Our Goals for 2025

Wait, what!? 2024 is already over? That was fast! We’ll, I guess it’s time to review the goals we set last year and set a new set of goals for 2025. So, without further ado, let’s take a closer look at how we did in 2024, shall we?

What Happened to the 2024 Goals?

Here’s the analysis of our 2024 goals and how well we performed:

1. Publish an average of a couple of posts per month on our blog.

✅ Success. We’ve published 26 posts this year, which averages a little bit more than two per month. However, I must admit, this year we shifted the focus of our content a little bit. Here’s what we’ve been discussing this year in our blog:

• 9 posts had tutorials and tips for developers. I like these posts a lot, because that’s where we share our experience and findings with you, and they’re really fun to write.
• 5 tests of the month. In these articles, we show some of the A/B tests we’ve run on our website, describing our hypothesis, what we tested and how, and the results we get. If you’re interested in running splits tests on your site and need some ideas, they’re a great starting point to find inspiration and learn from others/us.
• 11 posts with all the updates and new features we’ve been introducing to our plugins (Nelio A/B Testing and Nelio Content) throughout the year. We’ve done a lot of work, and so there was a lot to share 😁

So, yeah, not as diverse as we used to, but a lot of information that our subscribers, users, and followers needed.

2. Publish at least 12 posts (one per month) with some of the lessons we’ve learned.

❌ Failure. I wanted to write one post per month sharing tutorials and tips for fellow developers, but in the end we only published 9. It’s close, but I still call it a failure. As I said a few lines above, these are some of the posts I like the most, but writing them takes way more time than I’d like to, and I simply couldn’t do it. If you’d like to see more of these posts next year, let me know in the comment section below – otherwise, I might set a lower target for next year 😉

3. Increase Nelio’s turnover by 30%.

✅ Success. We totally did it! This year, we’re thrilled to announce that our revenue has soared by over 30%, a testament to the growing success and resonance of our plugins with our user base.

Leading the charge is, of course, Nelio A/B Testing, which has experienced the most significant surge in users and is driving the bulk of our increased revenue. This growth is no coincidence; it’s the result of a year-long dedication to enhancing the plugin’s capabilities, adding powerful new features, refining existing ones, and addressing user feedback with comprehensive bug fixes. Just take a look at our Trello to know more about all the things we did in Nelio A/B Testing and Nelio Content!

From improving the user experience to expanding compatibility and functionality, Nelio A/B Testing has evolved into a more robust and reliable tool that, as far as I can tell, seems to meet the needs of our customers. Personally, I must admit I’m extremely proud of how these efforts have transformed Nelio A/B Testing into a cornerstone of our success, and we’re excited to continue delivering exceptional value to our users in the years ahead.

4. Increase Nelio subscribers by 25%.

❌ Failure. While we’ve made strides in growing our subscriber base, with an increase of 12%, it falls short of our intended target of 25%. A key factor hindering faster growth is our high churn rate, which continues to offset new sign-ups and slows the expansion of our user base.

Addressing this challenge is critical for sustaining long-term growth. We have a few ideas to do so, like improving the onboarding experience, offering loyalty incentives, actively soliciting feedback from users to identify shortcomings, etc. In other words, there’s a lot of work to do ahead!

5. Get our first 10 clients in the WordPress.com marketplace.

❌ Failure. This year, one of our goals was to secure 10 premium customers from WordPress.com, but the reality is, we fell short—completely short, actually. That is, we got none 🙃

Sure, we didn’t take proactive steps to pursue this goal, and as a result, we didn’t achieve it… No wonder, huh?

However, we still believe the WordPress.com marketplace has significant potential. Unfortunately, we haven’t yet figured out how to effectively tap into it.

So far, all our WordPress.com users have joined through our regular subscription program rather than the premium marketplace channel. It’s clear that to unlock this opportunity, we need to develop a focused strategy, whether that’s through targeted marketing, building stronger partnerships with WordPress.com, or tailoring our offerings to better suit this specific audience.

6. Launch a new product.

✅ Objective achieved. One of our most ambitious goals this year was to launch a brand-new product, and we’re excited to say we accomplished it! That said, I must admit we took a creative approach to reach this goal: rather than building something entirely separate, we released it as an extension to Nelio A/B Testing. But, hey, it’s fully capable of standing alone as its own plugin… so that counts, right? Right?? 😅

In February we launched Nelio Session Recordings. This new tool enables session recording and visitor-level insights, giving users a detailed look at how individual visitors interact with their websites. By integrating Nelio Session Recordings with Nelio A/B Testing, we created a powerful synergy, making it easier for users to refine their experiments with actionable, real-time behavioral data. It’s an innovative step forward for our suite of tools, blending usability and value to empower our customers with deeper insights into their audiences.

7. Launch (at least) 4 new versions of Nelio A/B Testing with improvements requested by our users.

✅ Objective achieved. Nelio A/B Testing was the first product we created and it’s been with us for a long time. It’s probably the plugin we’re most proud of, because it brings a lot of value to its users. Moreover, this year the plugin entered the WordPress.com marketplace as a Premium plugin.

We’ve always worked very hard to improve and evolve Nelio A/B Testing, to keep it up-to-date with the WordPress ecosystem. And this year has been no exception, introducing way more new features than we first intended to:

• In February we launched version 6.4 introduced Nelio Session Recordings as a new feature within the scope of Nelio’s split testing strategy.
• In April, we published Nelio A/B Testing 6.5 improved support within the WooCommerce ecosystem, as that’s one of the features you guys have asked for. In particular, it added support for a couple of currency switcher plugins for WooCommerce (namely, Price Based on Country for WooCommerce and Aelia’s Currency Switcher). The plugin also tweaked its segmentation capabilities by implementing a new setting to customize when and how segmentation is computed, as well as other minor improvements.
• One month later, Nelio A/B Testing 6.6 was released with support for WooSubscriptions, a WooCommerce plugin to manage subscriptions.
• In June, we released version 7.0. The main focus here was to introduce support for dynamic caching in Nelio, making split tests faster and, thus, resulting in a better user experience to all your visitors. It also added support for Elementor’s template system to allow template testing on Elementor pages. And it also introduced data exports! Pretty neat, huh?
• Version 7.1 was released on September and featured a new type of test: URL tests. This test overcomes some of the limitations of other tests by simply giving users the opportunity to test existing pages against each other by using their URLs.
• Next month, we published version 7.2, a version aimed at improving Nelio A/B Testing’s compatibility with third-party plugins. Cache plugins, form plugins, Elementor, … you name it. And we also added new features to improve the overall UX, like faster heatmaps, variant duplication, and more.
• And finally, earlier last month, we released the latest installment to date of Nelio A/B Testing: version 7.3. Here, we redesigned WooCommerce product tests to make them compatible with third-party page builders and improved data exports. We also tweaked test scopes to give users more power deciding what to test where and addressed several issues and bugs.

8. Launch (at least) 4 new versions of Nelio Content with improvements that our users have requested.

✅ Objective achieved. Nelio Content has also received tons of love from us. We’ve continued to develop the plugin and integrate the features you asked for. Here’s a quick recap:

• In January we published Nelio Content 3.2, a version that introduced task presets into our plugin. This feature made it easier for our users to create and assign tasks to the members of their editorial team when creating new posts.
• In March, version 3.3 went live. This version added Bluesky as a new social network where our users can automatically share their content. It also added additional customization settings, like adding custom query arguments to the links you share depending on the network in which they’re shared.
• A couple of months later, we published version 3.4. This version added an message pool that makes it possible to keep track of and easily share evergreen social messages. It also added support for Hootsuite and several minor tweaks here and there.
• On June we launched a quick version 3.5, which introduced support for Threads and addressed a couple of bug fixes.
• On September, Nelio Content 3.6 went live and it was one of the biggest releases of the year. It added Medium support and featured a new Content Board, which is the perfect companion’s to Nelio Content’s editorial calendar. Moreover, it also added Future Actions – a feature that makes it possible to schedule actions that will automatically update the status and/or content of your published posts.
• Finally, on November we published the latest update of the year – Nelio Content 3.7. As many of you have told us, this version added yet another new feature to manage post series. That is, it’s now possible to group your posts into collections or series and let our plugin take care of everything.

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.

❌ Failure. This year, we aimed to give back to the WordPress.org community in a meaningful way, but unfortunately, we didn’t succeed as we would have liked. We made some small contributions, like helping with some translations, and the last two months we have been involved in the Training Team helping with the translation of video captions and thumbnails:… but I’m not gonna sugarcoat it – it’s far from the level of involvement we initially set out to achieve.

Supporting the community that has enabled our success is very important to us, and we recognize that we must do better. Contributing back isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s a responsibility we have to take seriously. Next year, this will be a top priority, and we’re committed to making it happen. Whether through code contributions, documentation, or more consistent engagement in community initiatives, we’re determined to step up and make a real impact.

10. Attend (at least) 4 meetups and 1 WordCamp.

❌ Failure. Our last goal is just another area where we also fell short this year. While having small children at home undoubtedly makes this more challenging, I feel like we have to do more to make it happen. Engaging with the WordPress community face-to-face is invaluable and very rewarding, not just for networking but also for staying connected with the people who use and support our plugins.

As with our WordPress.org contributions, this is something we have to prioritize and improve upon next year. Whether it’s attending WordCamps or participating in meetups, we’ll do our best to being more present and active in the community moving forward.

2024 Summary

Reflecting on the year, we achieved just 5 out of our 10 goals—a mixed bag of successes and misses.

Interestingly, some goals that seemed incredibly ambitious at the outset were accomplished, while others that felt more straightforward fell completely off the mark. This discrepancy is definitely food for thought as we plan for the future.

What’s clear, however, is that there’s a ton of areas where we can improve and grow. These experiences, both successes and failures, provide valuable insights into how we set our objectives and execute them.

There’s plenty to think about and we’re ready to dive in and make things happen next year!

Nelio A/B Testing

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New Goals

So what about this year? Well, I think we can dream a little bit more and set some big SMART goals for 2025:

1. Publish an average of a couple of posts per month on our blog.
2. Increase Nelio’s turnover by 20%.
3. Increase Nelio subscribers by 20%.
4. Launch (at least) 4 new versions of Nelio A/B Testing with improvements requested by our users.
5. Launch (at least) 4 new versions of Nelio Content with improvements that our users have requested.
6. Participate in the development of WordPress, dedicating 5% of our time (one morning every two weeks) to translations, reporting bugs, etc.
7. I would like to make (at least) 4 PRs to the Gutenberg project.
8. Attend (at least) 4 meetups and 1 WordCamp.

Let’s see how we do 😎 As always, I wish you the best in 2025. See you around!

Featured Image by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.