February 23, 2021

Success story from reader Keith Devon

Fellow list member, Keith Devon replied to a recent message) to share how he is migrating from selling an expensive solution to selling an inexpensive solution that solves the same expensive problem (shared with permission):

Hi Jonathan,

Thanks in large part to the advice I’ve gotten from you over the years, I believe that I’m slowly but successfully transitioning from 3 to 4.

I think that our example is a good one.

For a long time, we’ve been maintaining a free WordPress plugin (WP Broadbean). This plugin allows users to post jobs from their Broadbean account to their WordPress website. It’s fairly simple.

However, it didn’t really work “out of the box” and in reality we would often be doing custom development work to set it up. There would also always be custom development work on the Broadbean side. It all got quite expensive - but people were willing to pay it.

That was great, as it meant that we could make some money from our free offering.

Things really got interesting when we realised that 90% of these “custom” integrations were essentially the same.

We reached out to Broadbean and some other job posting providers and set up a productised service called JobRelay.

JobRelay means that the job posting service does next to no custom work and the work at our end has gone from hours or days to sometimes a matter of minutes.

The beautiful thing is that the value to the customer hasn’t changed.

Most premium WordPress plugins cost around £50 / year.

We’re able to charge £365 / year recurring. AND we still get some of the custom development work.

It’s a niche product/service, but we’re steadily adding customers. It feels transformative for our business.

Anyway, I thought you’d appreciate the story. :)

Keep up the great work.

Keith

Great example! Thanks to Keith for sharing. Hopefully, it will encourage more folks to get creative with their solutions.

Yours,

—J