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How to find the perfect customer in a crowded market
Even with all of the WordPress consolidation happening, there’s still plenty of opportunity ahead for the industry.
There’s lots of potential users, customers, and room for investment (note: we just saw the acquisition of Yoast happen by Newfold, formally EIG. If I had to guess, somewhere between a $30-50M deal.)
If you though the plugin space is crowded or even more specifically the membership & LMS veritcal, then I have a surprise for you today. Nathalie Lussier, founder of AccessAlly a LMS plugin for WordPress joins us to talk about her venture in building her business.
From selling online courses and building community to building and selling software — this is a fantastic lesson for all of us. Her and her team are really proving that in the a crowded market, you stand apart from the crowd by knowing who your perfect customer is and building them the perfect product.
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] This episode is brought to you by paid memberships pro well, actually it’s their other product. Site-wide sales at site-wide sales.com. It’s a complete black Friday cyber Monday and flash sales tool for WooCommerce or paid memberships pro. Before, you know it, the deal day holidays will be fast upon us. And you want to prepare your WooCommerce or paid memberships pro website.
[00:00:20] With the site-wide sales plugin, use it to make custom sale banners, targeted landing pages or apply discounts automatically in the cart. Use it to track the performance of all of these promotional features using the reporting feature, which will paint the picture of your black Friday and holiday shopping sales. I use it to help make your woo commerce or paid memberships pro store more money.
[00:00:43] Get the first 30 days for free. And then it’s an easy $49 a year. Check out site-wide sales.com. That’s site-wide sales.com to make more money. This holiday sale season.
[00:00:56] Matt: Even with all of the WordPress consolidation happening, there’s still plenty of opportunity ahead for them. There’s lots of potential users, customers, and room for investments notes. We just saw the acquisition of Yoast happened by new fold, formerly EIG. If I had to guess a deal somewhere between a 30 and $50 million acquisition, if you thought the plugin space is crowded or even more specifically, the membership and LMS vertical is crowded.
[00:01:22] Then I have a surprise for you today, Natalie Lucier founder of access, ally and LMS plugin for WordPress joins us to talk about her venture in building her. From selling online courses and building community to building and selling software. This is a fantastic lesson for all of us. Her and her team are really proving that in the crowded space, you stand apart from the crowd by knowing who your perfect customer is and building them the perfect product you’re listening to the Maryport a podcast for the resilient digital business builders.
[00:01:51] Subscribe to the newsletter maryport.com/subscribe and follow the podcast on. Spotify, wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts better yet. Please share this episode, please do, because I just read that the best way to grow a podcast is word of mouth and sharing. So please share this episode with others.
[00:02:09] We’d love more listeners around here. Okay. Let’s get into today’s episode.
[00:02:13] It almost feels like a SAS software as a service. Tell us about that, that moment when you realize I’m teaching people, I might as well build the software too.
[00:02:22] Nathalie: Yeah, absolutely. So I was in the like marketing and tech space and doing videos on like, how to build a popup and how to do things on your WordPress site and how to market your courses and all of that stuff. And I was teaching. In courses and also on YouTube and people who were, signing up to our free challenge.
[00:02:42] We had a challenge called the 30 day list building challenge to help people build an email list and they were signing up. And it was, becoming pretty popular. So we had a lot of people logging in at the same time. And at the time. I thought we were getting attacked by hackers or something.
[00:02:56] Cause we have so many logins and the way that our plugin that we were using at the time it kept pinging our CRM and every single time somebody went to any page on that site. So, we were having nightmares basically. I would wake up every morning and have to call my host to have them. Unlock us, essentially, we put my website back up and then all the people who were signing up were upset with us because, they signed up and they couldn’t get what they were asking for or what we had promised.
[00:03:21] So essentially my husband and I were like, okay, let’s just quickly whip up a plugin to replace what we have right now, just to stop this problem. And so that’s literally in one weekend we wrote the first beta beta version of access ally. And it was just to solve our own problem. Yeah. But then after that, we kind of realized like, Hey, okay, this gives us a lot of, interesting options.
[00:03:40] And we started adding on and kind of building other things that we thought would be very useful for the people going through our courses and content. And that was kind of the start of what you see today.
[00:03:51] Matt: So you ha I, I didn’t write this down in our peer review, but what was the timeline you had popup ally first and then.
[00:03:58] Then we created access ally, correct?
[00:04:00] Nathalie: Yes. So we built SSLI first just to solve this problem. And we knew that someday we might release something like this, but it just felt like too big of an undertaking to do a whole like online membership or LMS or anything like that. So we ended up building popup ally next and releasing that first because we knew we could do a free version.
[00:04:19] We could see how that went. Then we could do a paid version and see how that was. Being responded to and how we could handle support and all of that. And then we realized, okay, yes, we can actually do this. We have the chops. And so let’s go all in on SSLI and kind of build
[00:04:33] Matt: that. And I’ll, I’ll paint sort of the the, the picture at least of the way that I see it in my head is pop-up plugin a very, very broad market, big market.
[00:04:44] Chances are anyone who might be selling courses or digital content is going to be attracted to a pop-up to use on their site to capture the visitor’s attention. And, oh, by the way, we also. Have this LMS plug-in fair statement.
[00:04:58] Nathalie: Yeah, it totally started off that way. It’s a much broader, pop-ups are much broader.
[00:05:02] And then, yeah, like you said, people who are using them to build an email list and audience, they probably will want to sell something online. So, so that pretty much leads to access ally.
[00:05:12] Matt: Yeah. I want to start with something that I won’t say it’s a curve ball, but a little bit on the hot seat, but something that I totall...
View all episodes
By Matt Report & Matt Medeiros
4.9
133133 ratings
Even with all of the WordPress consolidation happening, there’s still plenty of opportunity ahead for the industry.
There’s lots of potential users, customers, and room for investment (note: we just saw the acquisition of Yoast happen by Newfold, formally EIG. If I had to guess, somewhere between a $30-50M deal.)
If you though the plugin space is crowded or even more specifically the membership & LMS veritcal, then I have a surprise for you today. Nathalie Lussier, founder of AccessAlly a LMS plugin for WordPress joins us to talk about her venture in building her business.
From selling online courses and building community to building and selling software — this is a fantastic lesson for all of us. Her and her team are really proving that in the a crowded market, you stand apart from the crowd by knowing who your perfect customer is and building them the perfect product.
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] This episode is brought to you by paid memberships pro well, actually it’s their other product. Site-wide sales at site-wide sales.com. It’s a complete black Friday cyber Monday and flash sales tool for WooCommerce or paid memberships pro. Before, you know it, the deal day holidays will be fast upon us. And you want to prepare your WooCommerce or paid memberships pro website.
[00:00:20] With the site-wide sales plugin, use it to make custom sale banners, targeted landing pages or apply discounts automatically in the cart. Use it to track the performance of all of these promotional features using the reporting feature, which will paint the picture of your black Friday and holiday shopping sales. I use it to help make your woo commerce or paid memberships pro store more money.
[00:00:43] Get the first 30 days for free. And then it’s an easy $49 a year. Check out site-wide sales.com. That’s site-wide sales.com to make more money. This holiday sale season.
[00:00:56] Matt: Even with all of the WordPress consolidation happening, there’s still plenty of opportunity ahead for them. There’s lots of potential users, customers, and room for investments notes. We just saw the acquisition of Yoast happened by new fold, formerly EIG. If I had to guess a deal somewhere between a 30 and $50 million acquisition, if you thought the plugin space is crowded or even more specifically, the membership and LMS vertical is crowded.
[00:01:22] Then I have a surprise for you today, Natalie Lucier founder of access, ally and LMS plugin for WordPress joins us to talk about her venture in building her. From selling online courses and building community to building and selling software. This is a fantastic lesson for all of us. Her and her team are really proving that in the crowded space, you stand apart from the crowd by knowing who your perfect customer is and building them the perfect product you’re listening to the Maryport a podcast for the resilient digital business builders.
[00:01:51] Subscribe to the newsletter maryport.com/subscribe and follow the podcast on. Spotify, wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts better yet. Please share this episode, please do, because I just read that the best way to grow a podcast is word of mouth and sharing. So please share this episode with others.
[00:02:09] We’d love more listeners around here. Okay. Let’s get into today’s episode.
[00:02:13] It almost feels like a SAS software as a service. Tell us about that, that moment when you realize I’m teaching people, I might as well build the software too.
[00:02:22] Nathalie: Yeah, absolutely. So I was in the like marketing and tech space and doing videos on like, how to build a popup and how to do things on your WordPress site and how to market your courses and all of that stuff. And I was teaching. In courses and also on YouTube and people who were, signing up to our free challenge.
[00:02:42] We had a challenge called the 30 day list building challenge to help people build an email list and they were signing up. And it was, becoming pretty popular. So we had a lot of people logging in at the same time. And at the time. I thought we were getting attacked by hackers or something.
[00:02:56] Cause we have so many logins and the way that our plugin that we were using at the time it kept pinging our CRM and every single time somebody went to any page on that site. So, we were having nightmares basically. I would wake up every morning and have to call my host to have them. Unlock us, essentially, we put my website back up and then all the people who were signing up were upset with us because, they signed up and they couldn’t get what they were asking for or what we had promised.
[00:03:21] So essentially my husband and I were like, okay, let’s just quickly whip up a plugin to replace what we have right now, just to stop this problem. And so that’s literally in one weekend we wrote the first beta beta version of access ally. And it was just to solve our own problem. Yeah. But then after that, we kind of realized like, Hey, okay, this gives us a lot of, interesting options.
[00:03:40] And we started adding on and kind of building other things that we thought would be very useful for the people going through our courses and content. And that was kind of the start of what you see today.
[00:03:51] Matt: So you ha I, I didn’t write this down in our peer review, but what was the timeline you had popup ally first and then.
[00:03:58] Then we created access ally, correct?
[00:04:00] Nathalie: Yes. So we built SSLI first just to solve this problem. And we knew that someday we might release something like this, but it just felt like too big of an undertaking to do a whole like online membership or LMS or anything like that. So we ended up building popup ally next and releasing that first because we knew we could do a free version.
[00:04:19] We could see how that went. Then we could do a paid version and see how that was. Being responded to and how we could handle support and all of that. And then we realized, okay, yes, we can actually do this. We have the chops. And so let’s go all in on SSLI and kind of build
[00:04:33] Matt: that. And I’ll, I’ll paint sort of the the, the picture at least of the way that I see it in my head is pop-up plugin a very, very broad market, big market.
[00:04:44] Chances are anyone who might be selling courses or digital content is going to be attracted to a pop-up to use on their site to capture the visitor’s attention. And, oh, by the way, we also. Have this LMS plug-in fair statement.
[00:04:58] Nathalie: Yeah, it totally started off that way. It’s a much broader, pop-ups are much broader.
[00:05:02] And then, yeah, like you said, people who are using them to build an email list and audience, they probably will want to sell something online. So, so that pretty much leads to access ally.
[00:05:12] Matt: Yeah. I want to start with something that I won’t say it’s a curve ball, but a little bit on the hot seat, but something that I totall...