Quality, flexibility and professionalism. These are the three most important characteristics of a good WordPress business, says Michelle Ratzlaff, founder of HootProof. A successful WordPress entrepreneur on the eternal conflict between free and paid, pricing and scaling options in the WordPress business.

A huge market has developed around WordPress in recent years. And not just in the USA. Development, support, hosting and stores are just some of the promising business areas. Michelle, founder of HootProof and successful WordPress entrepreneur, has found her niche and talks about the importance of continuous training, quality of work and flexibility in her guest article. We at Raidboxes have been working with Michelle, Niko and Kjell for quite some time and recommend customers with special support needs to HootProof.

I'm Michelle, founder of HootProof. After studying computer science, I worked as a software developer for a few years before starting my own business in mid-2015. With my HootProof service, I offer a WordPress support service for solopreneurs and small businesses. My team and I solve problems with WordPress and implement change requests. This means, for example, that we advise on the selection and setup of plugins and themes, carry out theme and plugin customizations or set up member areas. In this post, I describe my journey from a free blog to a three-man team.

In the beginning was the blog: the launch of HootProof

I started the blog in May 2015 and then added WordPress support in its current form in September 2015. Although I clearly founded HootProof as a WordPress business, the exact monetization strategy was not clear to me at the beginning. I experimented with a productized service (performance optimization), started to develop a paid plugin and, of course, also thought about classic info products such as e-books and online courses.

I would like to focus on three areas in particular, as I have learned a lot from them:

• The eternal conflict between free and fee-based
• Pricing in the WordPress business
• The scaling

Free of charge vs. chargeable

Especially with a new blog or a new WordPress business with little reach, it is very difficult to get attention online. For me, it took months for blog traffic to increase noticeably, for comments to appear on the blog and for this to have an impact on my service, i.e. WordPress support. Direct advertising measures, such as Facebook Ads or Google Adsense, didn't work for me at all - probably because they were too directly geared towards sales.

In the spirit of the Thank You Economy, I tried to offer a lot of knowledge and even my service for free. There was always a mental limit: I didn't want to give away too much of my knowledge "for free" and possibly make my paid service superfluous.

On the other hand, I really wanted to offer the opportunity to try out my service free of charge and without risk in order to convince myself of its value. That's why I started with free "test tickets".

However, experience has shown that most people fall into one of two categories: Either they try to make the most of the test ticket, but don't really have much interest in becoming paying customers - e.g. because they only run their blog as a hobby or prefer to tinker with it themselves. On the other hand, there are interested parties who need no further convincing that our service is just right for them and are prepared to pay accordingly. Ultimately, this group is made up of precisely those customers with whom I want to work and to whom I can actually offer the best possible service.

In terms of content, it is now also quite simple: most users can find lots of useful tips and specific instructions on the blog and in the knowledge database to help them solve typical problems themselves. In principle, the online course deals with similar topics, but is much more in-depth and more structured than detailed step-by-step instructions in blog form.

If you don't want to invest your own time, but would rather pass on the effort and risk, you can commission my team and me directly. So there is no direct competition between the different levels of help and self-help.

The most important insight for a WordPress business at this point is therefore: design your offer in such a way that free and paid content do not cannibalize each other. It sounds banal, but it requires a lot of thought about which services and information you actually want to offer for free and how much money you want to charge for them.

Especially with WordPress support, the pricing model is a real challenge

As far as the service is concerned, the pricing model was a real problem at the beginning. For fear of the competition and the more or less prominent role models in English and German-speaking countries, I opted for a flat-rate model at the beginning. Back then, customers could order an unlimited number of "tickets" for a fixed monthly amount.

However, even after adjusting the prices and the maximum number of tickets several times, this led to various problems. For one thing, this model is inherently unfair: some customers paid the same for one or two small jobs a month as others did for many, much larger jobs. Where do you draw the line between a "ticket" and a larger job? On the other hand, the fixed price is a clear entry threshold for a potential new customer who asks themselves "Is this even worth it for me? Can I even take advantage of it?". And last but not least, I couldn't see any solution for paying my team members fairly and in line with their workload on this basis.

After a few months, I therefore switched to hourly billing for WordPress support. This means that each customer pays for exactly the amount of work that their tasks require. I was initially very afraid of the reactions to this step - but it was definitely the right move. Our customers have full cost control. For example, they can set limits and view the recorded expenses at any time. And we are no longer limited to "small things", but can accept orders of any size - from backup setup to plugin customization. This is fair and goal-oriented for everyone involved.

From solopreneur to scaling the WordPress business

Like most solopreneurs, I initially did everything completely on my own. It wasn't until May 2016 that I brought Niko on board as my first team member and Kjell joined a little later. That gave me the space I needed to work on the online course and other WordPress projects. We can also exchange ideas on tricky tasks and take turns taking vacations. This means I no longer have to be available every day on my own.

I spent a long time looking for suitable software to organize our team. To date, I haven't found one that meets all our requirements. We therefore use a range of more or less well-integrated tools:

• HelpScout for receiving and processing support tickets
• Harvest for team time tracking and display via API in WordPress
• The WordPress plugin User Frontend Pro for registration and the user profile
• The WordPress plugin Sprout Help Desk for integration with HelpScout
• a small self-written plugin to improve the integration with HelpScout and display the recorded time in the customer profile

Overall, scaling has worked very well so far - my team is doing a great job and we complement each other well with our different skills and experience. And this is also the key insight for scaling: look for people with whom you can work well together and (perhaps even more importantly) who complement your own skills. This will help you create a more powerful team and maximize the capabilities of your business.

Where does the business stand today?

I'll be honest and open about the figures here. Since June 2016, however, I have neglected the growth of HootProof, hardly produced any content and have not pursued any other marketing strategies. As a result, the support service is growing slowly through referrals and the current online presence. I'm convinced that it could grow much faster if I paid more attention to social media, new blog articles and targeted advertising.

In the last 6 months, WordPress support has brought in an average of around €3000 per month (net). I spend a large part of the revenue on my team and around €100 per month on the tools mentioned above.

So what makes a successful WordPress business?

The WordPress market is huge, but increasingly competitive, now also in German-speaking countries. Unfortunately, half-knowledge is also widespread and many freelancers still offer their services at dumping prices. What's more, WordPress and the landscape around it is developing at breakneck speed - further training and continuous, intensive work with WordPress are essential.

In my opinion, the opportunity here lies in finding a well-defined niche and becoming an unbeatable expert in it. How about a productized service for setting up WooCommerce, for example. Because WooCommerce is a comprehensive topic with many pitfalls and possibilities. With a wealth of experience and in-depth knowledge, you can create a lot of value for a target group that is ready to pay.

I would also always focus on quality rather than price. Our hourly rate is deliberately set high because we want clients who approach their WordPress project professionally and value our work.

To summarize:

• Quality comes first - differentiating yourself on price is not a good strategy in this market (or any digital market for that matter) in my opinion.
• Professionalism - clear, goal-oriented communication with your customers, professional working methods with high quality standards.
• You need to stay up to date in this fast-changing world. This happens almost automatically if you work continuously with WordPress.

Conclusion: A WordPress business can be started very quickly and with little effort. However, scaling is naturally a much more difficult issue. Quality standards and team organization need to be considered.

Do you have questions about your own WordPress business? We look forward to your comments!