Imagine a product that evolved as your needs changed

At a recent product team meetup for WooCommerce I remembered one of the first ‘ideas’ I had after joining Automattic as part of the WooThemes acquisition in 2015. After joining I was intrigued by all the different products Automattic had within the company, but found myself wondering if there was not a way that all these products could work together to create a unique product experience and vision.

I shared this vision at the 2015 Grand Meetup (a time where the entire company came together for a week in a chosen location) as my flash talk and actually found the notes for it in Simple Note (interestingly enough) when looking for it during that meetup – and thought I’d share it here again for posterity.

It was written as if someone was recounting their experience to someone else:

I had so many ideas.

I just needed a way to keep track of them all.

I decided to install this note taking app I’d heard everyone talking about. (Simplenote).

It offered such a clean and simple interface – it was all I needed to help me keep track of my ideas and thoughts. I found I could use it anywhere and anytime, it magically synced everything seamlessly between my phone and my computer. It kept all my information safe, secure and private. (VaultPress).

I found it made it so easy to start capturing and storing my ideas, when all I had at that stage were lots of ideas and I just needed a way of capturing them for future reference. For a good few years all I did with the app was take notes as well as store and share photos and links with friends (Cloudup).

Later, after much prompting from friends and family, I decided that some of the ideas I was storing in that little app would be much better shared with the world.

So I decided to find my voice, vocalise my ideas and share them with the world (.blog). With just a simple swipe I was able to take one of my favourite ‘ideas’, converted it into a draft ‘post’ and had started my my own place on the internet (WordPress.com).

With what felt like just a “tap of a button” I had published that idea, and now it was out there – for the world to read!

A few weeks later I received a notification on my mobile phone – an alert that traffic to that post I had published had been unusually high! Apparently my article had been shared on some ‘feed’ (Reader) that curated the best articles of the week I think, and it now been shared all over the internet!

That idea was no longer just ‘my’ idea! I ended up spending most of that morning looking through various stats and insights (Jetpack) that gave me some clarity on just where all that traffic had come from and where my idea had been shared and I quickly start engaging with all the feedback via the comments (Akismet).

After fair amount of time and effort, that first post had now become the spark for a thriving blog and community and I was starting to think – where to from here – what’s next? I had seen a lot of people were getting into ecommerce and setting up their own stores online – but the idea of creating an online store was intimidating – the time and money needed, added to the uncertainty of success – that was just scary!

But, what if I could simply add a product to my existing blog – and start selling to the loyal following I had already spent all this time creating?

To get started I took five of my most popular ‘posts’ and created a poll (Crowdsignal) which I sent out to my readers to get a better idea of what product might resonate with them – it did not take long and the answers came in. There was interest. There was potential to take this further. It was time to started selling!

Instead of writing a new post now though I chose to add a product to my blog. After uploading a photo, adding a product description, setting a price and some basic shipping details I was ready to start selling (Payments Block). The best thing about it was that I never had to worry about ‘what was happening in the background’ it just worked.

I kept adding products to my site and sales kept growing as did the demand for new products. I started to realise that the future of my business lay in adding a fully-fledged online store (WooCommerce) to my blog and to start offering more complex features like earning recurring revenue through creating subscription based products and started putting a bigger emphasis into optimising my site and customer experience to take my business to the next level.

Now, several years later, I am the owner of a very succcesful company with multiple employees. I still struggle to believe where it all started – with that simple ‘app’. I am now considered a VIP customer apparently (WordPress VIP) – which gives me access to a team that have come alongside me to help me grow and scale my business to meet the continuously changing demands of my customers and stay ahead of my competitors. All this would not have been possible without that app it feels – it just worked, automatically.

Imagine it.

It’s Automattic.

Now in 2024, I feel that vision could be quite different with the additional products Automattic now owns, and if anything, it could be even more compelling. I do acknowledge that this is just ‘one’ way someone could encounter all these products, and that they could well exist independently. To me though, there was something powerful about a product like this, if it could be pulled off of course!