Initially, the lifetime plan will only be offered during a limited time sale. We don’t know if or when we will offer the lifetime deal again. We do know that the lifetime plan will never be available for a price lower than we will offer during this sale.

If you are interested in the lifetime sale and would like to be notified when it goes live, sign up for a free account at PMPro or join our mailing list.

The rest of this post will share some of our reasoning around lifetime deals and address some common concerns and questions that folks may have.

Why haven’t we done this before?

Throughout the 13+ years we’ve been selling plans for PMPro, we’ve had users ask for “lifetime deals”, and we’ve always said no. There were two main reasons we didn’t offer lifetime deals: (1) We wanted to keep our pricing simple, and (2) We wanted to make sure our business always had the cashflow required to support our customers.

Further, many of the typical reasons for offering a lifetime deal didn’t apply to us.

One reason companies offer lifetime deals is to raise money up front, but we never had to do that. Our business has always been profitable. We’ve always had a cushion of cash. We’ve been able to invest at the pace we’re comfortable with and never needed the injection of upfront revenue a lifetime deal would deliver.

Another reason lifetime deals are popular is to allow folks access to everything in one big dump. Unlike nearly all other premium WordPress plugins, we already make ALL of our code easily available for free on GitHub. Many potential lifetime deal purchasers just take advantage of our generous free offerings.

Lifetime deals are also popular as a way to get an influx of users and customers, but Paid Memberships Pro was around for years before we created our annual plans and already had tens of thousands of users. Paid Memberships Pro is one of the longest running membership plugins for WordPress. It’s one of the longest running premium plugins of any kind, predating even WooCommerce. Prerelease versions of PMPro were running on WordPress 2.6.

Why are we doing this now?

The main reason we are offering the lifetime deal now is because people are still asking for it. Many customers, for various reasons, prefer to pay once and not have recurring subscriptions to keep track of for themselves or on behalf of clients. We liked to have a fair plan for these kinds of customers looking for a one time payment option.

We are also inspired by folks like Jason Fried and Basecamp have started releasing projects through their banner ONCE. Here are the rules for the ONCE products:

• Pay one time, own forever.
• We write the code, you get to see it.
• We give you the software, you get to host it.
• Simple and straightforward, not enterprisey and bloated.
• For one fixed price. Once.

Our products don’t line up exactly with the Basecamp or ONCE products, but it’s a model we would like to play with more going forward.

Does PMPro need money or is it going out of business?

No and no. We already support many “VIP” users with pro bono memberships, as well as thousands of paying customers that are paying legacy prices much lower than our current prices, and we’ve been able to run a profitable business every year since inception. Not to get into the weeds too much about this, but we know how to run this business to keep our team and customers happy.

One of the reasons we held off on offering a lifetime deal before was around cashflow concerns due to having to deliver ongoing support to customers that paid up front, but we no longer have those concerns.

Yeah, but how will you afford this 3-5 years from now and later?

The lifetime deal is for our highest membership level, PMPro Plus, and priced at 5 times the annual price of that plan. In this way, we are getting the typical “lifetime value” of a good PMPro customer up front instead of over many years. By not squandering that up front payment, keeping the percentage of lifetime members relatively low compared to our recurring subscribers, and just managing our company well, we will be fine.

One of the reasons we are initially offering the lifetime deal through a limited time sale is so we can slowly bring these customers into our business and take our time figuring out the best way to price and promote the lifetime offer. We will make adjustments to the price and how we offer the lifetime deals. We will always give our lifetime PMPro Plus customers the same level of access and support recurring Plus subscribers have.

Aren’t you worried about how lifetime deals will affect the sale price of your company?

No because we aren’t selling.

One reason many companies don’t offer a lifetime deal is because acquiring companies don’t like having to deal with lifetime customers. The acquiring company won’t count the revenue from lifetime deals toward the multiple they are offering, and in some cases might even lower their offer price even further to account for having to support lifetime customers. Well, we have zero plans to sell the business, and so we won’t have to deal with that.

Never?

Never ever. There are so many more interesting things we could do with this company and team than hand it over to bigger company that won’t “get it” (or even a similar sized company that is more likely to “get it”).

I look forward to chatting with y’all about those interesting things and sharing more as we continue to help people “get paid” by making the best membership platform possible.

The post On Lifetime Deals for Paid Memberships Pro appeared first on Stranger Studios.

Here is a checklist explaining how to make money with your free WordPress plugins. We used this very model to make over $250,000 in recurring revenue selling plans around Paid Memberships Pro. Today, with just incremental changes to this plan (using our own license server, building a custom support platform, raising our prices, and a lot of marketing work) the Paid Memberships Pro business brings in over $1,800,000 in revenue every year and growing.

A relatively modest plugin with 10,000 users could have as many as 1000 paying customers, which at $100 per year per customer is $100,000 per year. That’s very good money and very feasible for even niche plugins. That’s enough money to base a healthy career around. This kind of money may be available to you, but you’re holding off on doing something about it because you think it’s going to take more work or a more complicated business setup than you expect. Before you give up on this dream, read try implementing the steps below and see how it goes.

The Checklist

1. Use the GPL license. 100%.
2. Have just 1 version of your plugin. No free vs pro. No paid modules or extensions.
3. If you feel you must have extensions, use the 80/20 rule to separate certain features which are only useful for 20% of users, but confusing for the other 80%. Put the 20% features into free extensions or “add ons”.
4. Put all of your plugin code up on GitHub.com. Encourage other developers to get involved.
5. Put all of your plugin code in the WordPress repository.
6. Have the download link on your website require a free membership (created with Paid Memberships Pro), and then redirect users to the zip file in the WordPress repository.
7. Add documentation to the plugin website. Use the same domain. Start small and build it out as support requests are handled.
8. Require the same free level to access the documentation on your site.
9. Use the Limit Post Views add on for PMPro so visitors to your site can view 1-3 articles before being prompted to sign up. This helps with SEO as well.
10. Add a premium support forum using bbPress and the bbPress Add On for PMPro. Require a paid plan for one year of access. We found annual recurring plans to work best. Charge enough to cover your average support costs per paying member, plus some.
11. Set up a “do it for me” plan where you would install the plugin for users and offer up to 5 hours of customization or consulting. Charge a one time fee equal to what you would charge for 5 hours of consulting. It should be about 5-10x the cost of regular support. This plan was crucial in the early days, allowing us to work closely with customers, gaining valuable insights that helped us to improve the core plugin and add ons.
12. Address all bugs and pre-sales questions on the WordPress.org forums. Direct other support to the paid membership on your site.
13. Integrate with Omnisend or another email marketing service to automatically create a mailing list of your free and paid members.
14. Focus your consulting business on doing more projects related to your plugin.

At 14 steps, this isn’t completely easy. It’s work. Here are the pros and cons as I see it:

Pros

• You will save time by avoiding multiple versions of your plugin.
• Using the WordPress repository for distribution saves you a headache.
• Having all of your code open source and available for free will encourage use of your plugin to spread and will encourage other developers to get involved.
• You are no longer supporting your plugin for free or for tiny donations. Set support prices so they make sense for your hourly rate, etc.
• You are generating a potentially valuable mailing list from your otherwise idle plugin code.
• Focusing your consulting business will allow you to raise your rates or increase your margins.

Cons

• Your plugin will be labeled as the “free” option. People associate “free” with “worse” even if it’s not true.
• People with no ability or intention to pay you (i.e. not customers) will use your plugin and demand support. You need to learn how to deal with them gently without wasting your time.

What’s Next

Who knows. There are many paths depending on your goals. I’ll try to share more on the specific challenges we faced, decisions we’ve made, and the successes (and failures!) we’ve had.

If you give the above a try, please please let me know how it goes. Let me know what challenges you are facing. If they are challenges we’ve run into as well, I might have something useful to say about it.

The post A Simple Business Model for Your WordPress Plugin appeared first on Stranger Studios.

While Paid Memberships Pro works well (as far as I know) with the most popular avatar plugins, we wanted to be able to recommend one of them above the others. We wanted one that worked as seamlessly as possible with our frontend profile page and directory plugin.

Taking Control of the Basic User Avatars Plugin

Last year, we reached out to Jared Atchison about taking over maintenance of the Basic User Avatars plugin. There were a few minor bugs and enhancements we had done for our customers. We did a pull request against the GitHub repository and offered to maintain the WordPress.org repository for the plugin going forward. Jared said yes, and gave us access on GitHub and WordPress.org.

To be clear, our intention still is to keep Basic User Avatars as a simple avatar upload plugin until such functionality is made available in the core WordPress software. Many of our customers require this functionality for their site, and we like being able to recommend a plugin we know we can fix if an update to PMPro, WordPress, or any popular plugin breaks that functionality.

WP User Avatar Becomes ProfilePress

One plugin we used to recommend for avatar uploads was called “WP User Avatar”. We noticed a couple years ago that it had been acquired by a competing membership plugin. We thought the new owners might add features that made it more than the single use plugin it was, and so we stopped recommending it, but we never expected them to do what they did this week.

Basically the plugin that was WP User Avatar is now a lite version of the ProfilePress plugin, with a lot of features that conflict with PMPro, or features you just don’t want if you only want avatar uploads for your site. WP Tavern has covered the release and confusion around it well.

Migrating from WP User Avatar to Basic User Avatars

Today we released version 1.0.5 of Basic User Avatars. This version added a feature to automatically convert avatars formerly loaded through the WP User Avatar plugin to the Basic User Avatars format. This means that you can disable WP User Avatar, activate Basic User Avatars, and have a seamless transition for existing avatars in your site. Be sure to update any avatar upload form that used the [avatar_upload] shortcode to use our shortcode: [basic-user-avatars].

Digging into the Code

Some of the developers and product folks reading this might be interested in the thought process behind how we decided to code the migration. At first we built a system that checked the user meta table to see if the WP User Avatar plugin had been used before. If so, we displayed a notification with a link to begin a migration process that loaded the avatar data from user meta in the old format and then saved it into the format used by Basic User Avatars.

This worked well, but when we tested it out on our staging site with over 100k users, the migration was slow. We were working on ways to increase the performance and reliability of the migration, when we realized (really it was our Lead Developer David Parker) that instead of migrating all avatars at once, we can instead migrate the avatars “on the fly” as they are loaded on the site.

We removed the migration code and instead added some code to our get_avatar filter that looks for WP User Avatar data if no Basic User Avatars data exists. This adds a fraction of a second of compute time the first event that any old format avatar is loaded, but in practice, this shouldn’t impact the perceived performance of the site, while still making sure the avatars that matter are updated.

This is a useful pattern that can be applied in any situation where you need to convert data from one format to another. WordPress does something similar when it generates resized versions of images on the fly. We do something similar with the license keys for PMPro members on this site. The pattern can be described as “write a function to get the thing; if the thing doesn’t exist, generate it”.

I hope this post explained some of the history of how we came to maintain the Basic User Avatars plugin, our plans for that plugin, some information about the WP User Avatar update, how to migrate from WPUA to BUA, and some insight into how we coded the migration.

The post Migrate From WP User Avatar to Basic User Avatars appeared first on Stranger Studios.

About the Force First Last Plugin

The Force First and Last Name as Display Name WordPress plugin is a free plugin available on the WordPress.org repository. Once you install and active this plugin, users will not see the “Display Name” field on the Edit Profile screen. Instead of allowing users to set this field, the plugin will change the display name to their first and last name. If first and last name are not available, the user’s display_name will default back to their chosen username.

Note that the first and last name are not captured through a basic WordPress user registration or a free membership checkout with Paid Memberships Pro. If you want to add these fields to checkout, use the Add Name to Checkout Add On.

Recipe 1: Switch Display Name to “Last First”

This first recipe demonstrates how to change the display name order and show the user’s last name then their first name. Last name before first is common for legal names in many countries.

Recipe #2: Set Display Name as First Name Only

The second recipe will show all display names for all users as their First Name only. This creates a more personal experience for community sites, without sharing too much information.

The plugin includes a “regenerate” tool that will update all users to the default format in the plugin, or a modified format if you put one of these recipes in place. Navigate to Settings > Force First Last to update all users.

The post Adjust the WordPress User’s Default Display Name Using the Force First Last Plugin appeared first on Stranger Studios.

The more you can get done early, the easier things are going to go. 

We created The Ultimate Planning Guide for Black Friday which is the companion download for this webinar. A few hours a week for 6 weeks and you can have a stress-free Black Friday which grows your business. Jason reviews each section of the guide to get you started. Download the book to learn exactly how we recommend spreading out this work over 6 weeks. 

Webinar Replay: Six Weeks of Prep for a Stress-Free Black Friday Weekend

This webinar originally aired on Tuesday, October 5th, 2021 at 3pm ET.

Free Download: Ultimate Planning Guide For Black Friday

Six Weeks of Prep for Black Friday

The Opportunity

Consumers spent over $9 billion in 2020 in one weekend! That’s up 21.6% from the previous year. That’s a lot of spending that you could get a slice of.

We’ve seen sites make 25-75% of their typical November sales in one BFCM weekend Another way to think about this is if you run a Black Friday sale it’s the equivalent of having 12.5 months in the year.

The Offer

What discount are you going to give? Shoot for 20%, 33%,or  50%. 

Businesses are running the best deal of the year so you have to have a decent sale in order to compete. 

But make sure you are making a profit. If you can’t offer a big discount, raise prices or offer extra services/bundles. 

It is important to know how much you are investing. Figure out the math ahead of time to know how much of a discount you can afford. The last thing you want is to finish the sale and realize you lost money. 

Sale Length

Run your sale for four to seven days. Black Friday weekend has a lot of commotion so end your sale on a weekday. This gives your potential customers time to buy. 

It is also important to create a buffer for your discount codes. If your sale officially runs Friday through Monday, it can be helpful for your code to actually work from Thursday through Tuesday. This can reduce timezone issues and allow any stragglers to obtain the sale price.

Social Proof

Social Proof is testimonials that you place on your landing page so your customers feel more comfortable buying from your company. 

It is important to email your current customers and gather these testimonials early. As you receive testimonials, look for testimonials and reviews that reinforce your positioning. 

Email & Social Media

It is important to know who you’re targeting for your Black Friday deal. You can segment new versus existing customers to target the right group. You don’t want to email someone who just paid $300 for your product about the sale you are running now. 

People receive a lot of emails on BFCM weekend. Keep your copy short with a very clear call to action. Despite the number of emails people are receiving, email your list once a day and twice on the last day for the duration of your sale. Use quantity to your advantage to push through the noise of BFCM weekend. 

Automate your emails and social media posts so you can relax.

The Landing Page

Having a landing page specifically for your offer is a great way to highlight your on-sale products or categories, include social proof and have a clear call to action. If your software supports it, place checkout on the landing page. This will minimize the number of clicks it takes to take part in your sale. 

You can also create your landing page ahead of time. This directs your entire sale to one URL and gives you the opportunity to submit your sale to Black Friday Round Ups in your industry.

Pushing Live

Update and test your site ahead of time. This should be done in October in case any issues arise. 

After you push your sale live, test as if you were a real customer. Actually go to the landing page and complete the checkout just like anyone else would. 

Once your sale starts, do not update or change anything on your site. You don’t want to end up with a fire to put out. 

Relaxing

Now that everything is scheduled and running, it is time to relax! Spend time with family, eat some leftovers and brag about how hot your business is. 

Flash Sales: FAQs and Other Resources

Sales Calculator: Sitewide Sales resources to figure out if it is worth it to run a sale

Q: If my offer is getting people in at less than the current members I have, I fear current members will get mad. 

A: There are usually a lot less people than you are thinking. Out of 100 sales of BFCM weekend, we may get a handful of people asking for the sale price and we either give them a refund or a coupon code. It is also helpful to segment your email list. Sitewide Sales gives you the option to hide the sales banner to members who are signed in so your current members won’t see the sale. It can also be configured to only show the banner to potential customers that have landed on your landing page. 

Q: Some people may be considering launching a product on Black Friday. What are your recommendations for this?

A: Black Friday is such a noisy time, I don’t recommend it. I have seen that BFCM weekend is great for existing businesses and it can be a challenge to launch a new product with everything going on. If anything you should launch before Black Friday so you can collect some social proof to make the rest of your customer base more confident in buying that product on Black Friday.

The post Six Weeks of Prep for a Stress-Free Black Friday Weekend appeared first on Stranger Studios.

If your team is struggling to complete purposeful, high impact projects, while juggling day-to-day tasks and maintenance, Shape Up is a proven option to explore.

In a recent conversation between myself and Jason Coleman, we broke down the basics of Shape Up as introduced by Ryan Singer and the team at Basecamp.

Our interview and this article then explore how used an adapted version of Shape Up in our WordPress product teams over the past 3 years.

Video Interview: Adapting Shape Up for WordPress Teams

Understanding Shape Up: The Original

What is Shape Up?

“Shape Up” is a development methodology introduced by Basecamp, the company behind the popular project management tool of the same name. The methodology is described in a book titled Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters written by Ryan Singer, one of Basecamp’s product strategists.

The “Shape Up” methodology is Basecamp’s response to challenges they faced with traditional agile and waterfall development methods. It introduces a number of unique principles and practices aimed at helping teams build better products in more focused cycles.

Key Concepts of Shape Up

• Six-Week Cycles: Work is done in six-week chunks called cycles. Following the cycle is a two-week cooldown period. During cooldown, teams can focus on smaller tasks, bugs, or take a break.
• Shaping: Before a cycle starts, senior team members shape the work. They define the rough outlines of a solution but don’t go too deep into detailed specs. This is delivered as a “Pitch” at the “Betting Table”.

• Bets: Instead of committing to a roadmap of features, the team makes bets on which projects to tackle next. This means they’re betting their time on projects they believe will have the most impact.
• No Backlogs: Unlike many other methodologies, there’s no perpetual backlog in Shape Up. If something is deemed important, it will be shaped and bet on in a future cycle.
• Hill Charts: A unique way to represent the progress of a task. Tasks start on the left side of the hill (the unknown) and move right as things become clearer.
• Circuit Breakers: These are mechanisms to ensure that projects don’t drag on indefinitely. For instance, if a project isn’t showing promising results within the first few weeks, it might be terminated early.
• Fixed Time, Variable Scope: Instead of trying to cram all the work into the given timeframe, adjust the scope. This way, teams ensure they deliver something meaningful at the end of the cycle, even if it’s not everything that was originally envisioned.
• Appetite: Before shaping the work, the team decides how much time they want to spend on a particular project. Setting the appetite helps constrain the solution and prevents over-engineering.
• Rituals: There are specific rituals in the Shape Up process, such as the kick-off at the beginning of each cycle where the teams learn about the projects they’re going to work on.
• Teams of Three: For many projects, a designer, a programmer, and a tester form a small cross-functional team of three. This ensures a diverse skill set while still keeping the team lean and nimble.

Shape Up emphasizes deep work, meaningful results, and a sustainable development pace.

While it may not fit every company’s needs or culture, many organizations have found value in adopting or adapting some of its principles. I recommend diving deeper by reading the “Shape Up” book, which is free to read on Basecamp’s website.

Read Shape Up online for free here.

How We Adapted Shape Up For WordPress Teams

At its core, Shape Up promotes focused work cycles and intentional breaks.

As our team grew, we struggled to find a system that balanced our team’s time on maintenance and bug scrubs, alongside big picture projects that drove new product features or extensions.

Then Jason found Shape Up. We had a few key team members read and internalize the core Shape Up process over a few weeks of book club-style learning and sharing. Then we tried it.

Now 12 cycles into using Shape Up, we’re confident that the core model plus the following adaptations are worth a shot if your team was suffering similar issues as ours: a desire to ship meaningful, high impact work without burning out.

Here’s a breakdown of how we’ve adapted Shape Up for WordPress teams:

Extended Work Cycles

• Duration: While Shape Up recommends 6-week cycles, we extended ours to 7 weeks.
• Flexibility: To accommodate holidays and other commitments for our remote team, we integrated a floating week off for each person during the cycle.
• Longer Intervals Between Cycles: Basecamp’s rhythm is a constant flow of pitching, reviewing, and betting—almost perpetually. For us, the same people doing Shape Up work wear multiple hats, from pitching ideas to executing them. This dual responsibility meant we needed a longer buffer. We extended our “off cycle” to 6 weeks (instead of the usual 2).

A More Cautious Shipping Approach

Shape Up has an agile mantra: if something has bugs post-release, simply revert.

This approach doesn’t translate to an open-source software project like Paid Memberships Pro or LifterLMS. When using Shape Up for WordPress teams, you need to do things a little differently.

Once our code is out in the wild, there’s no taking it back. It is super important that we do thorough code reviews before any release.

Our extended off-cycle time enables this review period.

Additionally, we now build phases like “launch project X” into the actual cycle period. While this isn’t necessarily ‘new work’, it does also benefit from intentional time placed on the Work Cycles spreadsheet (schedule).

The Introduction of the “Ideas Meeting”

Before diving into pitch writing, we hold a meeting dedicated to discussing and evaluating any and all ideas. It’s a filter, ensuring we invest our energies only in concepts with potential.

There are two main benefits of the addition of an Ideas Meeting:

• Efficiency: Given our team’s size, drafting a pitch could be a large investment of time and resources. The Ideas Meeting helps us sidestep pitches that might not see the light of day.
• Guidance: People from different teams and with varying degrees of experience with the company attend the meeting. This brainstorming session aides newer members in understanding the company’s priorities and refining their pitches, while bringing fresh perspectives to the people who’ve been here the longest.

The way we adapted Shape Up for WordPress teams helps the system fit into our work culture. The core method gave us a much needed structure, and the adaptations lead to more flexibility and creativity—key drivers of why Shape Up has been such a success.

Post Mortems in the Shape Up Process

Our Post Mortems serve as a conclusion to specific cycle work projects, since we rarely launch projects within the cycle itself.

We needed a way to leave the completed work documented for our future selves: to understand what was left undone, and decide on the next steps.

Key Points of Our Post-Mortem Process

• Summarizing Completed Work: We start by outlining what was accomplished during the cycle, reiterating the major tasks completed based on what was initially proposed in the pitch.
• Identifying Unfinished Tasks: We provide clarity on what’s unfinished by listing out any significant tasks we thought we would finish but couldn’t.
• Deciding on Next Steps: We make a clear plan for the future, deciding if the project needs a few more days of work, if it needs a new pitch, or if we realized the project is larger than anticipated and needs to be reevaluated.

This process serves as a conclusion to a project in cycle. Post Mortems signal that it’s ok to put the pencils down and shift focus to the next cycle project or to take a much needed break.

The Post Mortem addresses a person’s internal struggle with leaving tasks incomplete by providing a sense of closure. A way to file away unfinished business for later review.

By adopting this practice, we’ve seen improvements in both restarting projects as well as team morale. The structure helps to clear away lingering thoughts about unfinished work and ensures that we are always moving forward.

Custom Templates: Shape Up for WordPress Teams

We put together a Google Drive folder with a few key templates we use for this adapted Shape Up method. Follow the link below to duplicate this folder for your own workspace.

The folder includes templates for:

• Ideas Sheet: A Google Sheet for tracking the ideas you will pitch, the pitch owner, and teamwide voting to help the writer understand how meaningful or popular the idea is.
• Pitch Template: A Google Doc template for writing a pitch.
• Work Cycle Calendar: A Google Sheet for quarterly work cycle scheduling across all participating team members.
• Post Mortem Template: A Google Doc template for writing a Post Mortem.

The Basics Always Apply: Product Teams, Agencies, Freelancers, and Solopreneurs

This methodology works for more than just software development. Early in 2023, we introduced this adapted methodology to the team at LifterLMS. For both product development and sales/marketing, the results were transformative.

Their team experienced renewed excitement for projects, started shipping more meaningful work, and are now operating with more targeted initiatives across all teams.

The structure offered by this adapted Shape Up system also enabled a more cohesive interaction between developers and key stakeholders—without requiring everyone to be a developer.

We’ve realized that Shape Up’s core principles and how we’ve adapted the system is deeply versatile. Whether you’re an agency on retainer, a freelancer, or a solitary membership site creator, you can benefit from its structured approach.

By setting clear priorities, defining deliverables, and establishing boundaries for what to tackle (and what to set aside), Shape Up provides a roadmap to efficient, meaningful work

Let’s Connect About Shape Up for WordPress Teams

Interested in adapting this methodology for your team or a solo endeavor? Jason and I are here to collaborate. 

Whether through a Slack chat or something deeper, we’d love an opportunity to continue to refine and adapt Shape Up for diverse environments like yours.

At its heart, Shape Up is about purposeful work. And that’s a core value Jason and I both hold tightly to—in our work life and personally.

The post Adapting Shape Up for WordPress Teams: A Framework for Intentional Work appeared first on Stranger Studios.

In 2022, Chris joined us on the Stranger Studios YouTube channel to talk about the similarities and differences between an LMS plugin and a membership plugin. As I watched the video, I was reminded of the past chats I had with Chris, and thought, “we should talk more”.

So we did. We started having regular chats about work and life.

During one of those chats, Chris mentioned that Thomas was thinking of leaving LifterLMS to pursue new opportunities. Chris initially just came to me for advice, but as we talked through it more, it became apparent that we could help out in a more tangible way.

Kim and I have invested in the LifterLMS parent company, codeBOX, and are now officially working with their team to build and grow the business and products.

LMS and membership plugins are on a collision course (puns intended).

Many people conflate the idea of a membership site with eLearning, and vice versa.

Chris and I always saw our businesses as both potential partners and indirect competitors. LifterLMS has membership features. Paid Memberships Pro has course features. Some sites do better starting with our plugin, some with LifterLMS. Some sites truly need both.

We launched our PMPro Courses Add On last year. By itself, the plugin adds Courses and Lessons as CPTs and tracks progress through both. Using PMPro levels, you can easily sell access to those courses.

The plugin also integrates with LifterLMS (and the other major LMS plugins)—so if you need more functionality than the default module, we encourage folks to consider using a complete LMS plugin alongside PMPro.

In 2021, the team at PMPro also started updating our marketing strategy and documentation to address the 8 key use cases we see with the PMPro membership platform.

The “courses” use case is one of our most popular, with somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of all PMPro sites either primarily selling access to courses or otherwise interested in including courses in their offering. We launched our Courses Hub and planned more content and services to help course creators get the most out of our membership platform.

This opportunity with LifterLMS came at the perfect time.

We can continue to improve the LMS experience for WordPress users. And we get to do that with an established team, brand, and code base. I really think we can get the best of both worlds here, updating PMPro to work as tightly as possible with LifterLMS, while ensuring that users can continue to use the plugins by themselves or together.

Kim and I are very excited to be on this journey with Chris. He’s incredibly committed to his work, and he’s good at it, too. We’re learning a lot from each other—and we’re implementing the best ideas to the benefit of both companies and both products.

We are still running PMPro and LifterLMS as separate businesses.

In the short term, we are focused on keeping both teams and products running as smoothly as they have in the past, while working on a tighter integration that will serve our common users.

We’re still figuring things out. Who knows what the future holds. I feel an incredible amount of excitement about the work we’re doing now. It’s an amazing time to be building software that empowers online educators and eLearning communities across the globe.

Finally, we’re hiring!

We’re looking for an experienced WordPress developer to join the LifterLMS team. Click here to apply for the developer position at LifterLMS or reach out to me personally on Twitter @jason_coleman. This work is extremely fun, challenging, and rewarding. I look forward to hearing from you.

The post Stranger Studios Makes Investment in LifterLMS appeared first on Stranger Studios.

Join our mailing list using the form below to grab access to a Google Drive folder with:

• Forecast, Balance Sheet, and Budget Template you can copy and use for your business.
• Household Income and Expenses Template for your personal life, including a monthly and annual income statement, plus a personal Balance Sheet for tracking your total assets (net worth).
• Jason’s presentation from WordCamp Orlando 2019 which includes the slides plus four unique worksheets for goal setting and forecasting based on your business type (product, consulting, SaaS, general)

The post Free Template Download: Budgeting and Forecasting for WordPress Products appeared first on Stranger Studios.