{"id":7919191,"date":"2024-04-29T11:24:17","date_gmt":"2024-04-29T15:24:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.himy.ca.muslimwiki.ca\/2024\/04\/29\/wordpress-growth-hacking\/"},"modified":"2024-04-29T11:34:58","modified_gmt":"2024-04-29T15:34:58","slug":"wordpress-growth-hacking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/himy.ca.muslimwiki.ca\/blog\/2024\/04\/29\/wordpress-growth-hacking\/","title":{"rendered":"WordPress \u201cgrowth hacking\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
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“Back in 2019, working on WordPress, I started finding myself, almost weekly, arguing against people who wanted to take the product we were working at and made it worse if that mean they could squeeze 0.1% more revenue from it.<\/p>\n

The 0.1% figure is not even a random number: I remember this speciffic A\/B test on WordPress.com that was declared a success and shipped to 100% of the users because it increased the free-to-paid conversion by 0.1%.<\/p>\n

Soon after it was released, I found out that as a side effect, it increased the churn of free users by 20 something %, so I called for an urgent rollback and removal of the change.<\/p>\n

So I was promptly explained that we didn’t care about free-users churn, because finance had calculated the average long-term value of the free users to be something like $2 per year, and the increase in conversion was bigger than what we could get from them.<\/p>\n

[…] by the end of 2020, the CEO quietly told me to follow the growth team plans and shut up or step down.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

– @Javi<\/a> | Goblin.Band<\/a>  <\/p>\n

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“oh, WordPress.com development is mostly open source, so if I’m too speciffic, anyone could go to github and find the single PR where that change was shipped, etc.<\/p>\n

I don’t want to put anyone under the spotlight, specially engineers who were just doing what they were told to do.<\/p>\n

Also, it’s just one example of many, the only thing interesting about that particular example is that I complained about it and I got told about the ‘free user value’ calculation.<\/p>\n

But well, on broad strokes, it was about making it harder to tell which features were paid and which ones were free during onboarding.<\/p>\n

So a lot of people who wanted to create an account to host a free blog, found themselves being redirected to the shopping cart and asked to pay for things they have selected thinking they were free.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

– @Javi<\/a> | Goblin.Band<\/a><\/p>\n

| #Wordpress #OpenSource<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Back in 2019, working on WordPress, I started finding myself, almost weekly, arguing against people who wanted to take the product we were working at and made it worse if that mean they could squeeze 0.1% more revenue from it. The 0.1% figure is not even a random number: I remember this speciffic A\/B test […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"link","meta":[],"categories":[133],"tags":[804,393],"views":312,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/himy.ca.muslimwiki.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7919191"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/himy.ca.muslimwiki.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/himy.ca.muslimwiki.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/himy.ca.muslimwiki.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/himy.ca.muslimwiki.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7919191"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/himy.ca.muslimwiki.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7919191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7919195,"href":"https:\/\/himy.ca.muslimwiki.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7919191\/revisions\/7919195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/himy.ca.muslimwiki.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7919191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/himy.ca.muslimwiki.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7919191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/himy.ca.muslimwiki.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7919191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}