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2016 has been big year for Multi Rating Pro, laying down some important foundations for future growth. Here’s a reflection on some of the highs and lows for 2016 and some goals for 2017.
Launched dedicated website
The time had come to give Multi Rating Pro it’s own dedicated website. In July we launched multiratingpro.com. As a part of this, we safely migrated all of our existing data across including the Easy Digital Downloads plugin data which was no simple feat. At the same time we gave all of our support documentation a major overhaul.
Blog
We also started a blog which will help drive content marketing. In 2016 we did 16 blog posts.
Multi Rating Pro v5
Version 5 of Multi Rating Pro was released in July after several months of development. This was a major release with a key focus on improving the user experience and making the WP-admin as intuitive as possible.
New logo
One of the best decisions we made in 2016 was to invest in getting a professional logo created for the plugin. The plugin now stands out on WordPress.org and we’ve seen a 40% increase in free downloads as a direct result. The net effect is cascading with more website traffic, an increase in sales and a higher conversion rate.
1,000 Pro customers and 50,000 free version downloads
We reached a couple of nice milestone in 2016. In November we reached 1,000 customers who have purchased the Pro version and in July the free version surpassed 50,000 downloads on WordPress.org.
Revenue
2016 was an inconsistent year in terms of revenue with a slow start Q1. It is difficult to attribute this to anything in particular but monthly revenue quickly bounced back in Q2. We decided to pivot and focus on some key strategic features in version 5 of the plugin and we also launched a dedicated website in Q3 which has helped improve the customer experience. A new logo also helped increase monthly revenue significantly towards the end of the year. The revenue in Q4 was 40% higher than Q3. We set a new record for monthly revenue and sales in November. However, due to the slow start to the year, total revenue in 2016 was only slightly more than 2015. Recurring payments was introduced in late 2016 so we should start to reap some of the rewards in late 2017.
Add-Ons
We released a new add-on for Gravity Forms. The website was also updated to support future add-ons such as the REST API add-on coming soon.
Goals for 2017
The following are my goals for 2017 which will put Multi Rating Pro in good stead.
- Present at a WordPress meetup
- Attend a WordCamp
- 4 e-mail campaigns through MailChimp (1 per quarter)
- Surpass 250 e-mail subscriptions to the newsletter
- Release more add-ons for Multi Rating Pro
- Increase revenue by 50%
- 12 new blog posts (1 per month)
- Surpass 250 Twitter followers
- 52 tweets (1 per week)