How Flyplugins CEO Benjamin Arellano grew Flyplugins to $500K revenue and 6K customers in 2020.

hello everyone my guest today is ben ariano he is the founder and creator of a company called flyplugins.com an e-learning solution for wordpress he worked in i.t for 12 years before he got the entrepreneurial bug and jumped ship to run his own plug-in business full-time he's happily married with three boys and he loves to serve at his church ben you ready to taste the top let's do it man all right did you sell your pastor on the wordpress plugin is he a customer or she a customer uh you know what they're not teaching courses right now but they do have one of my plugins they do have s3 media meister but but not the wp course for one fair enough fair enough all right so yeah let's let's focus here on which which business is primary so fly plug-ins you have two primary plug-ins is that right so we have three plug-ins so so uh the primary business is fly plugins and when we initially launched we had we had dreams and plans and i say we cause i'm co-founder i have a business partner nate we had plans of launching multiple premium plugins um when we got started you know we built wp course were the first ones s3 media meister was second surely came much later actually we had another one in between there which we pulled off the market um but we've gotten to three products so far uh we feel that that's just kind of where we're at we're comfortable with three products it's kind of surrounding that e-learning space um which which we kind of settled into we it's it's not something that we plan to do um it just kind of it sort of just happened we were scratching our own edge and it's just kind of how we is there one plug-in that makes up the majority of the revenue yes wp courseware makes up i would say about 75 of our revenue okay wp courseware and so what's the website for that uh it's it's still fly plugins forward slash wp courseware okay and how do you build for that is it sas or one time license or what it it it's a it's a yearly subscription so it's not sas it's it's actually a downloadable product so um but it but it is a yearly subscription and what do you build for it what do customers pay on average uh depends on the licensing model so we got a two five and ten license it starts out at i believe right now it's at 124 bucks right around there for two site license and then it goes up from there and what's the most expensive uh right now i think we got it built at about 175 i believe right now we're running some specials right now 50 offside i'm thinking it's about 170 175 179 right around there somewhere so if you average what your average customer pays you it's going to be somewhere around 130 140 bucks a year yeah roughly now we do have customers that come in they buy wp course where they see s3 medium maestro which is also very useful for online courses um so we kind of we can we can upsell them with that as well okay when did you launch the company what year uh 2012 2012 very good this a while how did you get your first you know 510 customers you remember yeah so um so so back in the day a lot of a lot of plugins i mean we were kind of like we had no idea what we were doing because we launched the plugin right who launches the wordpress plugin there's no forums out there or anything that tells you how to do this so we were just thinking like how did we launch this thing what we we started noticing that a lot of people were launching uh plug-ins on the warrior forum not sure if you're familiar with warrior forum network marketing internet marketing yeah yep sort of like that so we did a what they call a wso uh warrior special offer i think it was and we we launched this thing for like 20 bucks i mean it was just 20 bucks and we got the first i don't know five six seven sales in the first day i think it was like a uh something so it was a day in september i remember in in 2012 and we were just like stoked it actually sold you know very good so those are your first ten how many customers have you scaled to today oh we are over twenty thousand twenty thousand okay wow and so okay yeah let me let me let me digress a little bit so when we first launched obviously we were flipping at 20 20 bucks a pop i mean that was not recurring revenue um so then uh we finally got marketable and stuff like that we started raising the prices i think we got up to like 60 bucks at some point um but at that point we're still we're not recurring revenue now um we had some guys come and tell us hey you you should be charging yearly for this thing um we did not get that launched until i think 2014 we launched recurring revenue uh type systems in our with our plug-in the problem is is we we couldn't have we didn't have a system that would divvy out licenses and then track you know the recurring uh revenue and stuff like that so we um we finally got a system together uh there's another plug-in company called easy digital downloads and they they put together a really nice package for for stuff like software licensing for recurring revenue and stuff like that so so we've implemented that in 2014 late 2014 so a lot of our customers came in those first first couple years and and unfortunately and we grandfathered a minute we still support them to this day so they they they still get support they still get updates um and then thereafter we we took off with recurring revenues so we've had we've had a lot of we've had a gamut of customers that came in non-recurring and then uh since then we have nothing but recurring as i understand so so this year how many people on the recurring planet of the 20 000 oh i would say people that are still still on it maybe maybe 6 000 people 7 000 people okay 6 000 on the recurring got it and and then so sum up uh between 2012 and 2014. do you remember like in 2014 how much revenue you guys did total uh you know honestly it was it wasn't it wasn't a ton it was maybe if i had to guess 14 000 40 000 a month okay well so how much did you do total in 2014 do you remember it sounds like like 150 160 000 close yeah yeah right and scale obviously you've scaled up today have you done that on bootstrap or did you raise capital it's all bootstrapped i love that how many are on the team today so it's me and my business partner nate we've got uh two teams of developers now they are they're just contractors so we've got a team out in india we've got a team up in portland um so they're both working on different uh plug-ins and then we have two support guys one in bosnia and then one in poland so how many total would you say are employees working on the company uh we don't have any employees i mean they're all contractors i mean how many contractors total yeah so i mean the the development companies i mean they run maybe teams of four to five each and then you know we got our two supporters 14 total two teams of five two support people and then you and your co-founder sounds about right interesting um why bosnia um well we we put out ads for uh you know for support and uh the couple of companies that we went through the ads too for um that's just where they responded we we liked what we saw with these guys they had you know multiple experience with other plug-ins supporting plug-ins and so when we interviewed them they just seemed to be on point so we hired them what does i mean with this sort of license especially where it's downloadable do people pay it every year in other words the cohort that's signed up of june last year they were new june this year they do and it's automatic so it's automatic unless they cancel so um and that and that buys you another year of support and updates so what percent renewed this year oh um i'd have to if i had to guess right now i've not looked at the numbers this year about fifty percent okay so typically about fifty percent of each month's cohorts or renews the year later yeah because i mean so there's a lot of people that right out the gate they just want to cancel they cancel the bad thing about that is they don't lock in the price so for example a lot of people that came in in the early years 2014 2015 they locked in a renewing rate because we were discounting the renewal rate at 30 there was a point where we we had talked to some people we were doing some masterminding and they're like you know why are you doing that why are you why are you discounting that new renewal year and so we thought well let's just try it you know so we took off that 30 renewal fee and so it bumped it up so but a lot of people that uh didn't lock in um unfortunately yeah they've got the higher renewal rates um and then you have also you have you know credit card return and that kind of thing you know credit cards fail because they're they're expired um so yeah you deal with some of that stuff too what's it cost you fully waited to get a new customer that's willing to pay 120 bucks a year for the license well honestly man we've all we've done really is like you know facebook advertising what we've been we've been really um lucky i guess to to get get on some you know really well known blogs and so we've got you know people naturally just uh marketing us um but...