Why You Should Give Away Your Best Product Features for Free

Especially if you want to grow your WordPress business.

It’s a counterintuitive fact: Giving away free stuff can help you grow your business.

But we’re not talking about free trials or ebooks. Think bigger: If you really want to grow your WordPress business, try giving away your product’s best features. 

Maybe that sounds insane. You dedicate countless hours to developing your most sophisticated product features. How can you give them away for free? 

Rest assured, there’s a method to the madness. We talked to Ben Ritner of Kadence WP to learn how a free-for-all approach has helped him grow an audience and sustain a profitable WordPress business.

StellarWP: Hi, Ben. You’re the founder of Kadence WP, which includes a free theme, Kadence Blocks, and starter templates. How did you start your business? Were you always giving stuff away for free?

Ben Ritner: I got into theme development by releasing a free theme in 2013. I intentionally went and asked, what are other free themes not doing? I looked at what people were paying for and then decided I’m going to give that away. 

What kind of premium features did you give away for free in your first theme?

Eight years ago, WordPress looked a lot different. Virtue, my first theme, was primarily about creating options where users wouldn’t have to use extra tools and plugins. For example, at the time, a free theme might give you blog posts that showed a list. If you wanted it in a grid, you would need to buy a pro theme. It’s a silly example, but it’s one that was very much a reality back in 2013.

The success of Virtue is why I’m still doing Kadence. It was kind of an experiment to release that and see if I could earn any supplemental income. 

You started with a free product, but how did you eventually make money? How did free users become paid users?

If a feature is going to help a user earn money themselves, then I’m less likely to give that feature away for free.

With the free product, I want to attract customers who are not making any money yet, but they’re trying something out. Then when all of the sudden they’re making money, they want more of those paid pro features. It’s about trying to find that customer journey and later selling them the features they’re going to need to be successful; the tools to increase conversions, or make more money with better designs.

You always have to be on the scary side of what you give away.

Ben Ritner, Kadence WP

How do you decide what to give away for free?

I’ve never really been like, “There’s this specific feature that has to be pro or has to be free.” Obviously, anything that costs you money to run, like if you’re offering some kind of connection with a service, you don’t want to give that away for free. 

But to me, it’s more about thinking about the customer journey and trying to figure out what’s going to help them be really successful with your product first, without having to buy anything. Then when they’re in a position to buy, they’re much more likely to stay with your product.

Offering a free general product is key. Gaining users can happen so much faster when they can jump in without any upfront cost. The features we spend the most time and money developing and that are most innovative are usually in our free products. We’re after growing our user base. 

It’s a different thought process, and you always have to be on the scary side of what you give away. You have to be questioning why anyone would want to buy pro because you’re giving all this away.

What’s the value in cultivating a large user base of mostly free users?

It’s a way into the market. Just having a free product with Virtue was a significant way to gain users. In the end with WordPress, you need a lot of users to make it work because we don’t have high price points. There’s not really a business model where you have 1,000 customers, and they all pay you $1,000, right? You have to play for a big audience, and a free product with standout features is a way to capture that audience.

So what kind of features do you reserve for paid users?

A lot of it is feature requests from people that are making and doing more advanced stuff. The requests from users doing client work or with websites that are making money generally aren’t the same as what free users want. So those are easier choices to say, okay, we’re going to put that in pro. 

Then a lot of it is conversations with marketing and guesswork. It’s tricky, for sure, to find the right balance. But in my experience, the more you give away, the more you grow your user base, which grows the bottom line. Features don’t equal a certain amount of money. It’s more about capturing an audience.

How does it pay off down the line to capture an audience early on, like you did with Virtue?

It’s the reality of the content lock. Let’s say you go and build a website, and you use the free Kadence theme and Kadence Blocks to build it. Then two years from now, somebody else comes out with an innovative feature… You’re going to be way less likely to jump bandwagons to them because of the amount of work it takes to actually move all your content. 

By getting users, you tend to get a lot of people locked into your brand. They’re much less likely to jump ship whenever something new and flashy shows up. They don’t want to switch systems. Those same users also provide the ​​best feedback for improving your product so you continue to stay on the cutting edge.

Do you measure ROI on the things you give away for free?

It’s fair to put a value on a free user, and you could try to do that. I don’t personally try to make sense of any of that, because I think you have spent a lot of time trying to make data tell you something that intuition already does. And, you know, it’s pretty easy to lie with statistics. 

There are definitely goals associated with what we’re trying to do. It’s not just “we’re giving this away and hoping for the best”. We’re giving something away because we think it’s going to be loud enough in the marketplace that it’s going to grow our product. Or we’re giving something away because it’s going to give us email subscribers. That, right there, is of value. There’s a price to getting emails.

Has this approach ever backfired on you—have you ever realized you’ve given away too much?

No. Certainly, people have told me I’m giving too much away. And that’s not to say that I’m right and they’re wrong. But I never felt like we crossed some line at which our premium products became less valuable.

The other thing is we have quite a lot of users who pay because they want to support what we’re doing. Not because of a single feature; they just like using Kadence as a framework for what they’re doing, so they want to have the whole package. They want to see the company, not just, you know, go and die. 

Get more insight from Ben and the Kadence team on the Kadence Beat Podcast, with weekly episodes covering WordPress, blocks, and strategies for effective websites.

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