2022 Hindsight

For Fullworks Plugins 2022 was a bit of a consolidation year.

A bit of business history, as I have never written a retrospective before.

As a business Fullworks has been around for some 11 years in different guises (and names ) and mainly involved in WordPress based projects ( with a small flurry into Google Cloud projects ) so has a a range of experience. But it wasn’t until 2016 when my co-director ( and son ) parted way amicably ( he went off to create a successful non tech business ) that I started focusing on plugins.

I say started focusing, but initially I wasn’t 100% focused on plugins that didn’t happen until 2018.

And then I made a mistake – I went too deep and took on a strategy that failed. I could write a book on that but not here now. So after that failure by mid 2019 I had worked out what my plugin business was, roughly.

Which then mean I had several years before the start of 2022 stabilising my tools, methods and operations things like brand, website, knowledge base, help desk tools, development environment, and even by mid 2021 taken on a small amount of outsourced support.

So the point of that history is to say, operationally and revenue wise things were pretty stable by 2022.

2022 Priorities

It would be a lie to say I set out the primary focus of 2022 at the start, in fact it wasn’t until March that I wrote it down.

Priority 1: Protect the primary position of Display Eventbrite Plugin by enhancing and continuing to provide excellent support. Although niche this is significant revenue for me and two competitors came on in 2021 trying to take a share, one even copied large chunks of our code under GPL

Priority 2: Increase the install base of Anti Spam plugin through cross promotion of other plugins

Priority 3: Enhance Quick Event Manager with additional pro features ( e.g. schedule for webinars ) to make it a more desirable Event Manager

2022 Achievements against priorities

I can safely say that I didn’t achieve what I felt I should have achieved against the above priorities. Sure, progress was made but not enough in my book. So the 2022 priorities are now carried over to 2023.

Some Numbers

Support

Pro plugins support: 822 tickets, 1,739 responses average 1st response time 1h 32m average resolution time 85h 55m

Growth ( compared to 2021 )
I’ll only concentrate on the top three pro plugins

• Display Eventbrite
  Install base growth (inc pro & free) +9%
  Revenue growth +7%
• Anti Spam
  Install base growth (inc pro & free) -35% – now that is shocking and need to investigate
  Revenue growth +21% – that is a bit more reassuring
• Quick Event Manager
  Install base growth (inc pro & free) -0.1%
  Revenue growth +35%