WordPress HelpCenter will be ceasing operations on February 28th. Between now and then we will be working with existing customers to wrap up all of our committed projects, but we will not be taking on any new projects. For customers that purchased WPHC support for the Carrington Business theme, we have created a special premium support offering through Crowd Favorite to fulfill your support needs from March 1 forward.1
That’s the summary, here are the details.
This was a really tough decision for me. When I created the HelpCenter I had a couple of goals for it:
- Provide a support and quick-turn development service to the WordPress community that I think it desperately needs.
- Provide relief for plugin and theme developers that don’t wish to offer support, and give their users a good resource for support when they need assistance.
I never expected it to be a very profitable service due to the nature of the work we were targeting, but I thought it would fill a significant need.
Unfortunately we were not able to get the traction with developers that I was hoping for. Part of that may have been due to the $1 payout amount, so we were planning to increase that to 10% and created a set of tools to make it really easy for developers to include in their plugins. We never made this change or released these tools because their readiness coincided with the culmination of feedback from the community that commercial support for free plugins and themes just wasn’t something they were willing to pay for.
When we initially started the service, we did so as a partnership with another hosting and development company. Unfortunately, didn’t work out as I’d hoped and we brought it in-house and hired full time staff to help it grow. Since then we had as many as 4 full time staff on board.
Hiring for WPHC was extremely difficult. We needed generalists that knew WordPress very well, that were also personable and comfortable talking with customers. It’s a hard combination to find, and harder still to find at a salary range that the WPHC projects could support. Ultimately many of them left, tired of dealing with the fraction of our customers that were rude and unpleasant.
My experience building businesses is to grow them organically. This has worked well for Crowd Favorite and BackupMoxie, and is working nicely for CloudMoxie; however it didn’t work well for WPHC.
In retrospect (and as advice for the next person who decides to create a service like this), a different approach would have probably worked much better. I would recommend getting funding in place so that you can hire and do internal training, then come to market with a 5-6 person team (with dedicated sales and project management roles) in place from the start. Then it’s just a matter of providing great service and doing smart marketing to generate revenue. I would also recommend including a training offering, as that seems to be a service many people find valuable.
I still think the concept of the WPHC is an important one for the WordPress community, and a service that is very much needed now that WordPress has made the transition from Open Source project to a product that many folks (who do not consider themselves technical) rely on and use on a daily basis. I hope that next foray into this space is more successful.
At the same time, Crowd Favorite is flourishing nicely. We’ve got a number of open positions right now, including spots for interns and more experienced developers.
- You will receive an email about this shortly. [back]
This post is part of the project: WP HelpCenter. View the project timeline for more context on this post.
This post is part of the project: WP HelpCenter. View the project timeline for more context on this post.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Devin Reams, Alex King, John Kolbert, blognews, WordPress News and others. WordPress News said: Alex King: HelpCenter Shutting Down, Crowd Favorite is Hiring http://bit.ly/gEZGiH […]
This is unfortunate and I’m sorry to hear it is happening. That being said, your points make sense to me and I can understand where you’re coming from. I’m considering putting my plugins into ‘sunset’ because I just don’t have time to support them myself, even if everyone did pay (and they don’t).
I’m glad Crowd Favorite and the other services you all provide continue to thrive though. You all rock.
Alex,
Very sorry to see HelpCenter going away. It was a great help to be able to send users your way when I was stumped or didn’t have time to devote to something. If users really wanted help, they could always go to HelpCenter.
HelpCenter brought a dose of reality to the WP Community that people shouldn’t expect all of their problems to be solved by someone else for free…immediately. HelpCenter put a tangible value on the help that many plugin developers are giving away for free everyday. I hope someone else will take up the torch.
That said, I have a number of awesome users of my plugin who support my work, and I DEEPLY APPRECIATE THEM. I still don’t have any illusions of hitting minimum wage anytime soon, though 😉
Cheers and best wishes to you and Crowd Favorite,
Byron
Hi Alex,
I was one of the developers who referred people to my plugin listing on WPHELP. Totally understand your decision. Just thought I’d add something here since there may be others reading this who are thinking of starting up something similar. What would have been very helpful to me is to have the ability to see some sort of analytics about how many people contacted the service for support regarding my plugin (i.e. number of initial contacts, number of paying contacts etc.) This would give me an idea of the value of the service and whether I should still promote it (even a number of non-paying contacts would still indicate potential value).
[…] blog post is worth a read, as it gives plenty more insight into the closing than we can touch on […]
I was so jealous when WHC started. I loved the idea as I still do and I hope to be the next person to try that, but it seems quite a burden to bear.
I’m sorry you are closing Alex, and I wish you all the best with your other ventures.
Sorry to hear about this. When you first launched WPHC , I couldn’t help but believe that it would become wildly popular as more people came into the blogging and WP development community. I agree that their is still a need for this type of service( I hear it all the time from our publishers.)
I also totally get the challenges that come about from rude and unruly customers. That is pervasive in just about every support organization/environment and there is no sure way to combat it.
Regardless, good luck on growing further and congrats on knowing when to pull the plug.
I know that had to be a tough decision; I’ve been through having to close things that don’t work but then as they say “if you swing the bat you’ll like strike out once and a while but if you never swing the bat, you’ll never hit a home run.” So kudos for trying.
Looking from the outside I always thought it had to be a hard business to run, just as you describe. I’m curious though, if it was difficult to run as is, why would it make sense to get funding and ramp up? Seems like the market just doesn’t want to pay for such a service?
[…] King has announced that his company WP HelpCenter will be shutting down on February 28th. The WordPress HelpCenter was a company aimed at providing support for plug-ins […]
I echo Banago’s and Daniel’s thoughts.
Creating a viable business plan is tough in this field. Especially with competition being what it is. The numbers look like they would work, but it really is hard. Especially if you are able to pull in other consulting funds at a much higher rate.
Hosting profits are negligible until you get into the big numbers simply because soo many people get a VPS for $25/month and try to resell dozens of times for $4.99/month. That gets everyone wanting cheap hosting but unhappy with the service they get. If you intend to provide an honest service and support your customers, even at $50/month if you spend more than an hour supporting the customer over that month, you are probably operating at a loss.
A support service company is even harder because you HAVE to be able to take more than one call at a time. Hiring a competent person to help you and funding that via the prices people are willing to pay for support that they “have a right to in the first place”. Is just nuts.
I can’t imagine how many righteously indignant people you must have had to deal with…
Closing doors must be hard, but you’ve earned plenty of community respect just by making it as successful and long running as it has been already.
I’m looking forward to the next big idea you’ve got coming down the pike!
It’s sad to see it go. I wouldn’t have expected it to fail as it seems like such a good solution to a common problem.
Thanks for sharing the details of the problems though, it will help others, such as myself, who are trying to solve some of the similar issues in the WP Plugin world.
I admire you for giving it a try, and there’s certainly a need for ad hoc WP support, but I wasn’t super pleased with my WPHelpCenter experience.
I am interested in learning more about CloudMoxie, but the webpage doesn’t really say anything. How does it compare to say WPEngine or Page.ly in terms of cost and function?
I’d like to propose that this is a great idea which just needs a different approach — brought to you by my 5 yrs of WordPress development + my 7 years of entrepreneurship + my current MBA educational insights (I say all these not to boast, but just to provide the sources of my perspective):
1) Your actual customer is actually not the end user (even though you might interact with them), but it’s actually the plugin author. With that being said, you, or anyone that picks this idea up in the future, should be getting paid by plugin authors, not the end users, which leads me to ..
2) Your market should probably just be ‘WordPress premium plugin authors.’ As with any business, when you start of, if you try to serve everyone (in this case, all plugin end users), you satisfy no one. Secondly, premium plugin authors have constant cash flow, which could allow you flexibility in how you charge — as an affiliate (normal or upgraded), weekly/monthly flat rate, per support request, percentage of plugin revenue, some combination of the two, etc.
3) I’m a premium plugin author who, for a while, has been dreaming that a service like this tailored to the WordPress community existed. However, I never heard of HelpCenter, unfortunately, until now, when it’s shutting down. Thus, creatively marketing amongst big WordPress/tech channels (websites, newsletters, forums) to get the word out about this service would definitely help as well (consistent marketing too, because if I did see it, there’s so much info about WordPress-related things online, it could be overlooked).
4) Customers do not own you, not matter how much they pay. Make sure that customers understand up front, as part of your terms of service, that their conduct determines there amount of service, since morale of service people is directly impacted by ‘bad customers’ — the 20% of customers that take up 80% of your time and/or feel it’s in their right to verbally abuse service people.
Hopefully someone reading this sees my perspective, and possibly has more to add to this — however, I’d like to say, great effort for trying to make WordPress HelpCenter work, it clearly has not gone unnoticed.
[…] First because it’s a great resource for the WordPress community and I was very sad to be taking that away, and second because I’ll still have a quality resource to refer folks to when Crowd Favorite […]
[…] when they found out that Alex King, the guy behind Crowd Favorite announced that he was going to shut down his side project, WordPress HelpCenter because it never gained the traction with developers that Alex was aiming […]
[…] of the big factors in letting go of WP HelpCenter was the way it was taking my attention away from […]