EDITS.WS

Tag: Product builders

  • Partnership > First Win >Talk About It

    A large part of what we do over on Do the Woo is help builders with product growth. Now I am no expert in the field, but by osmosis, through our partners, our podcast guests, and yes, our show’s co-hosts, there is a wealth of knowledge that I facilitate and bring to the table.

    Partnerships are a big thing

    Since I have been in business, even before WordPress, I valued every partnership I grew. And when it comes to partnerships and product growth, a lot of us hear tips and insights that are helpful, but seldom do they take a twist on things. That is what I am always looking for.

    My friend and colleague, Jonathan Wold, is instrumental in helping me get Do the Woo where it is at today. I could go on and on about Jonathan, but another trait I really value from him is his unique and powerful insights that he brings to the Woo and WordPress ecosystem. And recently I was revisiting a post from last year about the challenges founders face with product businesses being undervalued in the WordPress ecosystem, my ears perked up. It’s titled, Using the Loop To Grow a WordPress Product Company.

    The post resonated with me initially as it applies to my own partnerships and how I can help my partners get the most out of it.

    I really felt Jonathan hit the nail on the head. With as many of these product companies who are struggling with growth, they can take his thoughts and actually step back with an approach that is more refined and strategic.

    Now I don’t want to give away the whole post, but I wanted to tease you with these three elements of what he calls the “loop”.

    From Jonathan’s blog

    Here is a small part of the post:

    Partnerships

    Our ecosystem is warming up to the idea of growing through strategic partnerships. I spoke about it at WordCamp Europe and published a framework for strategic partnerships that’s served as a starting point for founders.

    Within the context of our growth strategy, the idea is that you start with a partnership. Identify another business within the WordPress ecosystem aligned with the audience you’re serving and the problem you’re focused on solving and form a partnership.

    Early on, you can’t know whether a partnership will work out or to what extent. Accordingly, it’s critical to focus on your..

    First Win

    Work with your new partner to identify a first win. Given our emphasis on customer centricity, the ideal first win is going to be helping a mutual customer succeed.

    This is where I often see partnerships go wrong. They “partner up”, and wait around for wins to happen. Stay focused on the partnership until you have a win that has all involved succeeding.

    A first win is also a great way to gauge the quality of the partnership and decide how much further each of you are willing to invest.

    Talk About It

    Take the win and keep the customer in focus; it’s about them, not you. With the customer’s blessing, tell the story. Work with your partner to share the mutual win within your spheres of influence.

    Talking about the win and keeping the customer in focus gives you an opportunity to both anchor and continuously refine your positioning.

    The Loop

    Of course the loop is the part that is as simple as this, rinse and repeat.

    Now, as I said before, this was just a teaser as there is a lot more to the post that will be helpful to any product company looking to grow, whether it’s a product for WooCommerce or the bigger WordPress ecosystem. He goes more into his thoughts around this strategy including some solid guidance. Check out Jonathan’s post here. 

    The post Partnership > First Win >Talk About It appeared first on BobWP.

  • Finding Team Members to Fit Your Company’s Culture

    In a podcast with Marius Vetrici from WPRider, we dove into his agencies culture. Host Ronald Gijsel asked him, “How do you find out if somebody is the right fit into your culture? Is that something that you are very conscious on when you’re recruiting somebody?”

    Recruitment into a culture of values

    Between 2003 and 2013, I had another software company, and there we failed with five different products and made all the mistakes that you can do. That was a product company. So that’s why this time when we are approaching the new product, we did some research, we looked at positioning and the market and the needs that customers value.

    Now coming back to the recruitment, we start by trying to attract the right people. WPRiders was just starting up when it was founded as a company. I wrote down the values that I would ideally have that would run our company. These were not only just some words but an explanation of values, what was my understanding of those values at that time, and how does somebody objectively know if a person lives up to the values or not?

    When we started hiring people, I would just add those values into the job ad because that would communicate to certain people that, hey, these guys are like this, this is their values. And throughout the years we had people telling us that they had created the resume just to apply to your job. I have never had to apply to a job, but something clicked and I wanted to just meet you guys. So this is the effect that you are getting when you are consciously sending those messages, almost like a subliminal message on a certain wavelength. And then during the interview there are questions designed to discuss examples of this or that value, for example, integrity, honesty. And every six months we do evaluate ourselves with a performance appraisal and look at the values again to make sure we allocate some resources and budget in order to support and to foster those values.

    How reviews are done for team members

    Throughout the years we’ve designed a process for this. Actually, that’s one way that helped me convert myself from a freelancer, one-man show, into a team. Every time I would do a repetitive task, I would just write down a checklist, like a guideline, a procedure. And then I would run it based on that checklist just to make sure I’m not missing anything. Later on when new colleagues came in, they would just pick up on those checklists and would develop them further.

    So yeah, we are doing these reviews internally based on these processes that we’ve developed. And we have our director of operations who’s evaluating most of the people because they are in the operational department and I am still doing the performance appraisals for the other areas like sales and recruitment.

    The post Finding Team Members to Fit Your Company’s Culture appeared first on BobWP.

  • Breaking Into the WooCommerce Ecosystem as a Product Developer

    If you are a product developer, you may be thinking of moving into the the Woo ecosystem. You may be starting a plugin or extension or have already built it. Maybe you are looking at a big player in the space to acquire it. Or reselling on the WooCommerce marketplace. Here are three good places to start.

    Make Your Product Compelling

    What is compelling about a product is when it’s really created with customer need in mind. Less breath, and more depth. By that have it focus on this one problem and just really introduce an elegant, simple, easy solution that reflects and understanding of the customer’s true need.

    Everyone has seen products out there, plugins, extensions, consumer products that are just patched together, modified from one thing to suit a different need. What is important is the thing that you’re creating really does meet a real need in the market.

    Introduce an Elegant Solution

    This is looking at it from the customer perspective and not from a coding or development standpoint If the store owner uses your plugin , they want to with minimal guidance and to be able to feel confident in their use of it. That is the bigger picture.

    This may not be feasible depending on the level of complexity of the problem that you’re trying to solve. But it can be bolstered by really great docs, videos, and how to’s. With Google these days, people can find guidance out there. If they are using something and it’s intuitive or it’s adapting to their skill level or needs, that is really beautiful.

    Winning Hearts with Reviews

    It’s not always about market share or numbers. It’s also about winning the hearts of those that you’re trying to serve. So the amount of passion that comes through reviews should reflect a love for a brand, or the story about “hey, it really made my work a lot easier,” or “It boosted my sales by 40 percent,” or, “it changed how I think about my business, and it changed the opportunity for me.”

    These are just three examples that were shared with from Clara Lee who leads product marketing at WooCommerce.com. She has a lot of insights she shares more behind the scenes via marketing the WooCommerce marketplace and other products. You can listen to the full podcast. Or if you would like to hear my perspective on breaking into the Woo ecosystem, I have a few thoughts as well.

    The post Breaking Into the WooCommerce Ecosystem as a Product Developer appeared first on BobWP.

  • What Storytelling Means to a WooCommerce Product Builder

    Abha Thakor, co-host on my podcast Do the Woo, has been bringing on guests to tell stories since she joined our team. Before she did that, she was a guest herself and took the time to explain why storytelling is such an important part of being a builder.

    The reason behind storytelling

    I get really exasperated when people tell me in a professional environment, “Oh, we do storytelling” when this storytelling is basically nothing about the person or capturing what it is that it means to them. And it is just a corporately-engineered line. Some corporate blurb that has nothing about the real person or people involved. Storytelling has been around for thousands of years, the only difference is the tools that we use. A story, to be effective, has to have certain components to help people understand that story, to reach others, and for them to be moved or inspired by that story.

    That doesn’t mean that they should create stuff that’s not there. This is one of the things that I would really say to WooCommerce businesses, please don’t create stories that aren’t true. If you change people’s stories or what they share in reviews to fit your corporate brief or what you’re trying to sell, they will come back about it and they will not work with you again. They will also be a lost customer.

    And actually, you don’t need to approach it like that because the story they’ve told you is the one which will inspire somebody else. Storytelling needs to be something that is positive, it needs to have an integrity to it. It also needs to avoid being translated into words that actually people will not understand. People don’t relate to that, people relate to people.

    What storytelling means to a product builder

    The best stories are often going to be the people who write to you and give you a particularly strong review, saying why it made a difference. Now, don’t just use their review and run it as a promotion with all your branding around it. Talk to the person. Because talking to the person will give you more of the context of that story. That story itself is likely to be more powerful. You have empowered the person and the customer, you’ve made them feel valued, which is important because this customer has taken time to contact you. It is often so easy to give a negative review. In our culture, sadly, people will not jump to pay a compliment. Value that customer who does and help them share their story.

    The Royal National Lifeboat Institution is a really good example. They are a charity in the UK and Ireland, and like many other organizations, they monitor what is happening. They monitor what is being said. But they don’t just take it, reproduce them and say, “Hey, this is all about us.” What they do is actually something that is the same for what you would do for a product.

    It’s, “Let’s talk to this person, let’s see what the context is. Let’s see what else they might want to say.” It may be that they want to share more. If you don’t have the conversation, you could have just missed out on the best story, something that will not only interest your audience, but will also motivate your team or staff.

    Stories can also come from other sources and interactions with your customers. Encourage your team to look out for how to help build your community.

    The story brings trust for newcomers to WooCommerce

    We often say to one of the WooCommerce agencies we work with, “Okay, if you are working with a charity or you are sponsoring something because you passionately believe in it, what are you want to say about that?” And not from the perspective of making money off that charity or making money off that cause. But what is it that is part of your story? Because actually telling your story is more than telling the public that you sponsored something.

    And I’ve seen it with WooCommerce builders. I’ve dealt with a couple of sites recently that they’ve sent me. [These sites in their version of stories]  literally talked about what they had in their toothpaste and when they brushed their teeth, what came out of their teeth. And “Why would people want to know this?”

    It was because the teams looked at social media where people talked about breakfast and things like that. They didn’t know where to start, so, that’s what they did too. I have got permission to re-tell that story because the team there said, “Someone should have told us this.”

    But it’s telling your story and telling what you are comfortable with sharing. I’m one of the editors of the People of WordPress series. And we’ve interviewed lots of people who are from e-commerce, but hear them say, “Okay, what are you happy to be reading about yourself? What are you going to be happy about someone talking to you about? Is really important and that’s for any person.

    It’s about being listened to and heard

    And that’s the joy for me, coming from a PR background where I’m a Chartered PR Practitioner and that’s a lot about actually thinking about the ethics of communication and how we deal with things in a positive way and how we involve people. We don’t do communications to them, we create or we do communications together because it’s about being listened to and being heard. And helping people be listened to and heard is the greatest way to do that.

    We talk about ownership a lot. So if I was talking to you as a product developer, I would say, “Okay, share a little bit about what that means in terms of why it’s special to you, how and why it excites you,” because that is your story. And that may be what you invite other people to share as well.

    For example, with the boats work that we do, we ask the captains to share what it is that they love about taking people on these wonderful excursions. And it becomes much more than this e-commerce thing that you’re supposed to do. It becomes a living and breathing part of your business and part of your organization. And that is when business really innovates, it’s when you get fantastic solutions, it’s where you meet and collaborate with other people. And more importantly, you get to meet exciting customers that makes day with you for the rest of your business career. And that’s the people that you want to be at your party when you retire. So, it’s bringing that locality back to you, really.

    The post What Storytelling Means to a WooCommerce Product Builder appeared first on BobWP.