448 – Innovative WordPress plugin marketing: Dave Grey’s sponsorship model

[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 448 entitled Innovative WordPress Plugin Marketing, Dave Grey's Sponsorship Model. It was published on Thursday, the 4th of December 2025.

My name's Nathan Wrigley, and just two bits of housekeeping.

The first one is to say that our Black Friday page is still up. wpbuilds.com/black. There are loads of deals running throughout December, and in some cases there's a few which are running to January. The deals that are on that page are still working. They will disappear from that page as the date expires, so go and check 'em out. If you've still got some money burning a hole in your pocket over Black Friday, then you never know. There might be something there. wpbuilds.com/black.

The other thing to mention is that if you are in the WordPress space and would like to get your product or service out in front of a WordPress specific audience, which is exactly what we have. Head to wpbuilds.com/advertise, because WP Builds currently is actively looking for sponsors to help us put on the podcast, and to get your message out into the marketplace. Because we all know that it's difficult to get those messages out, and we have an audience listening all the time to WordPress specific content. So we really are the perfect place to help you promote whatever product or service you have.

Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, today I am chatting with Dave Grey. Dave's been on the podcast a couple of times before. That is to say he's been on This Week in WordPress, and the podcast in general.

He has a plugin called Nag Me KNot, and Nag Me Not is going to take away all of those admin banner ad notices that you see all the time. So you know what I mean? You log into the WP Admin and there is absolutely loads of stuff cluttering it up. Content, which many people find objectionable.

That's not really the point of this episode, although we do talk about the plugin. What's of interest is the way that Dave is marketing it, and who he is marketing it to. And I found it really interesting 'cause it's very unconventional. And so he talks about who he is marketing it to, how he is doing his subscriptions for that plugin. And you may find it curious, and it may be something that if you are a plugin developer, or thinking about launching a product in the WordPress space, you might want to pay attention to.

So that's coming up next. I hope that you enjoy it.

I am joined on the podcast by Dave Grey. Hello, Dave.

[00:02:52] Dave Grey: Good afternoon and thanks for having me

[00:02:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. Dave's been on the podcast before, but he is also been on the, this weekend WordPress show. And, and he's back because he, he sent me a message, I can't remember which platform, let's say it was Slack or something like that. And, and he was sounding me out wh which was it? Oh, was it email?

Okay. Yeah. There's so many ways of getting in touch these

[00:03:13] Dave Grey: forgotten

[00:03:14] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. That's right. Yeah. He sent me a, he sent me a message by Carrier Pigeon and, and in that message he explained that he's got this new idea for, not a plugin, but the way to sell the plugin or market the plugin or get the plugin into people's hands, even though they might not know that it's in their hands.

And, and I thought it was such a curious thing that he'd come up with that I thought we'd discuss it. However, before we do that, let's just lay the ground rules. sorry, the groundwork for this particular episode. Dave, it's a very generic question, but in case nobody has heard of you before, would you just one minute, just tell us who you are and what you do in the Word press space.

[00:03:55] Dave Grey: Yeah, so I'm Dave Grey from the rebranded friendly web guy Plugins 'cause I kept having to spell out the hour WP Plugins from beforehand and thought. I need a quick rename on there. And since leaving corporate about four months or so ago, I'm now focusing on WordPress plugins and browser extensions, mainly targeted towards the freelancer and small agency market to basically help make their lives a bit easier and ideally reduce support requests given them more time to make more money.

[00:04:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Tidying up the admin is the definitely the, what we're going into today because Dave has, as one of his plugins, he's got something called nag me Not, and, I'll just, if it's all right with you, I'll just explain the premise behind the plugin. So you've all been there, you've been into the WordPress admin as.

Some kind of admin user or maybe you've got some sort of escalated privileges and you go into the admin and you're just confronted by a carnival of banners and advertising and upsells and what have you. And in most cases, if you're like me. It's a bit like seeing Google Ads. When I go to a Google SERPs page, I block them out or quickly get rid of them.

So I, I'm not that bothered about them because I know it's fine to dismiss them, but my understanding is that. It's quite a problem, in the WordPress space, especially people who are not really using WordPress a hundred percent of the time, they may be dipping into it once a month, twice a week, something like that, to create content for their corporate job or whatever it may be.

And they see these banner ads and because they don't have a heritage with WordPress, there's some kind of disconnect and there's some kind of. what is that? Do I need to upgrade? Does that thing matter to me? If I click this dismiss button, have I done something wrong? Will my boss be crossed with me because I ignored something, which the website's telling me that I need to do anyway.

The point being, there's too much stuff going on in the WordPress admin and nag me, not gets rid of it in a variety of ways. You've got a plugin and you've got a Chrome extension. Just tell us how they work.

[00:06:10] Dave Grey: Yes, so it started off as just the WordPress plugin so that you could enable it for your different client admin so that. When they log into their own site, they don't get bombarded with all these different bits. Whereas for you as like the site maintainer on that side, you could have the options that you see all these notices and things to get rid of.

And then after doing a few sort of support calls and things where logging into other people's sites to try and troubleshoot bits, I then thought these sites could do with this bit, but I can't put this plugin on there 'cause it's not my site. So then made the little sort of spinoff browser extension. So if you were like.

Plugin support person or hosting person on that side, hopping onto sites that aren't directly yours. It can do the equivalent just through the browser extension to hide all the nag things. And then as of the latest release, actually put them into little notifications panel on the side so they're more shifted away, so can still click on something and see what was in there in case you need to action rather than scrubbing the whole bit out.

Yeah, I've got basically two different audiences and two different ways to do it for the people cleaning their own sites and the people that may be hopping between different sites to then make their lives a little bit visually less

[00:07:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so I guess the benefit of having it as a Chrome extension or a browser extension is that you install it once and then it detects, it doesn't matter which word best website you go to. So I don't know if I'm [email protected] and I'm one of their support people, and I go around.

Probably 50, a hundred WordPress websites a day. I'm not gonna be presented with this carnival of banners and ads or what have you. That will all be scrubbed out no matter which WordPress website on, I'm on. But that is probably not the best approach. If I've just got one or two WordPress websites, I can just chuck the plugin in and it will handle it, natively, for want of a better word, so that anybody coming with the, appropriate permissions and user roles and what have you.

We'll have all of those scrubbed out. And again, I just wanna drill on to the point that if you're an experienced WordPress, which you probably are, If you're listening to this podcast, you're probably thinking, it's not that bad. that they get in the way a little bit and they're annoying, but I just dismiss them and life moves on.

but think about, I don't know, that aging elderly relative or something like that, who suddenly gets a message on their Windows machine from an antivirus company. It pops up near the clock at the bottom right hand corner, and it tells them that they, I don't know, something's, they're not protected, or something like that.

there's a real proper. Sense of panic at that moment. And it, again, if you're a Windows user with loads of experience, you can dismiss that. It's just ignore it, dad, mom, get rid of it. It doesn't matter to you. But they panic because it feels like something's wrong. the computer, the.

Has told me something's wrong, and in the case of WordPress, my website is telling me something needs an upgrade. I have to purchase this upgrade, or there's something missing, or I'm not secure, or whatever it is. So it's easy to dismiss if you're a WordPress by, trade, but if you're not, there's real anxiety here.

And so that's what you are trying to tap into and get rid of it. okay. Yep.

[00:09:26] Dave Grey: 'cause the other bit is on there that even if you log in as your user and click dismiss, quite a few of them might just be dismissed for your user. They log in, they've not clicked dismiss on them so they see the whole bundles. You may well be thinking, oh, this is all nice and tidy, but. Sort of person logs in trying to do their monthly stats or something on that side.

Then get all these different bits shown on the screen.

[00:09:46] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:09:47] Dave Grey: some of the lesser technical people have kinda just got their little sheet, bit of paper to follow these things through. And then some sites I've been on to, to upload a new plugin on that side, you can't find the button because you've got some notices above it, some beneath it.

And it's just like the

[00:10:02] Nathan Wrigley: Oh

[00:10:02] Dave Grey: where am I? What am I trying to find on that thing?

[00:10:04] Nathan Wrigley: no.

[00:10:05] Dave Grey: like the,

[00:10:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's absolutely nuts. Oh gosh. Okay. So we now know what, nag Meoc does. but the bit that was curious to me was in your email. So you've got this thing, you've got this tool, you've built it, it's got, the Chrome extension or the browser extension, I should say, and it's got the plugin.

But the bit that I found most interesting was the way that your thinking. About selling this. So the traditional way of selling this would be, I don't know, download something like Easy Digital Downloads or WooCommerce subscriptions or something like that. Sell it to everybody who uses WordPress as a plugin, one site license, five site license, 50 site license, whatever.

And you add a little bit more to the price for each of those, and that's the way things are. Normally done, but you've got something totally different, which I've never heard of before. So do you wanna spell it out and then if I am confused by anything as we go along, I'll pause you at the end and go and ask more questions.

'cause it's really curious. I.

[00:11:10] Dave Grey: So it's, I say simple terms. Nothing is ever simple with me because it's one of those sort of tools or. Extensions that could be beneficial for lots and lots of people. It's just a case of how to reach those sort of people on there. Because if you've seen the different sort of Facebook groups and things around the place, the amount of people commenting that, oh, these things are popping up all over the place.

And not to know the particular sort of Facebook group, but one person said, all right, if I see any more plugins asking for like reviews and all these things, I'm just gonna go from one star on there. 'cause they're just really annoying. And other people say, yes, there's a bit of a blight on there. And. I think WordPress for years has basically said, oh, we need some, people have been saying you need a clear way of getting rid of these things, but that's never gonna happen because they're busy working on other bits and pieces.

So I thought, one potential way of trying to reach a larger market on that side may well be contacting, hosting providers or sort of service providers like WP Umbrella or Main WP and things like that to say, could we partnership on that side through, so that.

You could then offer it to all of your end clients on theirs, like Nexus or Bonus or Christmas or Festival gift on that side, or just a lawyer thing to say, we value your experience and stuff on that side. We know that these things can be causing your customers to raise tickets and things like this from your site or.

If you're like a fellow plugin developer, you go to different people's sites and troubleshoot, stick the browser extension on there so that you can get in, do these things and get back out again. So my thought was to basically try and contact them to basically say, would you be interested in quote sponsoring?

That could be not so that you rather your normal sponsorship of just saying, we stick a name on this bit and they don't get any real ROI from it. They could then, depending on the different tier, which I'll get to in a minute, could then offer it to their end customers as an extra bonus. So therefore they give something to their customers.

That was basically kind. Quite needed out there. The customer gets a benefit. They can see, oh, I'm getting free in quotes, access to this thing, which would normally be that amount. They actually value my WordPress experience on there. This is a nice differentiator for somebody more. Budget host on that side.

They just do fewer things on that side through. And then, evolved to, I've got the browser extension that lots of people could use as well as the plugin. So I thought if we've got a couple of different ways of bundling it on that side through then hopefully some sort of host or service providers may be interested in saying, oh, that would work out on there.

We've got marketing budget. That would be a relatively. re budgetable cost for them or expense for them to reach out. And it's also something else that then their customers would think, oh, that's a quite nice, handy thing to put in

[00:13:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so the, so let me just reprise that because I think the nugget, the bit that is really interesting. you just glossed right over there. so the, okay, let's call it sponsorship, let's call it buying it. We can say the sort of same thing. So the idea is that what you wanna do is you would like to.

You would like to give via sponsorship or payment, whatever the word is, the plugin to people who can then give it to other people. So as an example, let's say again, I am giant hosting.com. That's my fabulous hosting company by the way. I. You probably didn't know that I've got a fabulous hosting company, giant hosting.

I don't, by the way. but imagine I did. The idea would be that you and I would strike up a relationship, we'd figure out a price. You would give me access to the extension, the browser extension, or the plugin. I am then free. To just give it away to in my entire customer base. But the nice thing that I can do is that I can wrap that around, I can wrap that up in marketing language as a, here's a free thing.

here's a total random bonus that you never knew was coming your way, and they can do it again and again to their entire customer base. let again my giant hosting company.com business. We've got 15,000 websites, not that giant. We've got 15,000 websites. I talk to you, we strike up a relationship.

I get it sponsored, pay for it in some way. Then I'm free to email all of my customers to say, look. We took away all the nagging stuff in your WordPress website and we did it. You don't have to do a thing. We're donating it for free. here it is. And that's the interesting bit. The bit that I think is fascinating there is that you are allowing.

Big companies to give something to their customers for free, in effect. And although there's a little bit of quid pro quo, you are getting paid for it in some way. The thing is, they can then resell it, not even resell it, they just give it to their customers. And then they can go around doing, marketing pieces.

They can write blog posts, they can appear on podcasts and say, and we're, one other thing that we do just for convenience is we're also gonna take out all of the annoying things. I dunno if you've ever seen those on your WordPress website, but we've got a system in place now to. To get rid of those.

So that's the bit that I think is unique is this. You are standing in the middle somewhere, but you are offering something for a one time fee. And maybe it's not one time, maybe it's an annual, I don't know, we'll come to that, but you are offering the capacity for those companies to put something in front of their clients and they can market that as an added benefit.

So win-win, it really is a win-win. Well done.

[00:16:51] Dave Grey: Yeah. It's basically, it's a win, win. 'cause it'd be me, the hosting provide a bit and then the end

[00:16:56] Nathan Wrigley: is a win, win. I love

[00:16:57] Dave Grey: customers in the middle. 'cause because if you are basically like a small scale, like freelance hoster through your medium sized hosting company on that side through, then they could get access to the five license on there.

You could be onto five of your customers at no cost to you tell your customers as part of improving your service. This is now in place on there. So when you go into manage your WooCommerce store or. Put your new events and things on that side, there'll be less trouble, less annoying things on that side for you.

Or as everyone's got these sort of customers, some that are quite technical and ones that need a bit more handholding. You could just put on the people who need a bit more handholding or the ones that raise a few more tickets for, oh, I'm paying you for monthly maintenance, but I've just logged into my site and I can see four updates in there.

'cause there's WordPress, you went on there yesterday and three more turned up the day after. 'cause that's the way things go. So yeah, it's it's. Just a way kind of reaching market and just getting to help more people in a easier way.

[00:17:55] Nathan Wrigley: the curious thing here as well, again, despite the fact that I own giant hosting.com, I, I've got no experience with support, but I'm guessing that the support agents in hosting companies. I don't know. Please, if you're a, if you're a hosting company and you can gimme some telemetry about this, I'd be really interested to know.

I'm sure that their support agents are dealing with this on a more or less daily basis. somebody comes and explains the problem and it looked. Just dismiss them. You don't need to worry about them. It's just an upsell. Get rid of it or what have you. You know it's an upgrade. Click the button to install the upgrade.

It's absolutely fine. Don't worry. And for every minute, hour, day, week, and probably month that all of this adds up to, that's just complete dead time to those companies and the scale at which some of the hosting companies in the WordPress space are at. You definitely probably could measure. Things like that in weeks.

And so if you can eliminate any of that, then you are gonna be certainly saving them some money. Okay. So how does the, so the, you are calling it sponsorship, which I think is an interesting way of doing it as well. What, tell us how that all works. what are you imagining?

'cause again, we should say this might be subject to change. We're recording this in mid. November and maybe Dave's just gonna totally upend the pricing next week. Who knows? But where we're at the minute, how are you imagining this being priced or sponsored or whatever the right word is?

[00:19:29] Dave Grey: potentially offering it in two sort of tiers. The kind of the lower entry level tier may be for the browser extension on that side, because that would be the. in a sense, the low hanging fruit. 'cause then if you've got people doing WordPress maintenance across loads of sites, it'll make your life easier If you are going through to do bits on there.

There's probably quite a few sort of plugin developers that have got their own hosting of bits on there that they've got to go through and troubleshoot. So it'd just be easy for you to kinda go through. So that's basically gonna just do a one price would then just let you provide that for your entire sort of customer base.

On there because with sort browser extensions and web developers, I may have one laptop or a laptop on a computer with then Firefox, Chrome and Edge on both of them. You don't wanna have to pay one person to install it five times. It's just a case. Keep it simple, keep it easy. Just say for X price, they could just give it to their entire customer base.

I could install one or 10 copies of my devices. It doesn't have any effect on sort of things on that side through. And then for the second sort of tier I was thinking could offer the extension and then also the WordPress browser or the WordPress plugin even got browsers on the brain here. And then depending on what sort of audience they've got on there, they could basically pick between like starter growth, professional enterprise tier, that then give them X number of.

One of two types of discount codes. So if you've got a lot of smaller customers, like they may have like five or 10 sites between them, then they could offer like a free discount code that let that person purchase to plug in at no cost currently. So retailing at $49 on there. Or they could basically say, We know that most of our people are agencies that have like 50 or a hundred sites on that side. So they could also offer a $49 off a higher tier on there as well as the extension. So it's basically rather than having this confused things on that side, a here's the exact thing, it's the case of here's the different options that you've got on there.

'cause different hosting or service providers may be interested in different things on that side, and they may say, we just wanna offer it to everyone to go through. This price on that side through. So yeah, I just sort not quite have it as Alec carte, but also have a few kind of examples on that side just to kinda set

[00:21:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess you're

[00:21:51] Dave Grey: too

[00:21:52] Nathan Wrigley: you're just trying to figure it out at the moment, which I suppose is part of this podcast is, maybe somebody out there will have a, an idea and some curious insight into a way that you might be able to do this in a, I don't know, in a way that is sustainable or what have you.

But if you, if you go to the following, URL, this is the state of play at the moment. Whether or not it'll be the same shortly, I don't know. so it's, nag me, not wp.com, all as one word, no hyphens or anything. And then forward slash in each of these words is hyphenated. So sponsor nag me, not so sponsor, hyphen, nag, hyphen me, hyphen not.

links will be in the show notes for your convenience. That'll make it a little bit easier. And there you'll be able to see the current state of what Dave is thinking. And, subject to change, but at the moment, really it feels to me at least anyway, that the sweet spot here. the thing that I think is curious is, I think there's a capacity to sell this to the hosting companies, not necessarily something which I don't know, user A, user B, user C, 10,000 individual people will necessarily want to have.

I think the benefit to you will be selling it to the hosting companies. 'cause there's more revenue. You just have that one transaction and it's. Done. But also, the benefit to them is they can just install it across the board on all of their WordPress websites, and hopefully that'll take a lot of the support burden away.

yeah.

[00:23:21] Dave Grey: Yeah, that's the theory on that side is to try and get a bit more distribution awareness out there. And in a, for a single developer like myself, trying to speak to a few people who then got the distribution on that side would be a lot easier and probably more streamlined than trying to contact.

4,000 different agencies where they've got like 10 sites each on that side. Then individually try and pitch on there 'cause it's also trying to get the price point of how to get scale, but then also make it interesting for the ROI on that side to kinda

[00:23:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. the other thing is you'll, if all things work out and it manages to work as you're anticipating or hoping. the support burden for you, for the plugin will be fairly minimal. I would've thought if you sell it to hosting companies, and let's say that you sell it to 15, 20, a hundred hosting companies, they're now the people that you are dealing with.

So you've in, in effect, you've got a hundred clients or 50 clients or whatever it is. So that's the support burden that you've gotta deal with. And, but it may be deployed on, I don't know, 50,000, a hundred thousand. Different websites. So it is a really curious, a fairly unique plugin in that regard because I'm struggling to think of something else, which, which could have this model because, you want the revenue from a hundred thousand users, but in this case it works because it's a fairly light touch plugin.

It's not offering much in the way of features. In fact, if anything it's doing the opposite. It's removing

[00:24:55] Dave Grey: Taking stuff away.

[00:24:57] Nathan Wrigley: and My, my guess is that if you pull this off, you'll have a small support burden. You'll make the host happy. Maybe they won't know about it, but the end users will be happy 'cause they won't be, I won't be too fussed about, the things going on in their WordPress website, but also you'll have a plugin, which is generating a, hopefully, a decent amount of income that doesn't need too much in terms of new functionality or new deployments or anything like that. So great idea, Dave.

Great.

[00:25:31] Dave Grey: I just need to get out

[00:25:32] Nathan Wrigley: you need to get it out there. So, I think probably we've gone through what we needed to go through, so I'll just alert you to the URL again. So it's nag me wp.com. Go check that out. and if you are a listener who has any insights into this. maybe you've done something similar or you think the pricing is wonky, or the idea is, slightly peculiar or fascinating and you wanna explore options with Dave.

Where do we find you, Dave? Where can we reach you?

[00:26:03] Dave Grey: easiest bit would be on. Slash friendly web guy on there. Otherwise you can contact me through the ag wp.com site and that will email me through on that side.

[00:26:15] Nathan Wrigley: That's perfect. So really curious idea, interesting episode because we've never done that. Like we've never really talked about pricing in this way before. Let us know in the comments what you think, Have you got any insights to help Dave out? Do you think it's an a, a fool's errand, or you think it's a really good idea?

And if you've got any options for, partnerships, again, reach out to Dave or reach out in the comments. Dave Grey, thank you for chatting to me today.

[00:26:39] Dave Grey: Thanks for having us back on again.

[00:26:40] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's nearly all we've got time for. I'm just gonna give another shout out. Our Black Friday page is still up there, wpbuilds.com/black. And also if you would like to get your product or service in front of a WordPress specific audience, don't forget that's exactly what we have, and we are really looking at the moment to onboard some new sponsors. Head to wpbuilds.com/advertise to find out more and strike up a conversation.

Okay, that's it. I am gonna fade in some cheesy music. Say stay safe. See you Monday for This week in WordPress. Bye-bye for now.