Our Goals for 2024

It seems like only yesterday when I was writing down our goals for 2023… and here we are, in 2024, and thinking about what we’ll do next. So let’s get the party started already and take a look back at how well we did last year (spoiler alert: we didn’t) and share the goals for 2024.

What Happened to the 2023 Goals?

Last year we set ourselves 10 goals to accomplish and, well, here are the results:

1. Continue publishing a weekly post on our blog, both in English and Spanish.

❌ Failure. Honestly, when we set this goal at the beginning of last year, I assumed we would easily meet it. After all, it’s something we’ve been doing for years and nothing made me think this year would be different… but it was.

Last summer we were analyzing the impact our blog had on the conversion rates of our services and we came to the conclusion that it was negligible. Our posts have quite a few views, but none of those views translated into meaningful engagement (i.e. comments or subscriptions), as we shared last week. Given this poor performance, and the fact that we wanted to focus our efforts elsewhere, we decided it was time to cut resources from our blog.

Now, I’m not shirking any responsibility- if our blog isn’t engaging enough, it’s 100% our fault. Honestly, we struggle to find the type of content that best connects with the audience we want to reach. But we’d be fools to just write stuff to meet a self-imposed quota, ignoring its contribution to our business or personal satisfaction. So we opted for the easy solution – not to write anything until we were confident it would contribute something positive and not achieve this goal. I’m glad we did.

2. Increase Nelio’s billing by 20%.

✅ Success. A huge success. Last year we managed to increase Nelio’s turnover by 65%, an outstanding figure. The result is so good that it deserves some explanation, don’t you think?

On the one hand, last year we made the decision to raise the prices of our two main products: Nelio A/B Testing and Nelio Content. It’s something we had been considering for some time, but we needed a push. A push that we got from some subscribers when they said (I’m paraphrasing here) “we were too cheap” and “our prices didn’t reflect the value we provide.”

So we raised the prices of Nelio A/B Testing and Nelio Content by 30%. And not only that, we applied the new pricing structure to all our existing subscribers (something we had never done before).

On the other hand, we also decided to focus our efforts on improving these two products by developing many of the improvements our users have asked us for over the years. We also decided to better communicate our developments by publishing a summary of each new release on our blog and sharing Nelio A/B Testing and Nelio Content roadmaps on Trello boards.

All of this sends clear message to all our users and prospects: our products are constantly being developed and improved by a professional team that listens to you. A message that reached its audience, as our subscriber base has grown by 20%.

If we combine both factors and take into account that the plans that have grown the most are not always the most basic… well, there you have the 65% that I mentioned at the beginning.

3. Strengthen our partnership with WordPress VIP by getting 5 VIP clients into Nelio A/B Testing Enterprise.

Ⓜ️ Partial success. We did indeed get some WordPress VIP customers… but not as many as we expected and not as many Enterprise customers as we wanted. We weren’t sure what to expect from our partnership, so the goal was probably unrealistic.

Why, then, do I consider this goal a partial success? The objective metric is a clear failure, but we’ve someehow strengthned our partnership with WordPress VIP. Right now, we’re working to integrate Nelio A/B Testing into the WordPress.com marketplace – something we’re very excited about!

4. Add (at least) 2 new WooCommerce test types in Nelio A/B Testing.

✅ Success. Last year we spent a lot of time and resources improving, as we intended, Nelio A/B Testing’s compatibility with WooCommerce:

• In February we released version 5.4.0 which included a new type of test: WooCommerce bulk salesl, which allows you to apply a certain percentage discount to a selection of products. You asked for it, you got it.
• In March we released version 5.5.0 which included the ability to run A/B test on variable products.

But we didn’t stop there:

• At the end of March we released version 5.5.2 with support for Elementor forms as a conversion action.
• In September we launched version 6.0, in which we implemented different tracking alternatives to bypass ad blockers, added JavaScript tests, and implemented alternative load testing without redirects.
• A little later, we released versions 6.0.x with per-site quota management and conversion action scopes.
• In November, we launched version 6.2, which integrated event testing created with The Events Calendar and improved GDPR policy management.
• And in December we launched version 6.3 with support for HubSpot forms and the ability to ignore events from certain IPs.

As you can see, the decision to stop writing blog posts paid off well, huh?

5. Re-establish the test of the month on our blog by publishing (at least) 4 new posts within the series (one per quarter).

Ⓜ️ Partial success. This year we only wrote one test of the month – yet another failure in this goal list. But Ruth thought it’d be better to replace our tests of the month (whose main objective is to give ideas to our users and teach how to use Nelio A/B Testing) with use cases. I think this was a sensible change so… I’ll consider this goal as a partial success.

6. Launch (at least) 4 new versions of Nelio Content with improvements requested by our users.

✅ Objective achieved. Not only have we worked on Nelio A/B Testing – in 2023 we have also implemented a lot of new features for Nelio Content:

• Just at the beginning of the year, on January 9, we published version 2.4.0 of Nelio Content, which came with support for Mastodon. A nice update, especially after the the drama with Elon Musk at the helm of Twitter X.
• At the end of February, version 2.5 was released with support for custom placeholders in social messages.
• In March we integrated MailPoet newsletters and The Events Calendar events into our editorial calendar.
• In July, version 3.0 came out with automation groups, which offered a new way to define what, when, and how is automatically shared on your social accounts.
• In December we launched version 3.1 with recurring messages.

Not to mention all the minor updates we also released to fix small bugs or polish small details!

7. Get 500+ users on Nelio Popups with a 5% conversion to premium.

❌ Failure. At the end of last year, we had 300+ users according to wordpress.org and only 10 subscribers to our premium version (3% conversion). Both metrics (users and CR) are a complete failure, so there isn’t much I can say here.

8. Get 500+ users on Nelio Forms with a 5% conversion to premium.

❌ Failure. Last year we only had 40+ users and a lonely subscriber, resulting in a failure bigger than the one we got with Nelio Popups.

Looking at the bright side, though, we’ve learned some valuable lessons: it’s very difficult to enter a saturated market (such as form or popup plugins) when all you bring to the table is a better integration with Gutenberg and its blocks…

It was a fun adventure and we learned a lot, but I don’t think we can ever improve these metrics. At least, not in the short term.

9. Participate in the WordPress development, devoting 5% of our time (one morning every two weeks) to translations, bug reporting, etc. Also, I would like to do (at least) 4 PRs to the Gutenberg project.

❌ Failure. I certainly underestimated the work it would take to have a baby at home. This year we focused a lot on our products and neglected the WordPress community. A real shame, because the previous year we did much better… but something we can (and hopefully will) correct in 2024.

10. Attend (at least) 4 meetups and 1 WordCamp (online attendance would be success as well).

❌ Failure. Again, without much spare time, we were unable to actively participate in the community as we would have liked to.

2023 Summary

This year was a resounding failure with only 4 out of 10 goals have been met. But, to be honest, I’m not that sad about the results: we were able to grow our company a lot and we had a lot of fun doing so. The real loss from last year was our lack of involvement with WordPress and its community… so let’s see if we can fix that this year.

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New Goals

Taking into account last year’s results, it’s once again time to be ambitious and set a new list of SMART goals:

1. Publish an average of a couple of posts per month on our blog.
2. Publish at least 12 posts (one per month) with some of the lessons we’ve learned.
3. Increase Nelio’s turnover by 30%.
4. Increase Nelio subscribers by 25%.
5. Get our first 10 clients in the WordPress.com marketplace.
6. Launch a new product.
7. Launch (at least) 4 new versions of Nelio A/B Testing with improvements requested by our users.
8. Launch (at least) 4 new versions of Nelio Content with improvements that our users have requested.
9. Participate in the development of WordPress, dedicating 5% of our time (one morning every two weeks) to translations, reporting bugs, etc. Additionally, I would like to make (at least) 4 PRs to the Gutenberg project.
10. Attend (at least) 4 meetups and 1 WordCamp.

I wish you the best in 2024 and we’ll talk again next year, when we review these 10 goals.

Featured Image by Walls.io on Unsplash.