About possessive customers and the setup wizard

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Actually, this post should appear tomorrow (my rhythm is currently Monday and Thursday) but since my son turns one year old on Friday (🥳) I’m trying to free up the day. But that’s just a side note. This blog post is about very possessive customers and the current status of my setup assistant.

As always: this post came about because I read the book Traffic Secrets by Russell Brunson, who wrote in one of the articles that you should share your journey with the plugin with your (future) customers. Actually, he wants you to post once per day. And that for more than a year. But that’s not doable at all in my current situation (I share raising my son with my wife, which means I can’t be on the computer for half a day. However that is not a bad thing at all, because I enjoy it). And of course I want to do some development for my Schema WordPress plugin as well.

Possessive (future) customers

Surely you have heard how Google deals with its customers. Support is virtually non-existent. And if so, then only for their ad business. I don’t want to imply that they only give support for something that ultimately makes huge revenues. But sometimes it seems like this, as for example the dispute with the indie studio Re-Logic shows.

Being left out in the cold like that sucks. That’s not what I want or ever wanted for my customers. That’s why my plugin reviews are so good in the end. But of course it also works the other way around: Future customers sometimes ask so many questions. That’s crazy. But that’s what happened exactly today. I think in total I was probably busy for almost 45 minutes.

Did I help him? I think so. In the end, however, he did not become a customer.

Admittedly, such e-mails annoy me a little at first. Because most of the questions are absolute beginner questions and often already answered on my website. It’s like with a friend of mine. Instead of googling first he asks the professional WordPress developer in me when he wants to know something technical. I’m known for not always answering right away. That’s because my phone is always in silent-mode and kind of turned off during my “working hours”. Ultimately, I want to focus on my work and not get distracted. Social media is therefore also taboo for me.

Anyway, a response can take several hours. But that doesn’t matter. People prefer to communicate with people, not machines. Even if it’s often easier and faster. That never ceases to amaze me. Because I’m the other way around: I’m a person who always wants to solve everything myself (as I’ve already mentioned).

Back to the customer: I found it quite interesting that he gave professional tools like RankMath, YoastSEO and other Schema WordPress plugins a bad review. I guess he wasn’t happy with that tools and was now looking for an alternative.

With the support I have lost a lot of time. Time with my son, time with my plugin, time for other customers (who paid for support), etc. The list could go on forever. But you know what is not lost? The karma! What sounds very esoteric now, is described in the book Karmic Management (which I just read recently). In the end, however, it could be summed up in one quote:

What Goes Around Comes Around.

And that’s how I’ll leave it then. 🧘

State of progress with the setup wizard

Here is a short GIF which shows the current state:

As you can see, I’ve made progress with the following:

  • First, the step with the selection of snippets is skipped. This happens automatically if there is only one snippet to choose from.
  • Secondly, a few manual questions are made at the end. But only if absolutely necessary.

Generally I try to skip as many steps as possible to keep the setup wizard as short and as clean as possible.

I can already hear you yelling, “Excuse me, that’s all you’ve managed to do?”

No. Considering I currently only have 50% of what I used to work on and I’m burning half of the time blogging and link building. Well… that’s how it is. But good things come to those who wait, don’t they? 😆

What’s next?

That’s it! Cheers!