Product Rescue: Evaluating the Landscape

About a year ago I launched a new product: OrganizeWP — this particular product has been one in the making for a long time prior, and even has an initial concept on the .org repo initially posted back in 2012!

The original build of that plugin, and the inspiration behind OrganizeWP can be found in the launch post, but that’s not what I’m going to chat about a bit here.

To date, OrganizeWP has not been a successful product in my eyes. I’m going to start writing about my attempts to fix that. This is the first article in “I don’t know how many total” articles that will walk through my efforts, successes, and failures in trying to get OrganizeWP off the ground.

The current situation

OrganizeWP is nearly 12 months old, and I’ve done nothing beyond the initial blog posts and a few sporadic tweets about the product since. In my infinite wisdom I thought the product would be instantly well received and do its own marketing.

Spoiler alert: that did not happen.

I still stand behind what OrganizeWP is in and of itself. I truly believe that (along with other areas of the project as a whole) the editing experience in WordPress can be greatly improved, despite it being one of the best and most widely used.

Gutenberg continues to focus on the editing experience of single pieces of content. There are current and active efforts to tackle composition of entire pages from header to footer as well. There are (tentative? penciled?) plans to have Gutenberg literally do everything in the WordPress Admin. I don’t know where my opinion rests on that, but I do know it’s a ways out and I think OrganizeWP can fill the gap right now anyway.

The low hanging fruit

I was on a mastermind call recently with someone I greatly respect as a developer, a business person, and a friend. Our call wasn’t even aimed to talk about OrganizeWP but we got on the topic anyway, and through our conversation I realized just how many fundamental mistakes I’ve made with marketing the product to date.

I was walking him through the site and I could hear the confusion in his voice about OrganizeWP and he already knew about the product and what it did!

I realized I made the same mistake I did earlier with SearchWP; my target demographic was far too large to have anything worthwhile make sense at first glance.

In my wise mind I thought that OrganizeWP would be great for agencies and freelancers, it would make the editing experience for their clients so much more straightforward. Their clients would feel empowered, and there would be fewer emails/calls made out of frustration and confusion. It’s a win win.

But that wasn’t enough for some reason. I daydreamed about how site owners too would recognize and know this pain, they would know that they feel disoriented in the WordPress admin and seeing OrganizeWP would be a shiny resolution to that.

So I wrote copy that covered both angles. And in doing so the copy turned into the feature outlines we learn not to do in Marketing 101.

Project 1: Copy Writing

I’ve spent a couple of days this week revamping much of the copy on a few pages of the site, and I already feel like it’s an improvement. Once I get through some more I’ll take some time to put together a before/after breakdown of the changes I made and why.

Stay tuned!