A little over a year ago, Hero Plugins decided to enter the WordPress plugins market with the launch of two free plugins – HeroMaps and HeroSlider. We were very sneaky about it – despite putting up social media profiles for the brand, we did very little to announce our coming to the world at large.
The reason for this was simple – we were dipping our toes in and testing the waters. While our parent company already develops websites using WordPress, actively developing plugins is a whole different ballgame, and we wanted to get a good idea of what we were getting ourselves into.
Long story short – it didn’t go badly. Despite the large number of sliders already available, Hero Slider especially did pretty well, and we got a number of comments from users who were pleased with it.
We took what we learned throughout the year to heart (we might go into detail about some of these lessons in a later post), and last month we launched our first paid-for plugin – HeroMenu Premium, a responsive mega menu builder plugin for WordPress. At the same time, we released HeroMaps Pro, an upgraded – but still absolutely free – version of HeroMaps.
We’re doing things a little differently this time. Rather than selling our premium plugin through this site, we’ve decided to sell it through CodeCanyon. There are, of course, pros and cons to selling through Envato’s platform, which we’re not going to go into here, but the major reason is the potential exposure our plugin could receive on a website that boasts a member community numbering in the millions.
HeroMaps Pro has been made available on WordPress.org. Once again, we did this for exposure – in the one month since adding it to the repository, we have already seen more downloads of the plugin than during the entire year the original HeroMaps was hosted on our own servers. And developers/bloggers looking for free plugins are far more likely to head over to search on WordPress.org than they are to do searches through any of the major search engines.
Another area we will be spending a lot of time on is our support. We’re committed to providing the best support for our products with quick response times from our support team. We’ve put systems in place to help with this goal, and so far we’ve received quite a few compliments from users of both our plugins.
Yes, we want to be known for building awesome plugins. But we also want to be known for providing brilliant support for our plugins.
So, what’s in the pipeline?
Firstly, you may have noticed that HeroSlider has been removed. This is because we are rebuilding HeroSlider to be even better than before, using the same framework we now have in place for HeroMaps Pro and HeroMenu. We don’t have a release date yet, but we are working on launching it as soon as possible.
HeroMaps Pro will also be getting a big brother, HeroMaps Premium, which is currently being built to incorporate a number of very cool additional functions not available in the current free version. It will be marketed alongside HeroMenu Premium on CodeCanyon in the near future.
Following that, we have a few more awesome plugins planned that will be built over the coming months – premium as well as free. If you want to stay up to date, and be one of the first to hear about upcoming releases and developments, you can register for our newsletter; you’ll find the sign-up in the footer down below. If you have registered on the previous version of our website, you will automatically receive our newsletters.
So, if you’ve been getting a kick out of using what we’ve made available so far, you will definitely want to keep an eye on this space.