Table of Contents

This is our monthly report where we share our business insights as part of our transparency policy.

Updates

In May, we shipped one minor version and  2.6 Yavin which is a major update including better Lazy Load and smarter minification!

Revenue

  • $45 858 in revenue (+0,26%)
  • 785 orders (+1,9%)
  • 68 renewals (+9,7%)
  • 651 new customers  (+7%)
  • 3127 websites added (-4,6%)

If you follow our monthly revenues you will notice that for the past 3 months our revenue has been very stable around $45 000. That’s a good amount but we don’t have the same growth as the few months before.

Let’s have a look at our customer acquisition strategy.

Since the beginning, our customer acquisition strategy has been very simple: having the best caching solution possible and fantastic customer service.
This leads to transforming our customers into brand advocates who recommend WP Rocket to others – this has been very effective for us.

In the meantime we had another customer acquisition channel which is blog reviews of WP Rocket.

It’s a hard job to get the number of reviews that we have. Reviews never come by being passive. So basically I  contacted hundreds of bloggers to pitch WP Rocket to them and let them know I would be very happy to provide them a licence  if they want to test/review it.

This strategy was very effective, most people know us because of these reviews. All of our reviews have been free, except for two which we paid for  – WP Lift and WP Mayor.
But a few months ago I stopped contacting bloggers, so naturally we’ve had less reviews recently and we’ve cut our biggest customer acquisition channel.

So we’ve decided to put more effort into this strategy again. Our goal is to have 1 new review per week.  For the past month we have received at least 1 new review per week.
Mission accomplished for now!

We’ve also created some partnerships to get visibility, which we talked about in the previous post about our reseller plan.

Our reseller plan is a very important  new acquisition channel.  We already have a few resellers and are in talks with some big companies. We’re very excited about this.

At the same time, we are continuing our content marketing strategy with blog posts focusing on WordPress performance. These two latest posts are great examples:

In our business model, renewals are very important. In the WordPress ecosystem it’s very difficult to have a high renewal rate.

We have to think and act more as a SaaS, that’s why we are currently working on automatic renewals.
Matt Mullenweg explains this properly in a long video.

Hopefully in a couple of months we will be able to demonstrate a large growth that shows our strategy is working!

We are continuing to do some partnerships. We’ve just done one with WooThemes and we are very open to any kind of new partnership.
Feel free to contact us if you want to partner with us.

Another thing we want to do is stop multi-currency support.
At the time of writing this (May 2015), if you are from France, Germany or Italy, our pricing is in Euro, and for all other countries it is in U.S. Dollars.

When we created our pricing 2 years ago, the value of the Euro was much higher, so this was our pricing:

  • Personal licence – 29€/39$
  • Business licence – 69€/99$
  • Pro licence – 149€/ 199$

The value was equivalent, but now since 1 Euro = 1,12 Dollars, it’s totally different.

What we want to do now is have only Dollars for all countries. So this will increase our revenue for the same amount of orders.

Because we like testing and we try to be as data driven as possible, as of June 1st we’ve converted to Dollars for Germany. As of July 1st, the pricing for French customers will be in Dollars.
Let’s see what happens!

 

Support Tickets / Happiness Reports

This month 371 support tickets (-7,5%)  were created by our customers.

That’s a very great indicator for us because we had more orders and less tickets. This allows us to be even better on our tickets, and to give us some time to create some blog posts 🙂

Improving our documentation is definitely paying off, and in parallel WP Rocket’s new updates are solving existing issues and improving site speed!

You can see that the traffic to our documentation site is increasing every month.docs-visit-may-2015

Our first response time on tickets is pretty stable around 2 hours, that’s a reasonable objective to keep!

first-repond-time-mai

 

Our happiness score is almost the same as last month (from 89 to 88)

hapiness-score-mai

 

 

Lucy had a perfect month with a 100% score, she is now enjoying a brand new French press coffee maker.
ps : We are hiring a new customer support person.

 

 

 


Comments (12)

You guys truly rock! I'm a total advocate considering how easy your product is to install and use and most importantly how responsive you are to support requests. Totally brilliant and hope your strategies pay off.

Hello, I suggest using a trial period (or something like a 30 days money back guarantee) as a customer acquisition strategy. I'm interested in your product, but at 29 euros for the first year, your product must really be extremely superior to the other free caching plugins available out there. And buying something unknown looks like an act of faith.
Thanks

@Stephan Thank's :)

@phastidio We've a 30 days refund policy, if your website is not faster, we refund you. WP Rocket is the fastest caching plugin, according to this benchmark : http://wpdevshed.com/best-wordpress-cache-plugin/ :)

with the great customer service you all are providing, word of mouth on your plugin will truly keep you going strong. I've learned more about caching with your help than all the years I had W3TC and had no clue of what it was really doing.

If you guys introduced a decent affiliate program, I predict you could easily double your growth. At the moment, you make it hard for people to recommend you (i.e. you give them no reason to). Especially when there are free alternatives. I know you have the reseller program, but that is not the same. Seriously, it would take you 5 mins to implement an affiliate program, and you would see huge growth. If you're worried about 'bad' affiliates, then make it invite only. We (theme shop) would be interested in promoting you, for one.

So when the dollar gets weak and the Euro is strong again, are you going to change the pricing currency? o.O

I'd gladly do a review on WP Rocket, I don't charge for doing it unlike others. I'll be frank though I only give straight reviews, if there are problems etc I will say so, if it's awesome equally I will say so! Just drop me an email.

It would be interesting to see share by region, especially Europe/US numbers as you came from France and then expand internationally.

Can I ask what tool you guys use to track tickets, response time and "happiness"? I'm thinking about changing CRM systems... thanks!

@Peter Great idea. Going to do that for the next one :)

@Chris We use HelpScout (http://www.helpscout.net/), this is our ticketing system which give us a lot of reports. We love it :)

What a coincidence, it's the first time i have visited this blog and on the top this post was listed. Believe me i had no idea about this plugin but this report explains the popularity. Just moved a step ahead to read the details of it, gotta buy it for sure.

@Allan : Glad to hear it! If you have any questions about WP Rocket, don't hesitate to contact us: https://wp-rocket.me/contact/

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