How We Pivoted and Pivoted and Pivoted Our WordPress SaaS
If you saw the headline on this post and kept reading, you probably like stories about business challenges.
Good, because this story is about about business challenges.
I’m Steve and my partner here at Logtivity is Ralph. And this is the tale of the challenges we faced in 2022.
We’ll tell you about how we pivoted and pivoted and pivoted our WordPress SaaS in 2022, trying to find the right approach.
This story is also about how the kindness of some customers can make all the difference.
Here’s the story of three big pivots we made to Logtivity in 2022.
Pivot #1. Target Audience
We launched Logtivity at the end of 2021. Our original idea was to target big customers with massive WordPress sites.
One customer with a huge site provided the spark for Logtivity. This customer was using an activity log plugin that relied on the WordPress database. Whenever they tried to export large amounts of logs, the site would crash. Ralph built Logtivity and it solved that customer’s problem because the new platform could export millions of WordPress logs!
We had solved a real customer problem. And this seemed like a great target market. Not only did we have our first paying customer who loved the service, but we also had early interest from other large companies.
But, in the end, that proved to be a dead end. We overestimated how much big companies value an audit log of site activity. Plus some of the companies had tricky legal requirements around HIPAA, GDPR and more. These companies showed plenty of of interest, but never enough to sign up and become customers.
Slowly, during 2022, the true audience for Logtivity started to appear. We didn’t find them. They found us.
A lot of helpful customers gave us feedback this year, but two people in particular really helped unlock the door for us: Matt Schwartz from Inspry in Georgia and Andrew Wilder from NerdPress in California. Matt runs a WordPress agency and Andrew runs a WordPress maintenance service. We can’t say enough good things about Matt and Andrew. If you need a development agency, or site maintenance, please reach out to them!
Matt and Andrew saw the potential for Logtivity more clearly than we did. They wanted a platform to help monitor the hundreds of sites that they manage. If one of those sites goes offline, they need an audit log so they can quickly understand the problem.
It became clear to us that people do want WordPress audit logs and they will pay for them. But they don’t want audit logs for large sites. They want them for a large number of sites.
So we pivoted Logtivity to focus on agencies and maintenance services. Logtivity’s new slogan is “The monitoring service for WordPress agencies“.
The kindness of customers helped us see what we had been missing.
Pivot #2. Features
Once we pivoted our target audience, we needed to pivot everything else about Logtivity. Next, we changed our development roadmap.
We had been previously working on features for large sites, including these:
I have to tell you … this pivot was painful. We’d been working on some of these features for many months. Those features listed above allow you to track really detailed changes to WordPress. However, we saw that agencies don’t require really detailed changes. When something goes wrong on a client site, they need the most important logs and they need to find them quickly.
So, our new development roadmap focuses on making it easier to manage all your sites. Recent releases include these:
We’ve also improved developer tools for agencies, including support for staging and development environments and the ability to quickly connect multiple sites using code.
Our roadmap for 2023 is full of ideas to help you easily monitor all the WordPress sites in your portfolio.
Pivot #3. Pricing
Aftering updated our target audience and development roadmap, the final pivot in 2022 was changing our pricing.
Initially, our pricing was inspired by services such as Pingdom (on left of this screenshot) and Fathom Analytics (on the right of this screenshot). Many of these developer-focused services use metered billing based on the number of logs, pageviews, and similar metrics.
Metered billing seemed like a good idea for Logtivity too. Most of our costs are based around log storage. The more logs you have, the more it costs us. But that approach falls into the trap of thinking about the business rather than the customers.
Customers told us that the metered billing was unclear. They wanted to add a new site and know exactly what their cost would be. To manage costs, some agencies were spending time trying to keep their costs low by filtering down the number of logs stored for their sites. Our pricing was causing extra headaches for customers.
So we pivoted the pricing too. You can still get metered billing if you want it, but the main price point for Logtivity is now $1.99 per site per month. Agencies don’t have to worry about the number of logs for each site, and they have 100% clarity on how much each site will cost. Click here to see Logtivity’s new pricing scheme.
Over to you …
Our story is far from unique. If you’ve read to the end of this post, there’s a good chance that you’ve endured similar challenges. In fact, you probably run a WordPress-related business.
We’d love to hear from you about what you’re working on and the challenges you’ve faced. If you’ve written a recap of your 2022 experience, please feel free to add a link in the comments, plus our contact form is also open.
And if you run a WordPress agency or maintenance company, we’d love to talk with you. It took us a while to realize it, but Logtivity is built for you!
