To Heck with Black Friday, I’m Raising My Prices! — Post Status Draft 127

Post Status Podcasts

Transcript ↓

This week in Post Status Slack, Lesley Sim, the founder of Newsletter Glue, dropped this announcement:

"While everybody is offering discounts for Black Friday, we’re planning to significantly raise prices. We’ll be narrowing our target audience and focusing mainly on medium-large publishers and online businesses; working with them more closely and providing a high level of customization and support."

What motivated Lesley's decision? Where does she expect it to take her company?

For some background, listen to my recent conversation with Till Krüss, whose business model for Object Cache Pro and conversations following from it were part of Lesley's thinking about her own product.

In this conversation with Lesley, we talk about:

Pay attention to the shape of your market and your pricing.

Lesley Sim

• Lesley's experience with Black Friday sales tactics.
• "Lifetime" memberships and licenses.
• Where Newsletter Glue started and how its pricing model has changed.
• Why freemium didn't work for Newsletter Glue.
• Lesley's experience entering — and leaving — the WordPress plugin directory.
• How Newsletter Glue's pricing has steadily evolved toward a better match with its ideal customers.
• How Lesley accessed enterprise agencies and clients.
• What Lesley has learned and hopes to achieve in the future.
• The technical challenges and barriers to reaching a high-end market.

🔗 Mentioned in the show:

• Newsletter Glue is a WordPress plugin that connects your WordPress content and the block editor with a newsletter service, like Mailchimp. It simplifies newsletter publishing so you can focus on writing — in WordPress — and sending your content out from there without having to copy/paste/edit content or create layouts inside your newsletter service's separate, not-as-good design interface.
• InstaWP is what it sounds like: a way to launch a WordPress sandbox/demo site in less than a second.
• Groundhogg is Marketing Automation and CRM For Serious Agencies and Small Businesses using WordPress.
• LifterLMS helps education entrepreneurs enable their learners to achieve their desired outcomes, to truly change lives, and make a great living in the process.
• rtCamp is a WordPress VIP Gold Ageny Partner delivering enterprise-grade web publishing and digital commerce solutions with WordPress to Fortune 500 companies.
• The Code Company is a very specialized agency for publishers focused on the WordPress core competency: publishing! They are specialist WordPress engineers who solve complex publishing problems at scale.
• Human Made is one of the oldest enterprise agencies in WordPress. They've been one of the largest contributors to the WordPress core project, and the wider ecosystem and community. They make Altis DXP, the evolution of how they work with WordPress. Human Made believes Altis is a fundamental and major step forward for the WordPress ecosystem.

🐦 You can follow Post Status and our guests on Twitter:

• Lesley Sim (Founder, Newsletter Glue)
• Dan Knauss (Editor, Post Status)
• Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)

The Post Status Draft podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis. 📝
Browse our archives, and don’t forget to subscribe via iTunes, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Stitcher, Simplecast, or RSS. 🎧

Transcript