Daniel and i are currently thinking a lot on how we could improve our business model. But before we make any changes, that are going to affect you, we wanted to ask you for your feedback and your opinion.
You can either just post it as a comment here or contact us privately (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) or have a chat with Daniel (the_ai87) or me (yves.hoppe) on Skype.
Why?
The market is getting tougher, so is getting new customers. Joomla! lost some market share and third party extensions in general have gotten a bit of bad reputation etc.
We are currently evaluating the following ideas:
1.) Working on Drupal and / or Wordpress support?
Porting our extensions to Drupal or Wordpress would extend our possible customers and make us more independent of market fluctuations.
The downside would be that this would probably take a lot of work and maybe even cut some features in existing extensions, because we can't use all the great Joomla functions there (or have to port them).
Entering a new market can although be very tough and time consuming..
2.) Lower the download extension fees, increase the support ones
I don't know if this is helping us making new customers, but currently the situation in support is the following:
- 35 % are CSS questions (which we normally don't even support according to our policy, but we do still help almost always..)
- 30 % are JavaScript issues not caused by our extensions (which we normally don't even support according to our policy, but we do still help almost always..)
- 10 % are customization help requests (same..)
- 15 % Questions on features etc. which have been answered already or a explained in the documentation
- 10 % is real support where our software has bugs / problems.
As you can see we are doing a lot of stuff, which we normally don't consider as support.. We charge between 30 and 60 Euro per extension, this is not even half an hour of working fees here in Germany in the IT sector.
So we can either increase the fees for everyone, which is going to cost us customers, or we just offer a lower priced download version (including support for REAL bugs / problems of course) and some sort of premium support for those wanting more.
3.) Splitting our extensions up in parts
Instead of having just one version or core and pro, we start selling features as plugins.. E.g. we cut out parts, which are not basic functionality, out of our extensions and sell these things as addons. The extension would be some core version, which could be free or cost only a very low fee (without support) and then could be extended by addons.
For example the payment processing system in Matukio could be moved out into an addon or the webinar system etc. And we would of course add paid templates.
The question is could that bring us new customers?
4.) Templates
No, we don't want to be a normal template shop, but templates are an important topic nowadays.
We want to make templates which integrate our extensions and help you built sites around them easier.
Maybe 4 to 5 different ones a year.
One thing we definitely want to do:
We are looking for up to 5 people (per extension) who use our extensions on daily basis. We need your feedback to improve our extensions. So if you work with them on daily basis and you want to make them better send us a mail This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
We are going to invite you into a slack channel, where we all can chat and exchange ideas about how our extensions can help you growing and making your business more easy!
Thank you for reading that long blog post and thank you in advance for providing your feedback!
Daniel & Yves
The Compojoom Team
