This week we flew past 30,000 plugin downloads and things were so hectic we did not even notice. Sunday provides a chance to catch up and look back on the week and see … yes wow, we’ve hit that milestone during the week.
We started plugin development in January of 2011 which lead to the launch of the WP User Reviews plugin. We launched the plugin in May of 2011 and tried to market it off a purpose built site via ‘Clickbank’ and from the A3 Rev site. To be frank that marketing strategy was a disaster realizing about 2 sales a month on average.
We did no plugin development work at all in the second half of 2011, but early this year we thought when had found a plugin worth developing. Looking at the Magento e-Commerce platform one of the most popular features was and is the Compare Products feature. We had a look around and found that there was no Compare Products plugin for WP e-Commerce or WooCommerce and so spent all of January and a good part of the next few months building Compare Products for both platforms.
This time our marketing strategy was to release a Free ‘Lite’ version of the plugin on WordPress with a ‘Pro’ Version upgrade available. To be frank that has been a wonderful success. Today we have 9 ‘Lite’ version plugins available on WordPress and as a result of the exposure we sell ‘Pro’ version plugins to clients right across the world.
Below is a bit of a time line of ‘Lite’ version plugins. These are available for free download on wordpress.org. They are listed in order of release date and number of downloads is at the time of writing this.
Plugin | Date Launched | # Downloads |
WP e-Commerce Compare Products…. | 26/02/2012 | 4,748 |
WooCommerce Compare Products | 15/03/2012 | 4,700 |
WooCommerce Dynamic Gallery | 14/07/2012 | 4,328 |
WP e-Commerce Dynamic Gallery | 18/07/2012 | 5,574 |
WP e-Commerce Grid View | 23/07/2012 | 3,653 |
WP e-Commerce Predictive Search | 30/07/2012 | 1,121 |
WooCommerce Predictive Search | 30/07/2012 | 1,796 |
WP e-Commerce catalog Visibility | 23/08/2012 | 2,807 |
WP Email Template | 03/09/2012 | 1,262 |
Currently on track to release 2 more ‘Lite’ version on WordPress this month and are aiming at releasing 1-2 new plugins each month.