Note: This transcript was auto generated then some poor soul sat and listened to it, and followed through correcting any mistakes they spotted. Please however expect human error and shout if you spot an issue. Email: lee [fancy curly symbol] trailblazer.fm.
Verbatim text
Lee Matthew Jackson
Welcome to the WP Innovator Podcast, the podcast for web designers and design agencies exploring the world of WordPress and online business. And now your host, Lee Jackson. Hi and welcome to episode number 69 of the WP Innovator Podcast. This is Lee, and today’s show we have Steve Marks from Property Hive. Now, this is a cool interview ’cause I get to unpack what goes on behind the scenes with regards to a plugin development agency. Steve started off as an agency and then pivoted his business with a super niche WordPress plugin for the UK real estate industry, but obviously the plugins that he did can still, in theory as well, be used across the pond as well in the USA. So fascinating story. I gotta admit, I picked his brain a lot because there’s a hell of a lot of stuff I wanna know for my own product releases. So if you are in the market of releasing your own plugin, thinking about it, or just wanna know what goes on behind the scenes of anyone who creates awesome WordPress plugins, then this is the episode for you. Don’t forget, if you have any views or just wanna share cat pictures, we have a Facebook group over on angledcrown.com/group. That is a redirect, and that will take you to the secret, private, super duper cool, awesome fun, nice to be in, and all that jazz Facebook group.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So we’ll see you over there. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of the WP Innovator Podcast. This is Lee, and today we have Steve on the line from Property Hive. Steve, how you doing, mate?
Steve Marks
I’m very good, yeah. Thank you for having me on.
Lee Matthew Jackson
It’s a pleasure. I suddenly thought, what if his name isn’t Steve? Every now and again I do this. It’s like I’ve hit 34 now and I look at people and go completely blank.
Steve Marks
So I’ve been called worse. Have you? It’s fine. Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Like, oh, you, what’s the worst you’ve been called?
Steve Marks
Is it, is it, if it’s like, um, you put me on the spot now. Um, I don’t know. I’ll pass on that one.
Lee Matthew Jackson
No worries.
Steve Marks
Public hearing.
Lee Matthew Jackson
No worries. This is not a test. You’re allowed to pass. There is, there is no failure. So, uh, guys, uh, Steve is from Property Hive and Property Hive is I’m going to describe this and then you can like, you can then fix everything that I do here. So my understanding is Property Hive is an amazing free plugin that allows realtors, estate agents around the world to be able to list all of their properties. And then there’s a whole load of paid-for add-ons and it’s freaking awesome, to be honest, because I’ve used it and recommended it to other people as well and obviously wanted to talk to Steve. So Steve, that was me butchering what you do. How about you introduce yourself to everyone, tell them about you and a little bit about the plugin as well. And let’s get to know you a bit more.
Steve Marks
Yeah, that was a pretty good introduction. Thank you for that. Um, yes, my name is Steve. I’m, uh, 29. Uh, we’re based in Birmingham, but I’m originally from Northampton, which I think is near you, Lee.
Lee Matthew Jackson
It is, that’s right.
Steve Marks
And yeah, so, um, I live in Birmingham. I’ve got my girlfriend, uh, two dogs, uh, I’ve got a baby on the way.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Congratulations.
Steve Marks
Yeah, thank you. Um, Yeah, and really I live and breathe Property Hive. It’s not only a job to me but a hobby and it’s something that takes up most of the day. So it’s the first thing I think about when I wake up and it’s the last thing I think about when I go to bed. And I think if I speak about it much more to my girlfriend, she’s going to murder me. But yeah, it’s what I love doing and I think that’s— That’s important because it makes me enjoy coming to work and working on it. Yeah, I just love working on it. So yeah, you hit the nail on the head at the beginning with Property Hive is for estate agents. The underlying core theme is that it allows anyone to get an estate agency site up and running in WordPress. Property Hive itself is a free plugin available to anyone from the WordPress repository like any other plugin. So anyone can go and download it and have a play. And essentially anyone, regardless of their technical backgrounds, can get an estate agency site up and running in— well, we can do it in a few minutes, is our record.
Steve Marks
So yeah, you’ve got the core Property Hive plugin, and then on top of that you’ve got multiple add-ons and things, which I think we’ll come on to in a bit.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Definitely, it’d be great to unpack that.
Steve Marks
Yeah, that’s me.
Lee Matthew Jackson
No, well, that’s a fantastic introduction, and I can definitely connect with the idea of having a girlfriend or wife that when you tell them about what you love so much and you can just see on their face that it’s not that they don’t care, it might be that they don’t understand, or maybe they’re just absolutely sick of hearing about it. But I come home every day from work and I’m telling Kate what’s been going on, and I can kind of see just a very slight disconnect in her brain where I think she’s gone into standby until I’m done. Yeah, you can see that vacant expression, can’t you? But now look, you’re on a podcast, you get to talk about this for an hour, mate. This is really good.
Steve Marks
I know, I said, I said, uh, she’s headed out and I said, you know, the things I’m going to speak about you’ve heard a million times already. So, um, she’s not missing out on anything.
Lee Matthew Jackson
She doesn’t need to listen to the podcast then.
Steve Marks
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Well, one of the things that I love about your product is that you’ve created something that’s freely available that’s actually quite powerful for free. I.e., you don’t— if you know, and when we say estate agent, American guys, we’re actually talking about realtor. I think it’s realtors out in the US of A. So estate agent, just translation right now, it is realtors. But it’s very powerful out of the box for free, which is obviously very impressive. And then you’ve got the add-ons as well for things like— we’ve purchased a few add-ons ourselves for things like connecting with Rightmove, which is a pretty big real estate website, portal, whatever, all those words, all of the above. And it just does all of that integration as well, which does the automation for us, which is perfect. And obviously our clients are very happy with that. But, um, I guess what I’m interested in first of all, before we go into too much into kind of getting the plugin and everything set up, what’s your background? How did you get into WordPress and how did you even get into the real estate industry?
Steve Marks
Yeah, so I’ve been in the property software industry for my whole career really since I left college. My first job was for a company called Dupix. Now, if you’re in the estate agency industry in the UK, you might have heard of Dupix. They’re property software and they’re quite big. When I joined, there was only 3 of the people in the company. When I left 8 years later, there was I think 50 or 60 people. And they were getting bought out by large companies and so forth. So that’s really how I got into the property side of things. Then once I left this Jubix company, I started my own web development agency and that was specialising in WordPress. We didn’t necessarily mean to stay in the property industry, but I think because of past clients, we just found ourselves staying on property websites and building property websites, most of which were in WordPress. That’s really how PropertyHub was born because we had this perfect mixture of my 8 years’ experience in the software industry and my 5 or 6 years in the WordPress industry, so the two really go hand in hand.
Lee Matthew Jackson
[Speaker:TYRONE] So when you were at Dupix, were you actually doing WordPress there or were you developing software on a separate platform and hobbying on the side with WordPress?
Steve Marks
Yeah, it was— there was no WordPress at Dupix. It was just software, so working on the PHP stack.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah.
Steve Marks
And then, yeah, once I left there, I started to get into WordPress. And yeah, so no WordPress at Dupix, no.
Lee Matthew Jackson
No. And how did you get into WordPress? Was it that you left and started an agency straightaway building websites and selected WordPress, or how did all that happen?
Steve Marks
Yeah, that’s it. Yeah, so I started my own agency. I’ve never really heard of— well, I mean, I’ve heard of the various CMSs like WordPress and Joomla and things. And yeah, I think it was just a stab in the dark, really. I chose WordPress and instantly fell in love. I just loved how flexible it was, the range of plugins. I know it gets a lot of stick from people, but I can’t fault it. I think once you know how to use things like actions and hooks and philtres, you really can do anything you want to do. It’s very powerful.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Exactly. I mean, we’ve created like CRMs for clients, like back-office CRM systems. It’s a beautiful— I mean, it’s a framework, isn’t it?
Steve Marks
It is.
Lee Matthew Jackson
A lot of people, I guess, don’t understand that. They hear the— a few security issues, or they hear of these big bloated themes that you could get from ThemeForest, i.e., therefore you get a super slow website, etc., and WordPress gets a bad a bad rap, but the things you can actually achieve with it are phenomenal. Did you go out then— so you’ve got WordPress, you’re getting under the hood, you’ve got this new agency. At what point did you think, “Okay, I’ve established enough code base here,” I guess, with these clients to then actually launch a plugin, or was the idea always to launch a plugin at some point?
Steve Marks
[Speaker:JAMES] Yeah, well, that’s the thing. Like I said earlier, we found ourselves doing estate agency websites most of the time. And what I found myself doing was copying one site, pasting it into another site, and redoing a lot of the code— or sorry, replicating a lot of the code. And the same applied for things like you mentioned earlier, sending properties to third-party sites, or map search, and all these different various modules that people were wanting. We would just kind of copy and paste. Everything was very bespoke. It kind of struck me that there must be a better solution out there that’s more unified and everybody can use, not just me. There is alternatives based in the US and Australia, but I think the issue with here in the UK is the property market is very different. So that’s really where the idea came about, was I looked for a UK version of one of these out-of-the-box solutions. There was just nothing around at all, not even a glimpse of hope. So, I kind of just saw a gap in the market there really and not just from a financial point of view but just for my own benefit really.
Steve Marks
I think if you’re building tools, you should build it as if you’re going to use it, build it for you and then, yeah, I think then look at marketing it. So, what I did was I built Property Hive for my own personal use and Then once I was happy with it, it did everything that I wanted to do, I then put it out on the plugin repository.
Lee Matthew Jackson
What happened when you did that? Was it crickets?
Steve Marks
At first, not a lot. It was very quiet. Yeah, I mean, we’ve never pushed PropertyEye really. We’ve never done advertising or marketing. Everything has just been organic search and word of mouth really.
Lee Matthew Jackson
With regards to it being on the repository though, I mean— was there— you put it out on the repository, were you planning to monetize the product straight away, or was it simply you were just sharing the code base to give back?
Steve Marks
Yeah, I think, I think there was always in the back of my mind a plan to monetize it, especially for some of the more advanced features, because some of the features, you know, they, they could take weeks to build. And I think if you can get something off the shelf for free that just plugs in and works straight away, I think there’s definitely a financial value in that. Because we are dealing with B2B, you know, I think— I don’t think people mind paying £100 or £200 for a feature that we could save them hours in the long run.
Lee Matthew Jackson
No, I agree with that. I mean, just looking through the API of Rightmove myself before I chanced upon the add-on page on your website, I just remember thinking, “Oh my gosh, they’re going to need to pay me for several weeks of work here. This looks so complicated.” Now—
Steve Marks
Yeah, that’s a good example. So the Rightmove one you just mentioned, I think I think I’ve seen people charge £3,000-£4,000 for that integration. And if you look at our add-on, it’s I think £200. You download it, instal it, and off you go. So the amount of time that you save is crazy.
Lee Matthew Jackson
And does Property Hive actually generate, other than obviously sales of the add-ons, etc., does it actually generate you any extra business with regards to building sites, or has it actually replaced your need to build sites anymore, i.e., Property Hive is now able to generate enough income for you not to have to try and balance between agency life and software provider?
Steve Marks
Yes. So when I started Property Hive, we had Property Hive and then we had this— our main business which was the agency. We’re now at a point 14 months later which we’re now at the point where the agency is now shut down and we’re 100% on Property Hive. So yeah, it can definitely— Just have been providing enough income.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That is a blink of an eye.
Steve Marks
Yeah, yeah, not too bad.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s incredible. Well, one of the things that surprised me, and I could be— I could have misunderstood this about your pricing model as well, and I apologise if I’m pummeling you, but I know a lot of people listen to this podcast all thinking of putting stuff out there, and it’s really great just to get this opportunity to kind of just pummelled you with questions and find out how things have gone and the reasons behind some of your decisions. But when I’ve looked at the pricing, Am I right in thinking that in theory I could purchase one of your add-ons and I will always get updates for it? I need one payment.
Steve Marks
You, you purchase the add-on and that’s a one-off cost. Yeah. And what we have then is a licence key.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Okay.
Steve Marks
So a licence key is £50 per year at the moment, and that gives you access to add-ons. So if we do new functionality or fix bugs or any of this stuff, If you have a licence key, you’d then be able to update the add-on through WordPress. Otherwise, some people don’t buy licence keys because they’re happy with the version they’re using and it works and they don’t want to change, which is, which is fair enough.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So is that, is that per add-on as well, or is that, that you just pay a yearly licence fee key no matter how many add-ons you own?
Steve Marks
That’s it. So if you own 1 add-on or 10, it’s just 1 licence key that covers everything.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s quite clever, isn’t it? Because like, for example, if I’m thinking now of WooCommerce, some of those plugins are super expensive. And I know they give you half off the following year, but if you add up $300, $200, $100, and $99, I still have to pay half of all of that the following year, and that actually mounts up to quite a big bill. Whereas I think what you’re saying is one-off fee for the add-on yearly— what was it? What was the fee?
Steve Marks
[Speaker:JAKE ARCHIBALD] Yeah, so the one-off fee for the add-ons and then the £50 licence key.
Lee Matthew Jackson
£50 licence key. And I assume, and again, it’s been a while since I read the site. I should probably have been prepared now, but is that per £50 per site or is that just like £50?
Steve Marks
Yeah, that’s per domain. So per site. Yeah. Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That makes more sense. Okay. I was going to say, because otherwise that sounds like you’re practically giving it away.
Steve Marks
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s phenomenal. And that’s actually quite unusual. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that. What inspired you to try this model?
Steve Marks
Yeah, I think the one place I’ve seen it is the Gravity Forms plugin. I think they do a similar model where you get the add-on and then you pay a licence key. And again, you don’t need the licence key for it to be active and working. You just need it if you want the add-ons and support and things.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah, so with— well, I think with Gravity Forms, I think it was something like for the developer licence, $199 or something like that.
Steve Marks
Okay.
Lee Matthew Jackson
And you pay $99 a year after that. but it’s unlimited domains as well. So I guess that is the difference. But I think with yours, it’s super niche as well. So I think you are definitely in a position where you can be charging something like £50 per domain for things like updates, etc. I suppose if someone’s a real cheapskate, they can get around with that by copying and pasting onto the other domains, but come on, guys. And I assume most people would charge the licencing onto the clients et cetera anyway.
Steve Marks
Yeah. Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So, I mean, some questions you’re allowed to say no, but do you know how many instals right now are rocking and rolling with Property Hive?
Steve Marks
Yeah. So on the page where you download Property Hive from on the WordPress repository, I think it currently reads 4,300 downloads in total. But obviously downloads doesn’t relate to active instals because obviously people don’t use it all the time, or people just download and play with it. But I think the active instals count is— he says 200 plus. Yeah, I don’t know an exact, exact figure, but it’s 200 plus at the moment.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah, well, that is inspiring. So if you have been able to replace agency income with a developed plugin like this and your active instals is at 200, I think that must encourage everybody listening, uh, because I think a lot of people I myself do this as well. There’s this kind of imposter syndrome, and this is kind of worried that I’m not going to be good enough and that I don’t have a big enough reach or a big enough audience. But I think the beauty of what you’re doing is you’ve niched right down to a very particular industry. Um, and despite the fact that there may only be 200 that at least that WordPress know about of active instals, because I’m sure there’s probably more than that. I don’t think that— I don’t even know how they work that out, to be honest. No, I don’t think it’s a science necessarily, but you know, you’ve, you’ve You’ve created a business that if there were 200 active instals in the world, you’re actually now full-time software developer. That’s amazing.
Steve Marks
That’s it.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I’m impressed, man.
Steve Marks
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I’m like kind of high-fiving you over—
Steve Marks
Yeah, virtual high-five.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah, exactly. Virtual high-five. So, all right. So, like I can’t imagine what life is now like. So, I’m a freaking busy agency and my dream is to be doing what you’re doing. I’ve got a product that we sell in our other business and it takes up quite a bit of work, but I still have to do the agency life to keep going. At the moment. So describe to me now what my dream job is in a few months’ time when I’m finally able to not be doing development work all the time. What is your life like? You said that you get up in your property hive all day, every day, etc. Describe the life of a software developer. Ex-agency, now software developer. What’s it like?
Steve Marks
Yeah, so, yeah, although we don’t do as much custom WordPress development because we have this off-the-shelf solution. I think there is always the need for bespoke development. So somebody always wants something bespoke built in, a bespoke feature they want on their site that we don’t support. And there’s also a lot of support. So one area that has really struck me is we get a heck of a lot of support. You know, the amount of emails and calls we get is crazy. And I think the first thing you have to do is prioritise them, support requests. So you have to prioritise it between people with a licence key and without a licence key. And yeah, so a lot of the day is spent just doing support, first of all. And then the rest of the time is spent building new add-ons because I’m always keen to push the product forward and always build new modules and features. And then you also got things like bug fixes. So I think I’d be— I think I wouldn’t like it if it was just support all day. I’ll still get the development code.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I feel stressed for you just thinking about this, by the way. I can just see tickets coming in. I can see you prioritising it. I can see you headaching over bugs and feeling the stress. You’re not selling it to me right now, but keep going.
Steve Marks
No, no, it is better than it sounds. I promise I’m not selling it. But Yeah, it’s a mixture. We split our day in half basically. One half is spent doing tickets and the second half is spent developing things. And that could be new add-ons or bug fixes. And also things like writing documentation. I think what you can do massively to reduce support is have good documentation. And that’s one area that we’re focusing on at the moment is getting good documentation and then doing screencasts. Just in an effort to reduce support so we can spend more time doing the development and moving it forward.
Lee Matthew Jackson
[Speaker:PAUL_LEWIS] That’s good. That’s one thing we learned as well because we licence our products as a hosted solution, but we still find that we get a lot of the same sorts of tickets. Instead of reinventing the wheel all the time, we’ve created those screencasts and we now just have these canned responses. When we recognise it’s that sort of ticket that’s coming in, we’re just going to send them, “Hey, yeah, this is how you go ahead and do that.” I have found, and I’m guilty of this by the way, I have found that people will decide they can’t be bothered to read the instructions, so they’ll email support.
Steve Marks
Do you get a few of those? Yeah, because I just send you one, you can just send them a link to an FAQ or something.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah, and that’s definitely me. And I haven’t done it to you yet, which is good.
Steve Marks
Good so far. I’ll wait for that.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I promise to read all the documentation now. But let’s just take a quick second, guys. If you do the exact same as me and email the support because you’re a bit lazy, then Why don’t you let us know in the Facebook group? Go on over to angledcrown.com/group. That’ll redirect you there. Let’s share our funny stories. And also, don’t forget, cheque out the show notes. Aim on to angledcrown.com/podcast, and you can cheque out the show notes to what we’re talking about right now, including links over to Property Hive to go and cheque out that plugin as well, especially if you’re looking to be building your own real estate website, either for yourself or for your clients. There you go. That sounded like an ad, didn’t it? That’s pretty cool. I liked that. It was definitely an ad for the Facebook group. I totally want to get people in there. We’re growing dead fast. It’s amazing. We’ve got like nearly 500 people, so that’s 500 agencies or web developers, designers, etc., all just gassing away in the Facebook group sharing their WordPress love, so that’s pretty cool.
Steve Marks
Brilliant. I shall have to join in on that.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Totally. I was trying to get you to join there. I’ve just done a video channel. I did my first video the other day. Tried to record a load today, but I had bags under my eyes, so I’ve got them right now, but nobody knows this. So right now I’ve got a face for a podcast. I tried doing video and it just did not work today. I was gutted.
Steve Marks
Well, like I said, I’m still sitting here in my pyjamas. I’m not really.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I don’t know. I think I was on the phone once and someone said it was No Pants Tuesday or something like that. I was like, okay, don’t turn on the camera. Whatever you do. So with regards to development, um, you said obviously you’re putting it at a chunk of time per day in development. You’re obviously receiving some requests which are paid for where someone will say, we really need this feature, or we need to integrate with— you’ve never heard of this, but here’s the documentation, could you do that for us? And you’re like, yeah, that’s a billion pounds please. Um, but for the actual open source plugin, kind of what, how do you plan your roadmap and how do you make decisions as to what you feel is something you’ll make freely available and something that you’ll potentially charge for?
Steve Marks
Yeah, so one of the great things we’ve used is we have a roadmap on Trello.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah.
Steve Marks
And what we do, we enter the cards, so the second we get a request, we put it into Trello. And what we’ve got on Trello is an add-on which allows people to vote on features. So that’s one way we can decide on which features we work on first. Whether we charge for it or whether it’s part of the open source project, I think that just depends on, A, the amount of time that it would save someone, the amount of time that it would take to develop, and how bespoke it is. Because what I don’t want to do is if one person requests a feature, that nobody else in 5 years has requested. I don’t want to clutter PropertyHive with that one feature.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah.
Steve Marks
So, yeah, in that case, we’d make it a bespoke add-on as well just for that person.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah.
Steve Marks
But yeah, we try and put as much into the core as possible that we think will be useful. And of course, PropertyHive is open source as well, so anybody can add features if they wanted to. And anybody else can, can build add-ons. So if you want a specific add-on and you’re a WordPress developer, you can go and, and do that because there are so many actions and philtres available that anybody can hook into it.
Lee Matthew Jackson
And now on, on features, are there any things that you’ve done in the past that you regret? So decisions you made, you know, when you said you don’t want to clutter it up, have you had any regrets?
Steve Marks
The only regret we had was one of the main— one of the previous sticking points was that out of the box, Property Hive doesn’t look like the theme that they’re integrating it with. The reason for that is because there are so many themes in the world. Everybody’s integrating it into their own bespoke theme or their Foundr theme online and they’re integrating it into that. And what would happen is people would instal it, and we don’t add any styling at all. We add a little bit of core styling, but nothing too specific. And one thing we tried to do was make it so that out of the box it looks better. But what that did was we added this styling, and it actually messed up sites that people were trying to build. So we— yeah, we took that out. Pretty sharp after trialling it for a few weeks. Yeah, I think sometimes you can try to be too helpful and in the end you end up messing things up.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s interesting.
Steve Marks
So, my— yeah, what I’ve learned from that is to definitely trial things first before releasing features. So, yeah, what we do is we have a couple of kind of guinea pig sites that we try new features on first for a few weeks before releasing it to the open source. World.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s interesting you should say that because, you know, I’m literally— and I mean, I don’t mean to keep comparing you to WooCommerce, but at the moment that just seems to be what everyone wants us to work with. But, you know, they really like that. They frustrate me with the amount of styling they put in.
Steve Marks
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So for me as a developer, it’s really— yeah, I’m having to use important and I don’t like using that.
Steve Marks
Uh, yeah, yeah, well, that’s it. So, so what, what we came to the alternative solution that we came up with was You’ve got two routes. One is you instal Property Hive, which comes with very limited styling, but then you’ve got complete flexibility to make it look how you want and fit it into the theme that you’re using. And then what we did was we released a free open source theme, which again, anyone can download and comes out of the box with everything styled. So feature properties, search forms, everything styled. So you’ve got the two routes there. You can go down.
Lee Matthew Jackson
And I assume as well you could actually create a child theme. So you could use, I think, isn’t it called Honey or Honey Pot or something like that?
Steve Marks
Honeycomb.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Honeycomb, that was it. So you could use Honeycomb. I could create a child theme on top of that. So I actually get some of your hard work you’ve already done making a responsive theme, but then I could also do my own stuff. Yes, exactly.
Steve Marks
And you said earlier about WooCommerce and they’ve got a theme called Storefront, which is essentially the same concept really. They have a free open source theme called Storefront, which you can create a child and we’ve done the same approach.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s a good idea. Now, did I dream this, but did I not see a whole load of other themes at some point, and then you’ve just rolled back to one theme, Honeycomb, or has it always just been the one theme?
Steve Marks
Uh, no, we did have another theme similarly named, um, Honey. Yeah, um, that was a paid-for theme, but what I, what I’m keen to do is, is make Property Hive as accessible as possible to anyone. So, you know, in that, in that vein of thought, we we dropped Honey and we gave Honeycomb away for free. And it’s open source again, so anybody can contribute to it. And just in an effort to get more people on board really.
Lee Matthew Jackson
[Speaker:TOM_BALLATORE] That’s good. So, and again, you’re evolving your decisions. You’re trying something, you’re seeing if it works or not, and then you’re changing your mind, and that’s good. So that’s something we can learn as well, I think, from that. We’re good to change our minds. One of the regrets I have is I launched a product probably a couple of years ago now, but I never did a free version of it, so I struggled to get an audience. And then I never really did anything with it. I just kind of gave in. So I do like hearing storeys like yourself where you are evolving and you’re changing your mind sometimes. So you were selling something and now you’re giving away for free. That’s a good idea. And I guess as you’ve done that, hopefully that’s going to help you guys grow the attention or the eyeballs on your website, and then obviously your website’s job therefore is to then encourage people down the extra support. And I assume, do you also do like support where people could just buy support but not have any of the add-ons?
Steve Marks
Yeah, so that’s the, the licence key we spoke about earlier, that kind of, um, that’s a combination of updates for add-ons and support as well, so it covers both areas. So cool. Yeah, I mean, we do, we do offer free support as well, so if someone comes to us and says I can’t get this to work, you know, if it’s a, if it’s a quick question, I mean, they might not get the priority support, but you know, within a few days we’ll still get back to them. It’s not as if we’re saying, no, we’re not helping you because you haven’t paid this money to us. But yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Give us all your money.
Steve Marks
Exactly. I don’t know how I feel about that.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I’d be like, hmm, yeah.
Steve Marks
All these people are paying for support.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I’m just a meanie.
Steve Marks
Yeah. It depends on the request, obviously. But yeah. I mean, to be honest, most of the time, people that get good support, And people that use Property Hive do most of the time go on to buy add-ons anyway. So I think if you can provide that good support in the first place, they do end up buying add-ons and spending money in the long run. So it just kind of pays for itself over time.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That feels like a valuable lesson that I could learn from that then. So giving good support even to those people who are using your free plugin, they will potentially either be ambassadors for your brand, so they’re going to tell other people about how freaking amazing you are. Those people might pay, or they themselves may think, you know what, this guy has proved that he’s good at support and provide a good product. I’m going to also trust him with purchasing X, Y, and Z. Yeah.
Steve Marks
And even if it means— I feel learned. Yeah. Even if it means getting a good— giving good support means a good review on WordPress at the end of it. That’s a review you’ve got, and that could entice other people to take it on.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Have you ever had an issue where you’ve rolled out an update and it’s broken everything or broken a significant amount of people’s sites, or are you good in that regard?
Steve Marks
Yeah, touch wood, no.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Not yet. Just touching plenty of wood for you. There you go.
Steve Marks
Yeah, thank you.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I was interested because I’ve seen that even Beaver Builder the other day had an issue where they rolled out an update and it did cause a bug on hundreds of sites and they had to quickly roll it back.
Steve Marks
Yeah, that’s my worst fear is doing that. And touch wood, we haven’t yet. We do have procedures in place, so we have like unit tests in place to try and stop that. But I’m sure one day something will happen. But yeah, touch wood, we can— I think the trouble is as well, because you can integrate Property Hive into any theme, you know, there’s unlimited number of scenarios and variations of plugins and themes. You can’t cater for them all, but you can only do so much, and touch wood. We haven’t had a problem yet.
Lee Matthew Jackson
[Speaker:PAUL_LEWIS] Well, let’s go down this road now. You’ve just pointed out a very good fact. People will instal themes that may be jQuery or plugin-heavy. People have their own custom instals, etc. For development, your development decisions, what sort of development decisions are you making then? This is something that I would want to use as well. So, you know, are you trying to go as minimalistic as possible with regards to what you use? Are you only using Codex Code, only using the current version of jQuery, or are you loading in your own stuff? I mean, what goes through your mind every time you’re going to add something?
Steve Marks
Yeah, so, so what I try and do is, is use as much of the built-in WordPress functionality as possible. So like everything is using their custom post types, we use their taxonomies, we use their terms, um, we use their mail function, all of that kind of stuff we try and use. What that means is that if they change in the future, it’s likely that we’ll still work. We don’t use our own jQuery. Brilliant. Yeah, we just try and use as much of the WordPress built-in stuff as possible.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s a real good plan.
Steve Marks
Yeah, just to try and limit that chance of breaking things like we just discussed.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah, no, I’m totally with you. I’ve seen it happen in so many plugins as well. With regards to the— How many years is it? You’ve had 6 years in WordPress now or longer?
Steve Marks
Yeah, about 6, yep.
Lee Matthew Jackson
It’s been 6 years in WordPress. How have you seen your own skills develop? I’m thinking right now, if I put my code out live, people are going to see how I code. I think I’m really good. I think I’m pretty good here, but I also know that there are a whole load of really clever people out there. I’m just dead worried about that. I mean, did you have that hang-up at all? Were you just, yeah, fine, throw it out there, or did you have any of those reservations as well?
Steve Marks
Yeah, I did at first, because I was very sceptical of putting it out there at first, because I wanted to get everything polished. I wanted to get every feature working and tested. I think it got to the point where you could spend years doing that stuff. So what I took the approach of was just get out there. No, it’s not going to have much traffic at first. So I just got it out there. And then, yeah, I mean, I like to think that my code is not too bad, but I’m sure someone out there will pick up on certain points.
Lee Matthew Jackson
And guys, that’s not an invitation to go and pick it apart.
Steve Marks
I’ve got enough on my plate, thank you.
Lee Matthew Jackson
We only edify people on WP Innovator Podcast. We only build them up.
Steve Marks
Carry on, sorry. Yeah, really the main objective at the beginning was to get a minimal viable product out there and just get some traffic and use out of it really.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s something we’ve heard so many times as well, minimum viable product. It’s something I failed to do and people probably roll their eyes now hearing this comment from me. But again, there was another product I built years ago. I spent like a year and a half building it. Never really launched it because I wanted it to be perfect and sold none of it.
Steve Marks
Yeah, it’s a tricky one, isn’t it? Because once you put your code out there, everybody’s going to see it and everybody can pick at it and stuff. But then on the other hand, I think if you don’t get input from other people, you can never really improve. So sometimes feedback from people is good. Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So WordPress community-wise, are there any things you do within the community outside of the plugin and obviously plugin development? Are you involved in any of the WordCamps, any of the meetups, etc.?
Steve Marks
Yep. So we sponsored 2 WordCamps so far. We did WordCamp Brighton last year and we’ve done the WordCamp London just gone last weekend. We actually couldn’t make the one last weekend because we was a bit ill. Yeah, we’ve gone to about 4 or 5 WordCamps so far. We regularly go to the local Birmingham WordPress meetup. And yeah, and on top of that, we just try and contribute to the open source WordPress stuff where possible. Yeah. Yeah, just try and contribute.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Have you managed to get any commits?
Steve Marks
Not yet, no. Do a few plugins. Like, I think I contributed to WooCommerce once and a few of the other plugins. Yeah, just trying. I’m a very community—
Lee Matthew Jackson
own WooCommerce, so you could kind of vicariously through that.
Steve Marks
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah.
Steve Marks
No, that’s it. As well, what I wanted to get from this experience was just make it very community-based because, because there is nothing like that in the UK. Like I say, I wanted to make everything open source and even the themes that we create and the plugin itself and just Yeah, just give people the opportunity to develop it further if they want to.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah.
Steve Marks
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
And have you had that yet? Have you had anyone submit changes back to you guys that you’ve been able to roll in?
Steve Marks
Yeah, we’ve had a few pull requests which we merged. Yeah, it’s always quite rewarding actually seeing someone contribute to your code. That’s brilliant. Yeah, it’s very, very rewarding.
Lee Matthew Jackson
We’re about to open source the product that I tried to sell 2 years ago. We’re just cleaning up the code.
Steve Marks
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So I’m asking you all this tentatively worrying about making it live. There is literally a button I can press to make it live. So I think really after this call, I should probably just get my act together and share it with the world and see what happens.
Steve Marks
Do it. Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Just do it instead of farting around worrying. It’s been so good to just pick your brain on these things. Now with regards to things like the meetups, are you kind of— just as an encouragement, because I know again, this has been a conversation in the Facebook group where people have been asking what sort of meetups are available and that. What sort of things do you get out of these sorts of meetups? Is it business or is it something else that you’re getting out of these WordPress meetups?
Steve Marks
Yeah, I think it’s not necessarily business. I think it’s good for kind of marketing and branding because I think if you’re a web developer, I think at some point in your career, at some point I think you will be asked to build an estate agency website. So even though you go to a meetup and there’s loads of developers there, even though they might not be building a property website at the moment, if in a year’s, two years’ time they get approached for that, they’ll have Property Hive in their mind. So I think it’s just a good kind of marketing aspect. But it’s also great because when you go— well, the one we go to, there’s lots of talkers, so you can stand up for like 5, 10 minutes and just talk about things. And you just get such a variety of things from quite simple stuff to complex WordPress PHP stuff. So yeah, it’s a bit of business, bit of learning as well.
Lee Matthew Jackson
No worries. So guys, if any of you are based in Birmingham, go meet up with Steve.
Steve Marks
Yeah, I’ll be recommended.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I should be up there as well in a few months’ time because we’re going to try and do a few— we’ve been down to London, but we want to try and do a few meetups up north. So I’ve got our eye on one up in Manchester, and Birmingham’s on the list as well.
Steve Marks
Brilliant.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah, it would be great to catch up with you there. Let’s get— just pick your brain on the spot right now. Other than your own plugins, what plugin would you recommend people go cheque out and why?
Steve Marks
Other plugin? He’s on the spot. I think the plugin which has saved us the most time in development, not on Property Hive stuff, but just in general web development stuff. Is the Advanced Custom Fields plugin.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I kind of knew you were going to say that. Yeah, I don’t know why, it was a sixth sense, but carry on.
Steve Marks
Yeah, that to me is just great because before that, I mean, I know there were similar plugins, but we used to add meta boxes ourselves and it would take forever to add fields. But, um, yeah, it just saves us so much time. And, um, and it’s even something the client can change if they want to as well. Absolutely. Putting it back on there on their hands.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I’ve never, I mean, I assume Elliot is like a millionaire. I don’t, you know, cause like it’s everywhere, but like I only paid once years ago and I like, I, I remember, I don’t know if I should confess this, but I think I emailed him like a year ago saying, is there anything else I can do? I feel like I want to give you more money because I’ve had so much value out of Advanced Custom Fields over the last 5 years. I feel bad. I feel like I’m robbing him. And he’s like, oh no, that’s fine. If you’ve got any code, just send it over and that, which we’ve done, sent some stuff over in the past to be reviewed and that. But I was like, is there anything else I can do? I’m so used to paying monthly, like with you guys. I’m so used to paying monthly, not monthly, sorry, yearly support fees and that. I just, he seems happy. That’s great. But I kind of feel uncomfortable by it at the same time.
Steve Marks
Yeah, that’s similar to us. We bought a few of the add-ons, like the repeater one, and there’s a few others. Um, yeah, then we also built some of our own. So I think we built an Advanced Custom Fields Street View, I think, and a— there’s another one as well, a link picker, I think it was.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah.
Steve Marks
Um, yeah, it was just so easy to integrate with.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah.
Steve Marks
Um, and hopefully that, that to me is my way of giving back really, is adding more functionality.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s awesome. Advanced Custom Fields, definitely recommend people cheque that out. I mean, it’s, it’s a common, it’s a common one. Uh, people either mention Yoast or Advanced Custom Fields. When people say Yoast, I roll my eyes. When people say Advanced Custom Fields, I get excited.
Steve Marks
Yeah. Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
But you know, if you’ve, if this is the first time you’re listening, you don’t know what it is, just, it allows you to create fields against post types and taxonomies and users in a really quick and efficient way. And it’s not bloated. It’s nice and fast. And you know, for rapid application development or rapid website development, it is spot on. Uh, it’s the go-to, isn’t it, really?
Steve Marks
Yeah. And it’s free and open source.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So free and open source, or you can purchase the not very high priced one-off ever fee, uh, to get their pro. I think, I think the way we did it, we bought their 4 add-ons and then about a week later, ACF 5 came out and he just kind of like grandfathered them into his new price. I don’t think, I think we actually paid less. Than the guy.
Steve Marks
Yeah, we did the same here. Yeah, we used to have the single repeater ones and they’re like $25 each.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Oh, was it $25 each or something like that? And then he just launched the lot and rolled everything into one ACF 5. It’s never actually— I think it’s been like ACF 5 for like 3 years now.
Steve Marks
Yeah, it hasn’t launched yet, has it? Properly. No, I was reading about that. I was reading about that the other day, actually. Yeah, Advanced Custom Fields 5. I think it’s in a few months it’s been launched officially. I saw on his website. The other day.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah. Well, it’s been 5 for a long time, but I mean, it must have been 5.0 point something. Um, but I have noticed like in recent months as well, the interface has drastically improved. It’s a lot slicker and nicer, uh, you know, and, and some nice design changes as well in the backend, which is good.
Steve Marks
Nice.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Cool.
Steve Marks
Yeah, very cool.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Uh, what biggest project you’ve ever tried to create with Advanced Custom Fields? Go on then. Let’s put you on the spot again.
Steve Marks
Uh, well, I, I know it. It hit the server limit of the max inputs allowed. Because I think the default on the server is 1,000. And we had to bump it up to, I think, 2,000 or 3,000. Really? Yeah. So it was definitely an estate agency website, a big one. I imagine.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I remember once I created, like, using the flexible layout, I created a— this was back early days. And I created a flexible layout page. And I hadn’t really thought about how many pieces of content that we’re going to need on that page. And there were literally thousands upon thousands of these repeatable rows and it was just ridiculous. Just to, just to open the edit page took like 20 seconds before you’d even changed anything and then tried to press save. I was so embarrassed. This is like confession hour, isn’t it?
Steve Marks
Yeah, it is a bit.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Very cathartic. Over the last few years, mate, what do you feel has been your biggest life lesson?
Steve Marks
Biggest life lesson, charge more money.
Lee Matthew Jackson
There you go. I tell everyone this.
Steve Marks
Charge more money, raise your prices. Brilliant. Yeah, it’s a tricky one because I think everything’s got a value. I think you can either price something on its value or price something on your time. I think if it’s something bespoke that you spent years studying, hours reading documentation, and then someone asks you to do something using that knowledge, I think it’s difficult at that point to charge on time because there’s a lot of overtime which has gone into that. I think at that point, you’ve got to charge on what its value is. So yeah, time versus value is what I’ve learned most, I think.
Lee Matthew Jackson
[Speaker:TYRONE] I think that’s something I just keep learning all the time. I still feel bad sometimes when someone says, ah, could you, could you do this? And I know it’s going to take me 5 seconds, but I also know that I know something that is very unique.
Steve Marks
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I have a special set of skills. Sounds like Taken now, doesn’t it? But you know what I mean? And, and that took me a long time to learn and a lot of crying to learn that thing.
Steve Marks
That’s like this, the, the, going back again to the Rightmove add-on that you mentioned earlier that we do. That, that probably, yeah, like we said earlier, that probably took hours and hours and days of building and testing and back and forth with Rightmove testing. It. And yeah, I think it’s £200. And then all the time we get people saying, oh, can you do it for £100 or £50? You know, I think, yeah, I think the amount of hours that has gone into that add-on.
Lee Matthew Jackson
It’s never crossed my mind to email a plugin company and ask them for a reduction.
Steve Marks
Yeah, I get it all the time.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I’m flabbergasted.
Steve Marks
Yeah. Wow. Obviously the answer is no.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Obviously, but I don’t know what to say about that. It kind of feels quite rude. I mean, I’m not a very good haggler anyway, to be honest. Even if I think it’s a bit too expensive somewhere, I’ll just end up paying it anyway. Proper British, don’t want to make a fuss.
Steve Marks
That’s it.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I’ll just moan about it when I get home.
Steve Marks
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
It was expensive, wasn’t it? Thieving bleeps. Well, you’ve been a legend anyway. Thank you just for giving us that sort of insight. I just love that you’ve been really open and honest and raw and kind of not held anything back, which is awesome. And I know this is going to be really helpful for those people that have been considering a lot of people do have, like you, they’re sat on quite a bit of code and they know they want to release it somehow and it’s just super useful to get plugin owners like yourself just kind of unpacking all the different things, throwing questions at you and just finding out the stuff that we’re probably never going to know. So there’s a huge value in that. So guys, really recommend you head on over to Property Hive. It’s wp-property-hive.com, of which I know Steve’s going to go out and buy a nice vanity URL for now.
Steve Marks
I am, yes.
Lee Matthew Jackson
But we’ll put that in the show notes as well. If you’re driving, don’t write that down. Just go to anglecrown.com/podcast. You’ll find the episode in there. Just type in Steve Marks into the search and his episode will pop right on up. Steve, you’re a legend. How can people get in touch with you?
Steve Marks
Yep, so the best way is to visit the website. Our email address is on there and we’ve got live chat as well.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Cool. Do you Twitter at all or do you Facebook?
Steve Marks
We Twitter, yeah. It’s WP_propertyhive.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Nice. Are you quite active on Twitter or is really the website the best way?
Steve Marks
Yeah, website. We try and tweet as much as possible, almost every other day.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s pretty good. I’m on it pretty much every day as well. I’m kind of a little bit addicted, to be honest.
Steve Marks
When time allows, yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
No, actually, I think I’ve got the opposite problem. It’s like I actually try and fit work in between Facebook and Twitter.
Steve Marks
Yeah, yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I really need some help. If you comment on something on my profile on Twitter, you’ll probably get a like from me within about 3 seconds. A lot of people have commented on that. I’m pretty sure there’s going to be an intervention at some point.
Steve Marks
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Mate, you’re a legend. Thanks so much for being on. Love it. And have an awesome day.
Steve Marks
Yeah, Andy, thanks so much.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Take care.
Steve Marks
Bye. Bye-bye.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Well, that wraps up episode number 69. And in next week’s show, We are going to have Hani Mourra, who’s going to be talking about repurposing content. He’s also launched a really cool product which you can go and cheque out in advance over on repurpose.io. All right, guys, don’t forget we have that Facebook group on angledcrown.com/group. Let’s all communicate and talk. And to be honest, I share some really goofy stuff on there, but also some good stuff as well. And we have got some wonderful people in the community. Especially Greg Sweet. I’ve got to give him a shout out because he’s always sharing really cool snippets of code. I kid you not, if you go and have a look at his GitHub, there are some really, really cool things he’s got to share. So that’s angledcrown.com/group. And Greg, if you’re listening, I would love to get you on the show, mate. I just want to cheque if you’re actually listening this far into the show. If you are, Greg, get in touch. All right, guys. See you next week.
