Best-practices for subscription-based extension distribution (SBED)

Comment by Matt Thomson on February 12, 2010 at 3:48pm

I agree with most of the above, also:

Don't hire "support staff" if you can avoid it. My extension has 2 developers, which are also part time support. Customers appreciate talking to the people who wrote the extension, and getting into discussions about future features.

Put a signature or request on your site to post a review on the JED, having a 4 star rating with 100 reviews is better than a 5 star rating with 10 reviews, as one angry customer (and there is always at least one), can have a serious effect on the average of 11 reviews, (like cutting your income by 30%) but not on the average of 100 reviews.

Give refunds if someone has a genuine problem, and you can't solve it. Its better to lose 2% in sales through refunds, then to spend lots of time arguing, and getting bad reviews.

Update your extension regularly, give your customers a reason to purchase another 6 months, and if you update regularly with new features, it's less likely some one will release a fork of your extension.

Accept your not going to please everyone, most software websites convert 1-2% of visitors to sales, theres always those in a country with a weak dollar that can't afford your extension, or those who want different features, or want it free. Work out what your niche is, do it well, and let others take care of other niches.

Comment by Matt Thomson on February 13, 2010 at 2:24am

Thats not the case with my extension, but I can see if the majority of your issues are programme use level, that having non-developers can be useful.

I find about half of my support queries are programme based, but usually I can answer thoses q's in 2 minutes. The other half involve some kind of template/php file/css/javascript hacking, but becuase these take a lot longer, I tend to spend most of my time on these questions.

It may be the case that a photo gallery with about 50 different layout options leads to more code like questions, it may be the case that we are more keen to help out with customisation, and are more likely to give some hacks where the extension doesn't have the feature natively, I'm not sure, but 95% programme level questions is nothing like our support question makeup.

I think some developers are not skilled at writing docs/ support etc, but not all, I do all my docs and half of the support, and I don't mention code once in the docs, eg; http://www.ignitejoomlaextensions.com/guide-to-component

So I don't think it's the case we are all buried in the code so much we don't see things from a baby boomer with their first computers point of view, and if were not, we have insight that only comes from working with the code for months/years.

Comment by Ronni K. G. Christiansen on February 13, 2010 at 4:39am

I employ 20 people - 12 of them work fulltime in development and support on redCOMPONENT.com - the other 8 bring in money to fund the development on custom jobs (roughly).

So we do have support, we do have documentation, we do have an update speed in some regards that is very quick - and in a few weeks we will perhaps be the largest extension service in northern europe in terms of amount of codelines out.

We where/are running the flatrate subscription model - as low as 29 euro for a 3 month subscription with full access to all including support and documentation and access to extensions thats easily sold for as much as 10 times the on single basis from other supliers,

As in regards to the support type - 90% is useage and 10% or less is code so there is a clear need for regular support and thats even on extensions with pretty extensive documentation.

As new thing we started doing video documentation and our 3 next components (which is more then 20.000 man hours oif works) will have very extensive documentation + video guides coming for them.

However - it seems that we need to adjust our model - as what 29 euro brings in can not pay for the expenses if there is also a liability on the product side - so i guess we will have to adjust and differentiate on the subscription side - so i think we might just split into 3-4 levels so it will become:

Free
Trial
Normal
Pro

And then depending on where you are as a user on that scale there will be a lot more difference as to what you can access in regards of dsitribution, support and documentation. But then we could also easier follow a best practise where new alphas go in free, smaller extensions to trials, mature extensions to basic and the bigest extensions to pro.

Alternatively there would be a need to switch to selling single components alltogether - which really wasnt what we went for originially.

Comment by Victor Drover on February 13, 2010 at 8:12am

Lets try to stay on topic folks.

Support is clearly important for everyone. The threads above show that knowing your clients and providing appropriate support is critical. I'll modify my original to include that in item #1.

Anyone have other ideas on best practices?

Comment by Victor Drover on February 13, 2010 at 9:51am

Both styles appear to be successful. I think being clear on what the subscription(s) include is key. We use per extension, or per group of extensions. Once we got a good set of comparison charts up, things became a lot better with subscribers.

Comment by Victor Drover on February 13, 2010 at 9:59am

Added "Clarify the terms" to the list above.

Comment by Markus Bopp on February 19, 2010 at 5:18am

I offer "Flatrate" subscriptions + access to the latest versions + support. Means, by paying a relatively small fee you'll get the permission to download the latest installable versions of all of my extensions, including support. The previous versions are "free as beer". So far my experience is that almost everyone seems happy with that and it keeps you in touch with the community for not being "too much" of a business.

Comment by Alex Kempkens on March 5, 2010 at 12:13pm

The club has definitely changed the understanding related who is a user and who is a customer. This is no judgement in who is a good or bad user, but it helps us to have our priorities right. E.g. in terms of support we still try to answer also the community forums (which are open and free accessible) but if you have less time then your first look at the club forum who needs support.

As it was already mentioned I agree that the key is that your customers need to know what they get and you have to stick to it.

In terms of what you need to make your customers happy. I think the most important thing is to stay to your commitment to the extensions, solutions you provide and keep on improving them. What I find sometimes quite complicate as it is hard to get new ideas and solutions within one product group. A clear trend for us is the video documentation. It seems people are more happy to watch a 5 minute video than reading a document. May be we need pod casts?

One of the things we like to add in future are related products and services which make the usage of our extensions more easy or better to integrate in the Joomla sites.

Comment