Transparency report #9 – Dec 2016

Wow. 2016 is over. It’s been a great year. There’s been so much going on that I didn’t write my ‘year in review’. This is partly due to the fact I’ve been doing these transparency reports. But also partly due to December just being crazy busy for me.

Last month, there was quite a lot of change. It’s been the first full month of epic plugins and epic themes being under a subscription based pricing model.

This scared me. For some reason I have in my head that changing to a ‘per year’ model will put people off. It really shouldn’t. It’s no different than it used to be. It’s just that bit easier. You can still cancel your subscription after one payment. But I’d love it if you didn’t.

What happened in December?

Before getting onto the numbers, I wanted to do a high level overview of what happened in December. In December I:-

• Launched the first theme in the ’12 in 12′ challenge.
• Got various feedback
• Got designers to help me with the second theme
• Launched the second theme just before the new year (Epic Timeline is now available)
• Decided to revamp the website and change web-hosts.
• Launched the Notify Me add on (for Plugin Hunt Theme and WPeddit Theme)
• Launched Subscriber Rewards for active subscribers
• Announced the first winner (an AeroPress is on the way)

The revamp and web host change is something I’ve been toying with for a while now. I’ve moved Epic Plugins over and moved to the Storefront WooCommerce theme. The theme I had previously (and is still on Epic Themes.com) was a little unforgiving and I was seeing various admin-side problems. So I moved. Epic Themes will follow shortly and have a similar layout. It has meant that my work in adapting the woocommerce item pages needs repeating on this new theme.

How did sales go?

I’m grabbing this information directly from the WooCommerce reports. I still run my own CRM but given the move over to Stripe (and current lack of a Stripe Importer in ZBS CRM) I’m back to using WooCommerce.

Epic Plugins – $710 in plugin sales in December 2016.

Epic Themes – $2160 in theme sales in December 2016.

Giving a total of $2,870 in sales in December.  How does that compare to the ‘trend’. The usual update is below

• May 2016 – $3,645
• Jun 2016 – $3,644
• Jul 2016 – $3,430
• Aug 2016 – $2,286
• Sep 2016 – $2,692
• Oct 2016 – $2,936
• Nov 2016– $1,998
• Dec 2016 – $2,870 ($2160 themes, $710 plugins)

I’ve started to split the plugin and theme sales out now that themes are only sold via epicthemes.com. You may also recall that I removed my plugins for sale on CodeCanyon in May 2016 for the mikemayhem3030 account. So showing the plugin income split out here is good to compare against what it was from codecanyon before removing them (more on this in another post).

What’s coming in Jan 2017

January 2017 will involve even more building up the Zero BS CRM. As well as continuing to enhance the Themes available.  I’m also working on some nice little projects which keep me on the cutting edge of what can be done with WordPress. Keep tuned. 🙂