Black Friday 2019
Some of you might have seen the Black Friday promo pop-up on our landing page.
As that pop-up says, our Black Friday deal is coming soon, and it’s going to be a fun one!
Ground Rules
- We put 500 licenses for sale during Black Friday at promo rates;
- The promo will run from Nov 11 – 30 OR until the 500 licenses are sold out, whatever happens first;
- We will have two different discount tiers: 35% OFF and 45% OFF.
Waiting List
To get the 45% discount rate you will need to signup for the waiting list (the form that pops up on the landing page). The form is also available here. The form is now closed.
You’ll be able to signup until 05:59 pm EST on November 11. After that, the deal will go live and all the subscribers on the waiting list will get an email with an exclusive link to a single-use coupon code.
The pop-up has been upon for little more than 24h and we’re already about to hit the 100 subscribers mark. Sign-up while you can!
Tips
- Coupons will be generated based on your email address and they will all be single-use coupons, so if you are planning to get more than one license, you will need to enter two different email addresses to the waiting list.
On Monday, Nov 11, 6 pm EST…
…the deal will go live for everyone (including those on the waiting list).
If you were not previously on the waiting list, you’ll still get a good deal out of it – 35% OFF.
You’ll have another chance to win back that extra 10%, but that will require some work on your part! So I recommend signing up for the waiting list as soon as possible.
FAQ
- Why limit the number of licenses being sold?
- Although we’d love to have you as a customer, we have a large user base that requires our support and assistance. One of our top priorities now is to make sure we will be able to handle the flux of new users without compromising support and development efforts.
- Was there a similar limitation on last year’s BF?
- Yes, we limited the number of licenses sold to 300, and it only took us 5 days to reach that mark back then.
Let me know if you have any questions!
Weekly Webinars, Office Hours, Forums, Roadmap, and More!
Hello everyone,
After WordCamp US and a lot of reflection, it’s time to put some things out there. I hope you all enjoy the reading!
The elephant in the room: WP Ultimo 2.0
During WordCamp US I had the opportunity to talk with lots and lots of product people and learn a lot from their experiences. During the trip back home, I had time to reflect on their tips and to think about the best ways to move WP Ultimo (and our other projects) forward.
Anyone that had the curiosity of taking a look at WP Ultimo’s code will agree that it is a beast. It does so much and it touches all of the messiest elements of WP Multisite. It’s hard code to write, harder to maintain, and even harder to make performant. Yet, we just love to write it.
A huge part of that code was rewritten pretty much from scratch for 2.0, mostly to remove some barriers they had put in place and allow us to have a strong foundation to build the new features. However, the results are still not optimal and not on a level I’m comfortable putting forward.
I admit I was not able to deal with the pressure very well, which lead to lots of deadlines being thrown out. I understand that, for some, this damages the trust I think is so valuable to create between a product developer and their customers and only actions can re-build that.
That pressure ultimately hurt our productivity as a team and we ended up rushing code that should never be rushed. The truth is that between testing, making sure the different modules work seamlessly among them, database migrations, and cleaning the code up there’s still a lot to be done.
I won’t give a new deadline for 2.0 until I’m 100% sure it is ready for public testing, but I won’t leave you guys in the dark anymore. Which leads us to…
Weekly Webinars
There are some workflows that I believe would greatly benefit from inputs from our Community – you! And there are some CRAAAAZY new features we’re adding that we’d love to show to you. I vented this idea before but never actually got to it. It’s time to change that.
During the next week (Nov 11-15), we’ll use the Facebook Group to decide a weekday and time to host a weekly webinar, open to anyone that wishes to participate. The idea here is to discuss workflows, ideas, feature suggestions, the roadmap, and get to know each other!
Office Hours
One little experiment I always wanted to run is having office hours, so starting next week, most Wednesday and Thursday I’ll have office hours between 12 pm – 14 pm EST.
You can book a 20-min block on that window and we’ll chat via Zoom. It doesn’t necessarily need to be WP Ultimo-related. We can discuss your WaaS idea, a feature suggestion you have, a bug you’re experiencing, a workflow you think needs improvement, etc.
You should be able to book the slots at Calendly – Arindo Duque.
Say Bye-Bye to the Forums, say Hi to the WP Ultimo Users Group
When I joined the Facebook group I was amazed by the level of engagement the posts there had. Although I recognize the WP Ultimo Forums played a great role in the past, I don’t see much sense in keeping them as a channel for discussion when all the talking is already going on elsewhere.
That means we’ll be disabling the forums later this month.
New posts will be locked and signups will no longer be available. The topics will be left there for reference, but nothing more.
This also means that you should join the Facebook Group if you’re still not part of it.
Say Bye-Bye to Trello, say Hi to Feedbear
Trello is a great tool, but it was never meant to be used as a public roadmap where people would actually be able to report bugs, suggest new features, and vote for the features they like the most.
We were given a FeedBear license (thanks, Fernando Arbex!) and that’s the right software for that task. During the month of November, we’ll be moving the Trello Roadmap to FeedBear (please, do not add suggestions and bug reports on there yet!).
Black Friday
It’s that time of the year again! We have some great plans for this year’s promo, but I’ll talk more about that later…
Well, I think that’s all for today. I would sincerely like to hear your opinions on that, so leave a comment below.
Updates on 2.0
Hey guys.
So, I feel really bad and the past few weeks that should have been great (since things have been great for business in general) were kind of a train-wreck, both mentally and in terms of work.
My original expectation is that the increased support/pre-sale questions load would return to normal as time went by, but the load has been growing and growing (despite some apparent dips). Not sure if Google has understood that we are the only option available now, but even with the reduced amount of direct WPMU DEV refers, our organic reach increased by a lot.
This is great for business because we are selling more licenses, Annual Recurring Revenue is growing and we are solidifying the company as a whole. However, the effects on my state of mind have not been so great, and a huge part of it is that I have this constant feeling of frustration and of “letting you guys down” on 2.0 progress.
I had to spend most of the past weeks either working long hours on the Migrator or working long hours helping Ruel on support. Even Marcelo (our other dev) and Juliana (which should mostly be writing documentation stuff) are now spending most of the time helping with support as well.
The past few weeks taught me a lot though, and I would like to share that with you all:
- I’m the bottleneck of the company. I’m not sure if this is due to the fact that I was a ‘solopreneur’ for so long, but I’m really bad at delegating and at creating processes that allow things to move without my direct oversight/interference. Basic things like refunding a license on the 30-day money back guarantee period have to go through me at the moment. One of my main goals is to make the entire operation “me-independent” as soon as possible.
- This is kind of a consequence of the first point, but I’m hugely underutilizing Ruel, our support manager. He will be taking a more active place in managing the forums, Trello, refunds, and other stuff a support manager should be doing.
- The increase in revenue gives me the leeway to confidently grow the team: we’ll be soon adding another support agent, another full-time developer and an intern will be joining us soon as well, bringing our total headcount to 7 people.
- Working on the Migrator made us realize what Pro Sites did right, especially in terms of performance and database modeling for multi-currency support and other features like that. I still think that a lot of the decisions we made on WP Ultimo are the right ones, but having to read almost every line of code of Pro Sites gave us great insight that we can now use to improve WP Ultimo even more.
- Choosing to work on a monolithic 2.0 release with all those new features was probably a bad decision given the position we were in and now it is probably too late to fix it. We will resume intermediate releases (1.9.X) with smaller, but important stuff, while we continue to work on the bigger stuff for 2.0. Some of the things that are ready to ship but are inside 2.0 might be released earlier in a 1.9.X release (examples include support to Cloudways SSL support, mass coupon generation, etc).
I’ll have to give you an update on a timeline later this month, but it is possible we won’t have an Ultimo 2.0 release until the end of July. We don’t want to push out something that is rushed or buggy. There are networks with 5-7k sites running our software and we can’t afford to do that.
I feel like I ask this every other week now, but I hope you guys understand.
Kind regards,
Arindo Duque,
Founder of NextPress