretty clear picture when it comes to trends – Google Analytics is great at that.

    Right now, I’m not too worried about it. GP has about 15,000 customers (awesome!) – other popular theme companies are in the hundreds of thousands, so it’s not like we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel.

    Also, it’s given me motivation to start creating premium themes – I have an awesome one almost done, and more on the way πŸ™‚

    #237863
    Nick

    I know I’m a little late to the party, but I can’t resist a topic about business models and pricing! ;p

    If you don’t mind, I’d love to just give you my 2 cents:

    * 39,95 for unlimited sites is really underpriced for the value you get. (Even with yearly renewals).

    A lot of people will be using GP to earn money and build sites for clients, which is great, but the current pricing doesn’t take that into account.

    I would encourage you to bring back some sort of agency type license and distinguish personal from professional licenses.

    Even at something like $99 it would be an insanely good deal, considering most will be charging their clients (probably many) multiples of that. Adding something like a “white labeling” addon exclusively for this license would make it all the more valuable and great positioning against your other option.

    * Recurring billing

    Another thing I would consider is automatic/recurring renewals. As long as you are upfront about it and make it easy for people to cancel (and just remind them of a renewal coming up) – this is both convenient (for customers) and predictable/consistent (for you) (which also makes it a lot easier to hire additional help if you need it, since you pretty much know what to expect). Add in automatic renewal discount and you’re golden.

    Moreover, adding a “renewal window” were you give manual renewals a [45] day period to renew their license with the renewal/loyalty discount, or let it lapse and later renew at the full current price, would be a good option.

    This stimulates loyalty and ensures it gets rewarded. Lot’s of membership sites, WooCommerce and EDD also use a similar model. It’s win-win and has nothing in common with the d-bag marketers sneaky approach.

    * Slowly increase the price (for new members only)

    As you keep improving the theme and addons, the more valuable it becomes and this warrants a price increase. Even if this means a little less total sales, it also means higher margins and less support.

    $39 x 1000 = $39.000
    $49 x 800 = $39.200 (20% less sales = 20% less support = less hours for roughly the same bottom line)

    You deserve to be compensated for your hard work. And you need a healthy profit to be able to sustain it long term.

    Something else that comes to mind:

    The more themes you create, the harder it will be to update and support all of them. You see this a lot with certain theme clubs were most themes don’t get updated much after the initial few months.

    You also see this a lot with Android OEM’s – they keep spitting out new phones, essentially leaving the previous ones without anything but security patches.

    Short term this makes a lot of sense, since new stuff brings in more business, but it also results in a lot of pissed of people.

    This makes it hard to create loyal customers and makes your business model more transactional than relational – meaning you have to constantly replenish and make up for leaving customers. This kills a lot of businesses long term.

    Especially if it’s just you and/or a small team, the leaner the better most of the time.

    Anyway, I’ll stop rambling now.

    GP is a truly excellent theme and we all benefit if you have the means and proper compensation to keep it that way!

    Thanks & keep rocking πŸ™‚

    #237906
    Tom
    Lead Developer
    Lead Developer

    Hi Nick,

    Thanks so much for your suggestions – I really appreciate it.

    The yearly renewal for updates and support is a new thing (started October 2). It’s been an interesting experiment.

    I’ve had an influx of traffic, and sales have pretty much stayed the same. So sales are technically “down”, but evening out nicely regardless.

    Of course, the yearly support/updates model is important for GeneratePress moving forward, so it will be sticking around. I think it will ensure the continued growth of GeneratePress for many years to come, which is very exciting for all of us.

    Professional/Personal licensing is something I might look at re-introducing sometime in the future, but it’s important to all of us that sales are steady and keep increasing. I saw disturbing numbers last time I tried this, which might have just been how I implemented it.

    GeneratePress is my one and only theme, which I agree is very important as it enables me to focus on it 100% and continue to make it awesome. Our latest GP Premium update is a product of that.

    As for pricing + unlimited websites, it’s very tough. The WordPress theme market is incredibly saturated these days by themes that throw on a nice coat of paint, but are atrocious under the hood. As a WordPress.org theme reviewer, I see this all the time. I think the unlimited websites gives us a bit of a boost when it comes to competition, and numbers show most people only active their license on 1-3 websites anyways.

    Since GP has started, pricing has gone from $20 to $30 to $39.95 as it is now. It may increase in the future as more add-ons/features are added.

    I also have plans to release premium child themes – I actually had one 100% complete and ready to release, then my harddrive crashed and I lost it (ugh). This will help our business model moving forward as well.

    One thing I want to stress is the business is extremely healthy right now, even though we are neglected from most “top 10 most popular” theme lists out there (which are all biased and misleading in most ways). GP’s conversion rate is amazing considering the amount of traffic we get.

    WordPress.org made a change to their popular tab algorithm close to a year ago that should have really hurt GP, as we dipped around 30 spots. Luckily, the theme is just too awesome for something like that to keep it down. The algorithm they have now drives me crazy – it’s totally misleading and easy for new themes to game, making it so most of the top 20 themes are terrible. That’s another topic though..

    Ok, I think I’m rambling now.

    I really appreciate your input – thanks for supporting GP, it means a lot to me and my family! πŸ™‚

    #237953
    Mike

    Nick, great points, especially…

    “The more themes you create, the harder it will be to update and support all of them. You see this a lot with certain theme clubs were most themes don’t get updated much after the initial few months.”

    That is why I love GP, I think quality over quantity is key. I also love finding a theme like GP and getting to know the ins and outs, slowly build some custom css and php libraries and being able to reproduce any layout I want. The need for 40+ themes in a club makes no sense to me personally.

    #238747
    Jorge

    The fact that you only have one theme, for me was a strong decision maker, as you mention it, you can focus the 100% of your work on that. So fewer bugs, easier updates/maintenance. Having premium child themes is really awesome.

    On that point, it probably means a bit more work on your side, but I think that plenty of us would like to help out with some child themes. I’m currently working on a couple of those, and since your code is pretty clean, it’s a breeze to do so! The part where you’d get some extra workload would be, of course, reviewing those to meet your quality standards. (Just don’t become a small Themeforest, ew). I wrote a few paragraphs on how this could be feasible to become a GP-Marketplace… which I deleted, mainly because when I reviewed, sounded a bit too complex. But the other reason is, do you’ve got more clients that only use the theme/plugins or that are developers that tinker with it?

    Anyhow, kudos on having 15k+ users!

    #238765
    Tom
    Lead Developer
    Lead Developer

    Thanks, Jorge!

    I think once I get at least one premium child theme released, it will be easier for devs like yourself to see how I did it and follow suit. I would definitely be interested in accepting really awesome child themes from the community.

    Of course, I’d be very strict with the code quality/bloat factor – the thought of Themeforest definitely makes me cringe πŸ™‚

    I know that there’s a decent amount of devs using GP, so hopefully having some sort of child theme program would bring them out.

    #367585
    Steve

    Hi Tom,
    I’m new to GP and loving it so far. I have used my fair share of themes – a lot of them poorly coded too!.

    I want to add my vote for an Agency License.
    As business owner I am more interested in using products that are more likely to be around in 5 yrs – products where the developer hasn’t given up because they were burned out and not making enough money to hire on other people to help run support etc.

    I currently pay another theme company $399/yr with no renewal discount for their agency license. I will not be renewing. Not because of the price, but because their products are buggy, poorly coded and hard to customize.

    I need something flexible, well coded, works on multisite easily and most of all is well supported with ongoing improvements. White labeling would be awesome too!!!!

    GP + Elementor is awesome for my business.
    You need an awesome business too πŸ˜‰

    Respectively,
    Steve D. – aka, “happy customer waiting to pay you more $$$!!!”

    #367716
    Tom
    Lead Developer
    Lead Developer

    Thanks, Steve! Really appreciate the input.

    We have moved to a yearly license model for almost a year now. The next step would likely be a lifetime license – I’m working out the details on that now πŸ™‚

    #369993
    Stephen

    Hi Tom,

    You should definitely increase the price for new customers.

    Whatever you do/change keep the pricing simple.

    A few child themes would be great but I think GP is your not so secret weapon. Adding extra features, like google maps, maybe a slider, embed video, etc, would help attract new customers. Your product rocks, but I thought a few features were missing when thinking about signing up.

    Have you considered a form editor? A form editor would take GP to another level and be very enticing.

    I’m still in the process of designing my first GP site and relaunching my business, which is taking forever. However, my youngest son starts mainstream school in two weeks time and I’ll be free again πŸ™‚ I will definitely be contributing to the ongoing development page when I complete each new project. Tom and Leo are doing a fantastic job!!!

    GP is ridiculously easy to use and worth every penny. I bought GP Premium last Christmas, taking advantage of the discount, and then made a small contribution anyway as I thought it only fair.

    Thanks
    Steve

    #369995
    Sandee

    #

    #370749
    Marge

    I am so happy to see this thread. +1 for the multisite suggestion. I’d definitely pay for an agency subscription. Any ETA on that?

    #370945
    Tom
    Lead Developer
    Lead Developer

    No ETA yet – but definitely open to any and all ideas that are “agency” related πŸ™‚

    #381863
    Simon

    Hi Tom,

    This is actually a very interesting topic as your GP + GPP is definitely a great framework, like Genesis Framework.

    I’d say better and more modern IMHO!

    Anyways, as I have been working on building a new site selling child themes, I stumbled upon StudioPress website.

    They actually sell both of the Genesis Framework + their own child themes.

    Perhaps instead of charging fees to those who bought GPP and future clients of yours, you can make an alteration to your affiliate program and make it as a Reseller Program.

    Where if we are selling child theme based on GPP, then we will have to sell that through our websites, and you will just charge a certain percentage of that GPP framework.

    This way, the millions of us who’s using GP+GPP will help you make more money without any conflicts!

    #434778
    GL

    Of course, they would have to look awesome and use the GP Premium defaults functions to create the settings so people could change the colors and other options using GP Premium

    Hello Tom,

    Ive recently been putting together some child themes, one of things i try to focus on while doing so is not adding anything to the stylesheet that can be controlled by overwriting the GP default layout. That way an end user can go in and easily change up things using the customizer, as it was intended to be.

    Now I see you posted here about using GP Premium functions. Now that of course kicks the creativity up 1000 degrees as we could add some awesome pages and easily export them so the end users are able to import and have a full fledged theme with little to do other than tweak it to fit their needs.

    So my question is, how do we offer the end user the child theme with GP Premium?

    As GP Premium is a purchase, I would not feel comfortable just packaging it with a child theme. Though if there was a way to package it and allow the end user a choice to purchase it, it would certainly expand what we could do with a child theme. My first thought is how dev’s at themeforest package versions of other plugins with their themes, and if you want updates then you either wait for the theme dev to update their theme, or purchase directly from the plugin dev.

    I’d really like to move forward in developing child themes, Ive been using GP for quite some time, and I admit, sometimes I go off for a walk through the forest to take a shortcut, but in the end it is a long winding path and I wind up back at GP and simply building with it. At least the scenery is great and inspirational in the forest, its just that fertilizer they use makes some things grow wild and out of control. πŸ™‚

    #434782
    Tom
    Lead Developer
    Lead Developer

    Hi there,

    GPP 1.6 is going to have a new add-on that will make the entire process much easier! Stay tuned πŸ™‚

Viewing 15 posts - 61 through 75 (of 81 total)
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