Lessons Learned Launching a Successful WordPress Service Plugin
Discover key lessons learned launching a WordPress service plugin. Avoid costly mistakes and accelerate your plugin’s success today.
With Special Guest Ben Sibley, Co-Founder of Independent Analytics
#1 – Ben, can you share more details on how you got into web development and WordPress?
#2 – Can you give some background insights that led to the development of Independent WP, and what fundamental problem it solves?
#3 – What are a couple of the most significant problems that you have faced with the development of Independent WP, and how have you overcome them?
#4 – What do you see as some of the biggest challenges that WordPress faces generally in the next 18 months?
#5 – What are a couple of individuals in the WordPress space that impress you most that you share with the tribe?
#6 – If you could go back in time to the beginning of your career journey, what advice would you give to yourself?
This Week’s Sponsors
Kinta: Kinta
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:00.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. This is episode 989. In this episode, we have a great guest. We have Ben Sibly with us, co-founder of a leading WordPress plugin. He will share his personal story, what led to this plugin service, and an independent analysis. Where is it? We’ll discuss everything related to WordPress plugin setup. It should be a great show. We haven’t got Kirek with us today. You’ve only got me, my beloved tribe. Kurt has had a previous engagement, but it should be a fantastic discussion. Ben, can you give us a really quick 10- to 15-second intro? When we return from our beginner’s break, we will delve into more detail about your background.
[00:01:17.280] – Ben Sibley
Sure. First, thank you for having me. Excited to be here and to chat with you. My name is Ben Sibley. I started with WordPress around 2010, launched a theme company in 2014, and in 2022 launched a WordPress analytics plugin called Independent Analytics. That’s what I do with most of my time now.
[00:01:38.520] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. We’re going to take our starter break, everyone. We’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I want to point out that we secured some great special deals from the show’s major sponsors, plus a curated list of the best WordPress plugins and services we use at WP Tonic. You can get all these free resources and recommendations that will save you a ton of time by visiting WP-tonic. Com/deals, wp-tonic. Com/deals. That’s where you’re going to find all the goodies, my beloved tribe. What more could you ask for? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get on that page. Ben gave us a quick outline. First, how did you get into WordPress? What was the initial journey around that, Ben?
[00:02:43.300] – Ben Sibley
I was still in college at the time, but I wanted to start a side business, a side project of sorts. I found many bloggers online discussing WordPress and sharing tutorials. There’s a lot of community around it. I built my first WordPress site around 2010. I learned a lot about it. I really enjoyed building sites with it.
[00:03:08.400] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m sorry to interrupt. What were you doing at college?
[00:03:12.680] – Ben Sibley
I was studying business. I was at the School of Business, pursuing an undergraduate degree. I just really liked WordPress. I thought it was really cool. It was as if there were no influencers on social media; people relied on their own websites, and building one was still a big deal. And it was very liberating. I ended up selling SEO services and related offerings for my website at the time. But yeah, that’s how I got into it.
[00:03:46.280] – Jonathan Denwood
How did that lead into a theme business? Are you a bit of a coder yourself, or did you self-teach yourself, or did you have somebody help you in the business?
[00:04:01.480] – Ben Sibley
Yeah. So the story is that a friend and I, my friend Andrew, who’s the co founder of independent Analytics, we launched a business together that didn’t really go anywhere. And then we parted ways after that, not friendship-wise, still great friends, but business-wise, we did different things. And I already learned a lot about WordPress, and I felt like many of the themes were too complicated. So I started to learn how to develop on my own using Udemy, courses, things like that. I learned how to program myself and open up a theme shop. That’s what I ran for about 10 years now.
[00:04:39.480] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. In any particular niche or sector?
[00:04:44.440] – Ben Sibley
Not exactly. Well, they’re minimalist and very content friendly. They’re for bloggers, but all sorts of people. I get a very wide range of people, musicians and poets and all sorts of stuff like that.
[00:05:02.000] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. What was the initial idea or concept around independent analysis? Maybe you can quickly give us an outline what it actually does, Ben.
[00:05:15.000] – Ben Sibley
I had the idea while I was making another plugin. Basically, I found that the Google Analytics, it had always been complicated, and I never really felt great using it. Then they released Google Google Analytics 4. I found that to be a lot more complicated, and it was causing privacy issues with the GDPR in particular. It became outright illegal to use in Austria and now many other countries in the EU. So people started looking for alternatives. So I had this idea for analytics that are tightly integrated with WordPress. And meanwhile, there’s this privacy stuff going on, and I also wanted to be simpler. And so all this coalesced together And that became independent analytics. And so I knew I am a developer, but I’m not a very strong developer myself. Whereas my friend Andrew, who went to school for computer science. He’s made Udemy courses. He teaches people programming. He really knows what he’s doing. We had that business that failed previously. We team back up for this, and then this one worked out. So basically with him doing the majority of the development, we were able to build independent analytics It is a simpler alternative to Google Analytics that is also privacy friendly.
[00:06:36.680] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. When did you start that with your co founder, Andrew, then?
[00:06:42.740] – Ben Sibley
We started building it in mid 2022. We’ve been in business for a little over three years now.
[00:06:51.060] – Jonathan Denwood
What’s been a couple of the biggest significant problems you faced and overcome come with developing independent analysis, would you say?
[00:07:08.540] – Ben Sibley
Yeah, on the development front, it’s been technically challenging to create an analytics plugin that can run well on everybody’s website because people have all sorts of different server environments, different plugins running, and they potentially have a lot of data being recorded. So writing it in a way that it can run quickly and that it can work for everybody, that’s been really difficult. And it’s taken time, but we have that just about sorted out now. And then on the marketing front, it’s just been a challenge to get people to find out about the plugin. And having a free version on the repository has helped a lot. But it is… Yeah, these days, it’s tough to create software and get people to find it because there’s so much competition.
[00:07:57.000] – Jonathan Denwood
It certainly is. So having So how did you work out? It’s always very tricky, Ben. I’ve had a few discussions with founders like yourself, and the directory is a great way of getting some exposure, but it’s tricky, isn’t it? What you’re going to offer in the free version and what you’re going to offer in the premium? Because if you don’t get that right, that’s disastrous in its own way, isn’t it? So how did you initially work out, or did Did you get it right initially, or have you had to adapt to what you’re offering in the free version and what you’re offering in the premium?
[00:08:37.360] – Ben Sibley
I think we did get it right because I’ve been in the WordPress industry for a while, so I’ve gotten to use a lot of different plugins and watch a lot of other plugin businesses grow. And something I’ve realized is that when you make that MVP, that initial version, there’s so much more you can put into the free version. You can really We add 90% of your ideas into the free version, and there will always be more to put into the pro version. So the free version has a lot of features. Of course, you can record unlimited numbers of visitors and things like that, use it on as many sites as you want. We didn’t end up launching the pro version for about five months after we released the free version. Then we spent a year adding almost exclusively features to the free version. Over this last year, we finally started to put more pro features in.
[00:09:37.320] – Jonathan Denwood
Are you okay to talk about figures, or would rather not do? Are you okay?
[00:09:43.760] – Ben Sibley
Approximately. I could give some approximate numbers.
[00:09:48.600] – Jonathan Denwood
How many downloads are there for the free version, and how many of the premier have been downloaded?
[00:09:59.280] – Ben Sibley
Sure. The repository says we have over 2 million downloads for the free version. Oh my God. It’s installed. It’s got 100,000 active installs right now. The pro version, I think It’s about 2 or 3% of our free users will end up purchasing the pro version, so you can just run the numbers that way, whatever it works out to be.
[00:10:25.600] – Jonathan Denwood
How much is the pro version? Do you have one price or It’s a different level price structure.
[00:10:32.480] – Ben Sibley
Yeah, so we don’t have any add-ons. It’s just a pro version, and it starts at $49 a year for one website. Then if you want to have more websites, it scales up from there. We also have lifetime licenses available.
[00:10:45.280] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. That’s interesting. What about the other area? Because I don’t know how you would rate the plugin. It sounds not a simple thing. You just said you’ve had your struggles making sure it works. How have you dealt with support? Because this is an area that can also become a obstacle for growth, and it knows. How has that worked out?
[00:11:18.340] – Ben Sibley
For support, the knowledge base has been super important. Something I do is I’ll do reviews of all of our support tickets. My goal is that When I look at a request I’ve gotten, I don’t want to get that request again. So I ask myself, how can I never get this question again? There’s usually something I can do. Sometimes it’s a very obscure question, but usually I can write a new knowledge base article. We can put a little tool tip inside the plugin, or we can just make a knowledge base article easier to find. Maybe they’re using different words to search for it than we have, so we can just add more content. That was working quite well. And then a new wave of chat bots came out that are powered by ChatGPT. We added one of those to our sites, and people can still email us, and we’re very clear about that. If you want to talk to a human being, here’s our email address. But a lot of folks use the chatbot and that works really, really well because it’s powered by our knowledge base. So we’ve got this knowledge base that’s over 100 articles, and the chatbot studied those articles.
[00:12:25.640] – Ben Sibley
And so now it can answer any questions you have. And to be honest, for In most queries, it says almost word for word what I would say because it’s written in my voice from the knowledge base. It works really well, and that’s helped to reduce the support load, too.
[00:12:41.640] – Jonathan Denwood
Do you mind which chatbot are you using What’s it called?
[00:12:46.100] – Ben Sibley
It’s called Chatling.
[00:12:47.780] – Jonathan Denwood
Chatling?
[00:12:48.500] – Ben Sibley
All right. Chatling, yeah.
[00:12:50.500] – Jonathan Denwood
Did you look at some others or was that the clear one that came across your radar to you?
[00:12:56.360] – Ben Sibley
I believe I looked at a few. They’re all Pretty similar from what I can tell. It was a little more affordable than some of the other ones. My needs are pretty simple. I didn’t need a lot of the lead generation stuff and those types of things. I just needed to answer questions.
[00:13:14.880] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m looking to put one on the WP tonic because we’re a boutique hosting provider, and I was looking to put a chatbot, but a lot of them slow your website down. But obviously, you found one that didn’t, so I’ll have a look at that. Has there been any big surprise? I know you got this experience. Oh, that’s another thing. How is the theme business still doing? Because it’s dominated by these page Is it Gutenberg-based, your theme business now?
[00:13:48.940] – Ben Sibley
No, mine are still all classic themes. They work with Gutenberg well enough, but they don’t have any special integrations. I don’t don’t actively develop new themes anymore. And so, yeah, I jumped ship to independent analytics. So the theme shop is not what it used to be. I think I’ve been saying I’m going to sell it for a while now. I just haven’t set aside the time to do that. But the nice thing is that a lot of people still want just the classic editor themes that use the live customizer instead of full site editing. And, yeah, they still run perfectly fine. They run really well for someone who still wants that workflow.
[00:14:35.760] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, right. What do you think on the marketing side, what has worked for you, you feel, apart from the directory? What are some of the leading methodologies that you utilize to get people to the website?
[00:14:57.560] – Ben Sibley
Yeah, Acquisition has been tough outside of the repository. I think our most important marketing activities have been utilizing, just getting more out of those users. So for instance, collecting email addresses, sending people an onboarding series so they learn all the different features, get comfortable with our knowledge base, and we send them video tutorials, all that stuff. That’s been most important for reaching other people outside of the repository. I’m going to say it’s a little bit of everything, a A little bit of SEO, a little bit of social media. But YouTube has probably been the most effective driver of new customers and new signups. So if someone has a big audience there and they do a video showing off their plugin, that always works well to introduce it to a lot of new people.
[00:15:49.340] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. You are looking for YouTube influencers and that to talk about your plugin. Is that about right?
[00:15:57.600] – Ben Sibley
Yeah. That’s the one thing that has repeatedly worked the best.
[00:16:02.580] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. Would you say that the user base, I don’t know if you got a feeling for this. How many are they are just end users or how many are they that buyer are implementer, freelancers, small agencies. Have you got any feeling around that?
[00:16:24.080] – Ben Sibley
Yeah. Early on, I felt like it was maybe like 20 end users to professionals. Now it seems like that’s shifting. I don’t know if it’s around 50, 50, but it seems like there’s more and more professionals building sites for clients and fewer end users from our new customers.
[00:16:48.320] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. Got any thoughts why that is happening?
[00:16:54.160] – Ben Sibley
I’m not exactly sure. I think that it might be an industry-wide issue. I think we’re WordPress might not be getting as many new end users with some of the competition from Squarespace and other platforms, or we just are reaching more of these freelancers and professional builders with our marketing.
[00:17:16.440] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. So where do you see WordPress now at the present moment? And where do you think it’s going to be in 18 months? I put 18 months Because if I asked you any further out, it would be ridiculous. Asking 18 months is a stretch in it, the way things are moving. But where do you think is the losing market share? Because obviously You must have discussions with other plugin shops and other people in the WordPress space. Where do you think things are at the present moment then?
[00:17:56.600] – Ben Sibley
When I started using WordPress in 2010, it was the simplest solution available. It was very popular, lots of support. I think it’s more complicated now than it was then. Large because the block editor is more capable, but it’s more complicated. And then you have blocks from plugins, blocks from themes, and now full site editing. It’s gotten pretty complicated. I think they need to work on simplifying that. Otherwise, something like Squarespace just looks so much simpler for an end user. So, yeah, I would like to see them finish unifying these interface elements and simplifying that. I am excited for the AI integrations. I know that WordPress has been talked about as a platform for building apps and a headless CMS is how people have talked about it in the past, almost like an operating system. And I think as WordPress begins to open up to AI platforms, I think we could see people using it in different ways where now they’re building their own interface, and then they’re just building whatever they want through prompting. And that could get around a lot of some of the design challenges that I think we’re seeing with WordPress right now.
[00:19:18.780] – Jonathan Denwood
Can you expand a little bit by design challenges? What do you precisely mean by that, Ben?
[00:19:27.100] – Ben Sibley
Well, I think right now when you the block editor, there’s different options for different blocks. And then you’ve got some blocks that are just blocks added to the site. And then some come from plugins, some come from themes. They all might be… I have different options to be styled a bit differently. And then you have full site editing. It introduces an entirely new set of menus. And it’s a lot for an end user. And that’s one of the reasons why people still enjoy the themes I make, even though I don’t get a ton of new business there anymore. You see a screenshot of the theme, and then you install it, and your site immediately looks like that, and then it’s pretty easy to customize. I think that we’ve lost some of that. I think it will take them time to unify the UI and make this a simpler, more streamlined experience. But the AI integrations open up a ton of possibilities where people could potentially circumvent that entirely by just writing prompts to design their website.
[00:20:33.600] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, all right. Thanks for that. I think we’re going to go for our middle break. When we come back, we’re going to delve more in the world of building a really successful plugin business. We’ll be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I want to point out, if you want to support the show and you’re listening on your mobile device, why don’t you leave us a review? It’s really easy on Spotify or on iTunes, if you’re on your phone, like I said. It really does. It’s the biggest way that new people can see the podcast and join the tribe. So if you could do that, that would be much appreciated. So I think I haven’t come to any conclusions, Ben. I think you’ve When you were doing your introduction, you said something I found really interesting. You were saying when you started blogging and having a website was really important. So do you think one of the other factors, do you think the importance of having a website has declined?
[00:21:52.400] – Ben Sibley
Yeah, for some cases, I would say yes, because when I first got started, there was a lot… There was a lot. There was this… There were bloggers, literally tons of bloggers, and a lot of them were just writing about blogging. But there’s this whole industry of them. And then Instagram, blew up, and then, of course, TikTok and these other platforms. Terms, but that’s when people became influencers. So someone might start a fashion blog back in 2010, even 2014, but then it quickly became, okay, I’ll just have an Instagram account or even a YouTube channel. And so a lot of folks that are looking to create content, it wasn’t necessary for them to have a website. And in fact, they’d probably be more successful just with a social media account because they can reach more people that way. And so I think that was a big segment of people that no longer needed to create websites. But for virtually every business, not having a website would be a real setback. My wife, she does eyelash extensions. And so I built a website for her salon. And we’ve looked at some of the other salons and not all of them have websites.
[00:23:10.960] – Ben Sibley
And so they’ve got that Google Maps listing. But you can only answer reviews and read one paragraph. You get literally one paragraph on there. So when people have questions and, of course, these doubts and concerns, you can’t find an answer online. You have to call. But if you go to look at her business and you go to the website, well, here’s an FAQ, a lot more photos, a lot more information. There’s a lot less friction. For any business, I think having a website is essential.
[00:23:42.860] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think I agree with you. It’s Absolutely there. Also with your own plugin, I don’t know if you actually got data that shows you this, but how much people are using it for e that are using WU commerce with it? Do you know?
[00:24:04.000] – Ben Sibley
Yeah, I don’t have the numbers off the top of my head, but I think a good percentage, it might be 5 or even as many as 10% of our users are using e-commerce, and they’re more likely to upgrade to the pro version, too. That’s where we have a WU commerce and Fluent CART and SureCart integrations in the pro version. So a lot in e-commerce stores, they’re making more money than most other types of websites, so they’re more likely to upgrade.
[00:24:38.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think the most exciting thing in the e-commerce space has been the launch of Fluent CART, hasn’t it? You got to be impressed with their ambitions and what they do in there. Would you agree?
[00:24:50.640] – Ben Sibley
Yeah, definitely. I think they’re a good company. We don’t have an e-commerce store like that. We don’t use Fluent Cart, but We played around with it a little bit to build our integration, and we were really impressed. It’s really streamlined. It’s really nice. For us, we always appreciate when an e-commerce platform has a test option, so we can just not have to actually complete purchases and run some test purchases in the real checkout environment and make sure that our integration is working properly.
[00:25:24.160] – Jonathan Denwood
I think you also mentioned that one of the areas that really helped you grow is what the situation in Europe, because I think you mentioned it, was it Austria? That some of Google’s analytics, they’re not allowed to use it. Is that growing in Europe, government and general restriction about utilizing Google’s analytical product?
[00:25:55.940] – Ben Sibley
Yeah. Austria was the first country to just make it illegal to use Google Analytics. And a lot of other countries in the EU have followed suit. Pretty sure France and Italy, for instance, have also done that. If you’re in the EU and you’re in one of the countries that hasn’t made it illegal, the writing’s on the wall. You don’t really want to keep using this tool. It’s also an American corporation that they don’t want to share their data with them. And of course, in the US and other places, we’re also We’re looking at this like, well, okay, we might not all have the same privacy laws, but again, we also care about privacy and we want to do this for ourselves. So that change basically got people looking for a new solution because I know that when I got started, analytics in Google Analytics, that was the same word. No one even considered an alternative. And so it wasn’t until the GDPR came out and people started having issues with privacy Obviously, that they started to look for alternatives. And then this spread everywhere. So now people in the US, for instance, that maybe you don’t even have customers in the EU, but you’re looking for alternatives because you have this awareness that, Okay, I need analytics.
[00:27:19.320] – Ben Sibley
Well, what analytics should I choose? People are asking that question now. That opened up the opportunity for us to build something different.
[00:27:27.700] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, and also the quality of the data they were providing, it’s got more and more less specific, isn’t it? I think with the update they did, which I think was a couple of years ago now, was it longer? When did they do the changeover?
[00:27:44.160] – Ben Sibley
They forced everybody to change in, I think, July of 2023.
[00:27:49.380] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. So it was a couple of years ago. I am correct, the data that they are now providing it has even become less specific. Am I correct about that?
[00:28:00.000] – Ben Sibley
Well, I know they do some data sampling. I actually don’t understand the specifics of how that works, but it’s a little bit of like, you probably have this many visitors thing, which is weird. And then they get blocked by everything. So if you’re using cookies with them and people aren’t opting in, then they’re getting blocked. And if they’re using any of the different browsers that block these types of things, then people just aren’t going to show up in your stats all if you’re using Google Analytics.
[00:28:33.540] – Jonathan Denwood
When it comes to AI, how do you see that affecting your own business and your own plugin in the next 18 months? Do you envision actually integrating AI at all, or do you think it’s got no relevance to where you are at the specific moment?
[00:28:58.360] – Ben Sibley
I actually don’t think AI is going to be a big part of what we do. For starters, using AI would probably mean taking people’s data and sending it elsewhere, which is a no-no for us. And then just as a product, tracking is part of what we offer. But then the other big part of what we offer is an interface. This is an easy way to find and look at your data. I don’t think people want to replace an interface with a prompt. You don’t want to… You could prompt, Okay, how many visitors did I have last week? But it’s just going to show it to you in text. An interface is the best way to see that data. I don’t think we’ll be implementing AI anytime soon.
[00:29:47.420] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. Yeah, that’s totally makes sense. It’s interesting. You think the main challenge is you got the possibility of the headless and working with AI. But actual Gutenberg, you see it more as interface problem, which I totally agree. I’ve been going on about that for years, and I think they are making some improvements. I just think it’s been a little bit slow, but on the other hand, it’s a very large platform, so it’s easy for me to criticize, but I’m not dealing with it. So you got to find a middle ground. And I really don’t want to be too negative. But what do you think? Do you think that WordPress can keep its market share and be effective I would say Squarespace and Wix are the two biggest in the consumer space, and there’s a host of other, but they got very small market share, haven’t they? And you’ve got Webflow and some platforms, and you got Lovable in the AI website building space, haven’t you? But do you think it can maintain it or if it can improve the interface? I think you suggested that’s the key thing in your own mind, isn’t it?
[00:31:18.540] – Ben Sibley
Yeah, definitely for end user adoption, because where WordPress is still really strong is the fact that there’s a massive developer community, and so many things have been built that the other competitors are never going to catch up in terms of functionality. So there’s lots of specific types of sites, other than just basic blogs and e-commerce stores, that you can build with WordPress that I don’t think you can build with other platforms. If you want to create a two-sided marketplace like Etsy, there’s a lot of plugins actually that can do that. I don’t know if you can… Definitely not with Squarespace, maybe with Shopify. But if you also want to have a forum, If you want to build out a membership side to it, you can do all of these things with one WordPress site and have everything integrated and running nicely. So in terms of functionality, it’s always going to win. And for people who build sites for clients, WordPress is the obvious choice because you have all that freedom. There’s lots of tools for this, all sorts of different workflows you can choose from. The only area I feel like it’s really lacking is just that that usability for new users.
[00:32:33.480] – Ben Sibley
If you just want to create a website for your business and you create a WordPress site, you’re probably going to have a tough time. I think they just need to… They’re building out a lot of new functionality, but I think they need to, as quickly as they can, they need to streamline it. And I get it. It’s like when it’s installed on so many millions of websites and backwards compatibility is a big issue, that’s a lot of restraints. But They need to make it simpler for people to see a screenshot and then recreate that same design.
[00:33:08.620] – Jonathan Denwood
You mentioned Shopify. Obviously, have you been looking at expanding into the Shopify area with your offering?
[00:33:19.120] – Ben Sibley
Not really. We pretty much chose to be WordPress-specific from the outset. We’ve built it as a WordPress plugin. We don’t have any servers or infrastructure of our own. You install the plugin, everything runs on your site, that’s it. We do a lot of WordPress-specific stuff. A simple example would be if you use another analytics platform, then you’ll see in the pages report a list of URLs. You just have to know what page corresponds to each URL. But because we run inside of WordPress, we have all that data. So the pages report just shows the titles of the pages instead. So that is a WordPress-specific thing we do, and we’re just pretty much focused on that. It gives us our own little moat. If someone’s using WordPress and they see our plugin, and then they see one of our competitors that is installed with the tracking script, the fact that one of them is a plugin, they already know how to install plugins. They’re going to trust the plugin a little bit more. It gets people to try us out, and then if they’re happy, then that’s it. They’ve picked our plugin.
[00:34:30.000] – Jonathan Denwood
What is the landscape? What are the main competitors for you?
[00:34:36.140] – Ben Sibley
Outside of WordPress, our main competitors would be Plaasible and Fathom Analytics, both very similar, just simple privacy-friendly analytics. Within the WordPress space, we don’t have any really strong competitors, but there’s a few other plugins. There’s Burst Statistics and Coco Analytics. Again, both simple privacy friendly options. Independent analytics is being developed more. We’re consistently putting out new features, and we’ve got a lot of momentum behind us at this point.
[00:35:15.180] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. Is there one or two things? Because I think you said the product’s been out now for almost three years. Is there one or two things that If you knew what you know now, at the beginning, you would have changed the actual launch of the plugin or the marketing or anything that comes to mind, Ben.
[00:35:44.620] – Ben Sibley
Yeah, there’s some technical stuff we probably would have done differently. The hardest part of this whole business has been every time we introduce a new feature, we have to store new data in the database, so we have to the database. So when someone updates the plugin, we need to run what we call a migration to change the structure of the database. You can’t be recording visits when the structure just doesn’t match what it’s supposed to. And that Running that has been a real pain. We do have sites that sometimes get stuck on that, and then we have to go in and help them fix it. That’s probably a very small percentage of sites, but with this many installs, it does come up. I think we would just do that completely differently. If we could find a better way, that’s something that would do differently from the start.
[00:36:36.780] – Jonathan Denwood
Is there a why?
[00:36:39.980] – Ben Sibley
I’m not sure. I’m not really sure. But there’s some things we could do that would make it a little bit nicer, better tools for ourselves.
[00:36:51.040] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. When it comes to the marketing, anything comes to mind that you would have liked to have changed?
[00:37:00.620] – Ben Sibley
I’m not sure. I think that if I could go back and have some more of the knowledge I have now, I would have made a nicer website sooner. But I think we’ve been learning, we’ve been growing. I wouldn’t say I have any big regret. I made a huge mistake on this or that.
[00:37:25.320] – Jonathan Denwood
So you don’t mind, how many are in the company? How many is it you and your co founder? Anybody else? Or you’re just running it between the two of you?
[00:37:33.870] – Ben Sibley
It’s just the two of us.
[00:37:35.860] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. That’s fantastic. All right. One of our questions is, What are a couple of people or companies or anything that’s on your radar in the WordPress space that really impresses you, Ben?
[00:37:53.620] – Ben Sibley
Oh, yeah. I would say I really like the WP Product Talk podcast that’s got Matt Cromwell and Katie Keith on it. I follow both of them and I see their tweets. I usually like what they have to say and learn a lot from them.
[00:38:13.080] – Jonathan Denwood
Katie is a friend of the show. Anybody else?
[00:38:18.600] – Ben Sibley
I said they’re the people that just come straight to mind. They’re my go-to people.
[00:38:25.080] – Jonathan Denwood
Were you supposed to say this podcast as well.
[00:38:27.580] – Ben Sibley
Sorry. Of course, that would be botanic.
[00:38:34.540] – Jonathan Denwood
Sorry, I had to tease me. Oh, dear, I do. Katie, I think she’s also tried to expand in the Shopify space as well. I think it’s been challenging, but she’s been very frank about that. I don’t think they’re going to give up, but I think she’s learned some lessons because I think each… It’s not only the technical, it’s a different community good to using it.
[00:39:02.320] – Ben Sibley
Yeah, I don’t know anything about the Shopify landscape. And one of the reasons why we also made a plugin, because it’s not Andrew is not a WordPress guy. He has been learning it through the building independent analytics. But as someone who’s been in the space for a long time, there’s so much domain expertise with WordPress, just knowing little things about what someone’s going to like or what someone’s I’m going to hate. Even if it’s something simple like, oh, what if we add an admin notice? No, people are so sick of those. There’s a million little things that help to be aware of. And so with Shopify, I’m sure there’s a bunch of those things, too. And it would be especially difficult to build an aftermarket product for Shopify.
[00:39:53.460] – Jonathan Denwood
I got to be truthful. I haven’t used your plugin, but I am going to touch base with you, and Hopefully, you’ll be generous with me. But I am interested to use it.
[00:40:08.780] – Ben Sibley
Yeah, give it a try.
[00:40:10.040] – Jonathan Denwood
What has been… You touched based on something about… It’s always Another factor, how much of the interface do you keep inside the classical look of WordPress? Other plugins, they literally take over the whole admin space, don’t they? They put their own quasar interface on the back-end, don’t they? Obviously, you’re dealing with a lot of data, a lot of charts and that. Was that a big discussion, how you were going to deal with that?
[00:40:44.680] – Ben Sibley
We needed to do our own thing from the start. So of course, that left sidebar, that’s there, the admin toolbar, we would never hide those things. That’s your primary navigation that sticks around. But everything else That is totally bespoke. When we take screenshots of it without the sidebar and the toolbar, people don’t know it’s in WordPress at all. That’s something that we had to do, I think.
[00:41:15.180] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think you had to because like you said, you’re dealing with a lot of visual diagrams, aren’t you?
[00:41:20.480] – Ben Sibley
Yeah, it’s all new stuff.
[00:41:23.760] – Jonathan Denwood
Now, I suppose because you’re taking the data, the actual It doesn’t impact the speed of the website or the server resources, isn’t it? Because you’re just taking the data and presenting it in diagrams, basically, in ways that the data can be digested more easier.
[00:41:48.680] – Ben Sibley
Is that correct? Yeah, it’s a good question. On the front-end, to record the visits, we’re firing a REST API request to your own website, and it’s deferred, so it doesn’t affect core vitals. It doesn’t affect the loading experience at all. So even if you have tons of traffic, the front-end is not going to be slowed down. In the back-end, your post menu, your sentence menu, all these different menus, no performance impact. In the analytics menu itself, that’s where we actually query the data and load it. So it loads quickly for the vast majority of websites. It can be slow for a really high traffic website. So sometimes people ask, I have a large website with all these pages. The number of pages on the website, number of users, none of that matters. It’s just how much traffic you get. So if you get 50,000 visitors a month, the analytics are going to load just fine. If you get a million, two million visitors per month, that’s where it might get really slow. And there’s not a ton we can do about that. We’ve optimized things a lot. At this point, we just say that it’s generally not…
[00:42:56.000] – Ben Sibley
It just might not be the best choice for your site if you have that much traffic.
[00:43:00.500] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, nice problem to have, isn’t it, Ben? Yeah. All right, so let’s wrap it up, Ben. If you had your own time machine and you could go back to the beginning of your career, your journey with WordPress and that, is there any one or two tips or insights you would like to share with yourself, Ben?
[00:43:23.720] – Ben Sibley
Yeah, I think I started as a workaholic and it did not serve me. So I would go back and I would take more time for my personal life and not be such a hustle bro through my 20s. And I would think a little bit bigger. So instead of pushing really hard on smaller ideas, I think I would take my time. I would have bigger ideas. I would think through them more clearly because that’s really how you end up creating something that is different and solving hard problems that you’ll be rewarded for solving Right.
[00:44:02.240] – Jonathan Denwood
But I think we touched this, and I might be repeating myself, but what’s your general vibe about WordPress? Are you optimistic where it’s going to be in the next couple of years, Ben?
[00:44:15.960] – Ben Sibley
Well, I don’t think WordPress is going anywhere. People change much slower than technology. And so many millions of people use WordPress, and we’re going to keep using WordPress. I know that for For any sites that I need to build for myself or anyone else, I’m always going to use WordPress. There’s no way I’m going to relearn a new platform when I already know this one so well. So I think WordPress is for sure here to stay. I’m not worried about there not being enough people to become independent analytics customers or anything like that. I do think that it seems like end user adoption is slowing down, and I think that’s what they need to address. They just need to make make it easier for someone who’s never built a website and is brand new to this.
[00:45:05.200] – Jonathan Denwood
I totally agree with you there, Ben. Have you got any other… I don’t expect you to share, but are there any new features you plan to add to the current plugin, or do you and your co-founder have any plans for new plugins in the next 18 months?
[00:45:28.900] – Ben Sibley
We don’t have any plans for new plugins, but in terms of upcoming features, we are working on a user journeys feature, which is going to be pretty cool. It will show all recent sessions on your site, so you can open one and view a complete timeline. They viewed the home page at noon, the About page at 12:03, and then purchased this product at 12:15. I know many people are excited about that, and we plan to release it in January, as long as everything goes according to plan.
[00:46:05.780] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. I forgot his name. What was the name of your co-founder?
[00:46:10.320] – Ben Sibley
Andrew Mead.
[00:46:11.480] – Jonathan Denwood
Andrew. What was his coding background? What languages did he get his chops on?
[00:46:21.120] – Ben Sibley
Yeah. He studied computer science and then became very interested in JavaScript. He released a JavaScript course on Udemy, as well as courses on other JavaScript libraries such as React and, I think, Redux. So that’s what he was primarily doing. As he began working on independent analytics, he also began learning PHP and gained a more profound familiarity with MySQL. But of course, he’s picked it up quickly. And he’s one of those people who’s already crushing it, but he’s always got a new programming book on his desk opened up to some page. I could not have possibly built this myself.
[00:47:06.020] – Jonathan Denwood
What’s the best way for people to find more about you and your company, Ben?
[00:47:15.240] – Ben Sibley
Yeah, they can head to independentwp. Com. That’s where you can learn all about our plugin. You can download it for free, explore the pro version, and find answers to any questions you have. Our social media links are also on that page if you want to follow us to learn when we release updates.
[00:47:34.620] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Ben. It’s been a blast on your journey. It’s really great to hear a smaller shop, a WordPress shop, a Plugin shop, doing really well in the space. I think it encourages others to see that they can achieve success as well. So thank you so much. And I’ve learned something from our chat. We’re going to wrap it up now, folks. We’ll be back next week. Hopefully, Kurt, my co-host, will be with me. We should have another… I think we have an exciting show coming up next week. Should be spicy. I’m not going to tell you any more, tribe, but it should be interesting. We’ll see you next week, folks. Bye.
[00:48:29.820] – Ben Sibley
See you.
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