[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 476 entitled Amber Hinds on restoring faith in WordPress, hard work, accessibility, and long-term plugin success. It was published on Thursday, the 16th of July, 2026.
My name's Nathan Wrigley, and before we get to the podcast interview with Amber, a few short bits of housekeeping.
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Okay. What have we got for you today? Well, today I am chatting with Amber Hinds. Amber Hinds is really a bit of a pariah. Maybe that's the right word, in the WordPress space. There's a lot of doism at the moment. There's a lot of people who seem to be fleeing the WordPress space, who find it hard to think how they've got a future in the WordPress space.
Well, Amber is really bucking that trend. Over the last few years, the products and services that she has been involved with have seemingly gone through the roof. Lots of hard work. Lots of turning up, showing up to community events. Organising things with no expectation of ROI seems to be the key to why this has all happened.
But today in the podcast, Amber explodes all of this, and explains how success is still possible in the WordPress space. I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast by Amber Hinds. Hello, Amber
[00:02:47] Amber Hinds: Hey, Nathan. Good to be here
[00:02:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you.
Thanks for joining us. Amber has been on the podcast before. We've talked about accessibility, in the past, which, Amber's very much an expert in. However, we're gonna deviate from that a little bit. although we will tangentially talk about products and services and things like that which are very much related to accessibility.
So the, idea of the topic today really is to, restore some faith in the WordPress community, which I think has been in the doldrums for a little while. AI came along, and it seems that there's no light at the end of a tunnel. No matter how long that tunnel is, it appears that lots of people have got their noses out of joint with what WordPress can possibly hold.
But you recently wrote a blog post, which is gonna be the, the basis of this whole episode. It's over on amberhinds.com, and it's called What Does It Take to Market a WordPress Plugin? It was written on June the 14th, 2026. I'll link to it in the show notes. but before we get into that, Amber, I know that you don't like this question 'cause I saw you tweet about it in the past, but bear with me.
The, the context that it adds to a listener who has never heard of you before is profound. So if you don't, if you don't need to know who Amber is, just skip forwards like a minute. Just click that button twice, and you won't need to hear it. But if you don't and you wanna get the credentials from Amber, go for it, Amber.
Just tell us who you are and what you do and all of that.
[00:04:17] Amber Hinds: I am the founder and CEO of a company called Equalize Digital. We specialize in accessibility on the web. We have a WordPress plugin called Accessibility Checker and also another one called ArchiveWP, which helps folks to make their websites more accessible. And we do accessibility auditing services both for WordPress and non-WordPress websites, web applications, mobile apps. And, I also do a lot with accessibility in the WordPress community, which we might talk about in just a little bit here, but I participate in the core WordPress accessibility team. I'm a board member for the WP Accessibility Day nonprofit, and I run the official WordPress accessibility meetup, which is the only, these days, fully remote, not city-based meetup in the official meetups program
[00:05:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. Oh, that's fascinating. I think what you'll have learnt from that, dear listener, especially if you click forwards twice in the podcast player, Amber does a lot basically. Amber seems to be, yeah, very much busy all the time, let's put it that way. And,
that I think is part of what we're gonna talk about.
how busy is it necessary for you to be in order to be successful in the WordPress space? I'll just lay a little bit of groundwork, if that's okay. So as I said, we're in... I didn't say it, but I'm gonna say it now. We're recording this right at the beginning of July, so a few weeks after Amber penned that post.
And 2026, the latter part of 2025 for me has been one in which a lot of people who've been coming on this podcast and having private chats with me have been questioning their place in the WordPress community, primarily because I think they found it harder and harder to make a living out of WordPress.
If we rewind to, I don't know, 2019 or that kind of era, 2020, 2022, something like that, it was considered, I think, a lot easier. I don't quite know what the catalyst is for the decline. We've obviously got a rift in the WordPress community based upon legal action being taken. We've got AI, which seems to be gobbling up people's interests left, right and center, all of these kind of things.
And the reason I'm saying all of that is because a lot of people seem to have real concern that WordPress represents a future which they can participate in, because plugins are harder to sell, the attention in the WordPress space is more difficult to capture, the market share of WordPress, albeit a tiny decline, is declining as we speak.
However, that doomerism, just none of it maps to your experience, which is the whole focus of the blog post. By the way, the blog post is enormous. I don't know how long it took you to write that , but it's got charts and loads of words. definitely worth checking out.
[00:07:21] Amber Hinds: Of our team, I use the least AI, so I'm
[00:07:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah
[00:07:25] Amber Hinds: this blog post has zero AI assistance.
[00:07:28] Nathan Wrigley: actually took the time, yeah
[00:07:30] Amber Hinds: thinking about it after I published, I might go and just update it with a table that allows you to compare years side by side,
[00:07:39] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay.
[00:07:39] Amber Hinds: just put bulleted lists and
"I actually think this should've been a table."
[00:07:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah
[00:07:44] Amber Hinds: I might go do that for folks who wanna be able to get an at-the-glance
[00:07:49] Nathan Wrigley: the reason that I--
[00:07:50] Amber Hinds: help
[00:07:50] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. thank you. But, the reason why I asked you on the podcast really was because just how different your experience is from what I'm hearing left, and center. And, do, do-- are you able to summarize that post? you can certainly do a better job than I can.
And I summary is really unfair to put you on the spot because there's an awful lot of work, as we said, that's gone into it. it spans many years. There, there must be 150, 200 bullet points listing data and stats and charts and m- d- different strands of what you did in different years and all of that kind of stuff.
So I'm being very unfair, but can you broadly summarize it for us?
[00:08:32] Amber Hinds: Sure. as you mentioned, the impetus of this post was I was seeing a ton of people on Twitter and in Post Office and on other social media platforms talk about how their plugin sales are down, their service sales are down, their agency can't get work. And the high levels of where we are for folks, which I lay out at the beginning, is, launched Accessibility Checker in December of 2020, basically January 2021. we hit 10,000 active installs last year. I think we'll see. We might... Right now we're forecasting that we might hit 20,000 before the end of this year.
[00:09:20] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, wow. That's a heck of an acceleration. Yeah. Yeah
[00:09:24] Amber Hinds: and but also in the last, so in, the last seven months of last year, we went from 4,000 to 10,000 active installs, so a very big increase. we increased our revenue from that specific product by 44.3%. And currently this year in 2026, we have exceeded our product revenue target, which was already aggressive because we were coming off of, okay, we're growing really fast. We've exceeded that by more than 26% for the first six months of 2026. so we are definitely not losing money, like some folks are saying. We're not seeing a decline in sales, and in fact, it's exceeding our expectations far more than we ever thought it would. And I will add to that, which is that on the service side, we also have not seen a dip. My partner Chris, who does all of our sales, has been like, at times he feels like he can't keep up.
He's referring work out because we're booked so far out that we can't... So we have partners that we are like, "Hey, maybe you could go to this agency that could help you with your accessibility." so
[00:10:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so
[00:10:44] Amber Hinds: we are.
[00:10:44] Nathan Wrigley: we have quite a lot of, developers and, plugin theme developers and those kind of things listening to this podcast. And, so first of all, let's just collectively pick our jaws up off the floor. and then let's collectively, just push the jealousy to one side a bit because we're gonna unpack how this is possible.
Because I know what it's gonna be like. "Okay, it's a fluke. there's gon- there's bound to be one. There's always one that seems to be bucking the trend." But what comes out of your article is not fluke. the bit that I got again, and again is dogged hard work basically. i- it's not that you stumbled across so- across some magic formula.
you didn't download somebody's PDF and follow their 100-point bullet point plan to s- great success on the internet. None of that. This is showing up over, and over again. I'm imagining in quite a lot of cases to no effect or, s- perhaps even sometimes a bit demoralisingly.
But then just doing the hard work, just making yourself available and what have you. So let's unpack that a little bit. Firstly, does your bit of WordPress offer a different opportunity for other bits of WordPress? So for example, website accessibility, we had a load of legislation a few years back which made that much more important.
And so people's eyes were turned towards accessibility, not just because of the moral conviction, but because of the legal conviction as well. So firstly, let's address that. Do you think you happen to be in the right bit of WordPress, which w- which was basically gonna have this rising tide carries all boats aspect to it anyway?
[00:12:34] Amber Hinds: So I, I do think yes, of course, the legislation helped us. We saw that coming a long time ago, and we prepared for that. The legislation alone cannot be thanked and I say this knowing that I have a good friend in the accessibility space who is closing their business because they can't bring in work. I you know, have seen a number of accessibility plugins start since around the same time as us that still have fewer than 1,000 active installs. So yes, the legislation definitely drives demand, if you don't get yourself in front of the right people, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if there's demand if no one knows who you are
your solution is going to help them. and, so I think a little bit of that strategically. I will say, just going a little bit to the concerns about AI and things, we are, we're definitely not alone. I had an interesting conversation, I think it happened on Twitter, on the comments for this post when I shared it, with Steve from PublishPress, who was saying that his enterprise, like his higher ed, his government kind of customers, he's not seeing any drop there, right?
[00:14:07] Nathan Wrigley: Okay
[00:14:08] Amber Hinds: and I think that is also a thing about how we've positioned ourself. We... Our plugin is what you might consider expensive for the WordPress space. Our s- a single site license is $190. We don't sell unlimited licenses. you can, the most you can buy off our website without talking to us is 25 sites, and that costs $2,500 maybe.
[00:14:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:14:40] Amber Hinds: right?
[00:14:40] Nathan Wrigley: yeah
[00:14:41] Amber Hinds: some- something around that. but and then if you want more than that, so large government, higher education institutions that have 200 websites, they contact us, we give them enterprise pricing, but they still pay per site activation. There's no "Okay, now you've hit the unlimited tier, and you can put it on 500 websites, and we don't make any extra money," right? and we very intentionally decided when we did pricing research that we needed to do that. We knew that it was going to be more expensive than a lot of WordPress plugins, and we have gotten some pushback from typical WordPress freelancers don't work with, higher budget clients. But we're also saying, "Okay, our product competes with SaaS." is who our competitors are. the pricing that they charge, it's not even per site. It's By URL counts or page views or something like that,
[00:15:44] Nathan Wrigley: Oh gosh. Okay. Wow. Oh
[00:15:46] Amber Hinds: we are massively underpriced even compared to some of the, like overlay solutions, which a lot of people...
[00:15:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:15:56] Amber Hinds: wanna say they're our competitors, but they totally are.
[00:15:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah
[00:16:00] Amber Hinds: and we went into that knowing that. But I will say, we've positioned ourself, and we've intentionally targeted, that higher end customer. course, we have some very small websites. I have single site plans, and they use it. but we have done a lot to try and position ourself, and with our marketing efforts, we've gone to, a lot of higher ed conferences,
[00:16:24] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,
[00:16:24] Amber Hinds: and those sorts of things.
we don't just stay in the WordPress space. we do a lot in the accessibility community, which may or may not be all WordPress developers, but we're, like, getting ourself known as this is an accessibility resource. And, and so I think that has helped us a lot, is not to just go after, the little guy.
say just this, because it is marketing, and I talk about this in the post, but it is very much your product has to support the marketing. All the marketing in the world won't work if your product sucks when someone installs it.
[00:17:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah
[00:17:03] Amber Hinds: we've put a lot of effort into making it, continually trying to advance it.
We put huge amounts of effort a couple years ago. Steve, put a ton of effort into making sure it passed every single coding standard that you could possibly pass. It has to be enterprise ready if you wanna serve those kinds of customers. and it's not a tool that can be vibe coded in a day,
[00:17:30] Nathan Wrigley: no.
[00:17:30] Amber Hinds: I think it's a lot harder for a WordPress plugin that's add a single checkbox to opt into an email on the e- on the WooCommerce checkout page, right? that's very simple basic, and you can easily vibe code that solution or
solution with ACF or whatever,
[00:17:52] Nathan Wrigley: yeah
[00:17:53] Amber Hinds: Those are, I think, the plugins that are having a lot harder time versus the platform plugins that, you're not gonna replace your big plugin that has had all kinds of security attention and its own accessibility attention and provides... we also are a teaching tool that brings knowledge that our users don't have to them. So how would they code a replacement when they don't even know what the replacement is supposed to be doing?
[00:18:21] Nathan Wrigley: okay. So a lot of threads to unpick there. So the first one I'm gonna pull on is the nature of the customer. And it feels so intentional on your part, but also an, a nice bit of serendipity in that the kind of people who are prepared to open their wallets are people who, let's say, they have an available budget.
th- their money is perhaps coming directly out of taxation, let's call it that. like a, a university or a public school or something like that. they've got a pot of money, they realise the value of something, and oh, and of course, then they have the legal bit, which means that they have to do that.
So you've got this lovely perfect storm of ideal customer, they've probably got an available budget, and also I imagine that the people who are implementing do not have the skillsets to pull this off by adapting, in this case, WordPress or whatever CMS they're using, by themselves. So that's really interesting.
Is that about right? It just so happens that the kind of customer has the pockets that are deep enough that they can pay those, 199 or $2,500 or whatever it may be?
[00:19:41] Amber Hinds: typically the people who are most motivated by the legislation are not small businesses because most of the legislation has exceptions for small businesses. and so it's either a large business or government or higher education, and then they're either in the land of they could get very large fines, they could literally lose their funding.
[00:20:07] Nathan Wrigley: Okay
[00:20:08] Amber Hinds: budget is tied to a problem that our plugin solves
[00:20:14] Nathan Wrigley: So at the same time as being the solution to something, you're also like a backstop, like a bit of insurance in a sense. You provide that kind of security... what's the word? that reassurance that, okay, Equalize Digital, we got the thing, we built the thing, they've done the hard work, and what have you.
Okay, that's really interesting. That hadn't occurred to me. And then the other bit, which I think is, really interesting, is that, okay, let's imagine that I want to build, I don't know, a form plugin or something. I don't really have to have a lot of knowledge apart from development knowledge. There's no kind of like industry behind that, if I can just knock together a form plugin because so long as I know how to put the necessary bits and pieces together, I can do it. But on the accessibility side, that's a whole world of knowledge all by itself. So in effect, you're presenting... You've got this plugin which solves a difficult to understand problem in the background as well.
D- does that land? Does that make sense a little bit?
[00:21:19] Amber Hinds: Yeah.
[00:21:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay.
[00:21:21] Amber Hinds: what I was trying to say,
[00:21:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:21:23] Amber Hinds: it requires specialized education
[00:21:26] Nathan Wrigley: Right
[00:21:26] Amber Hinds: us to even be able to create the tool. and, and that is why, our largest... This is interesting. the, largest percentage of customers who have purchased it are not necessarily, the public library or the government or whatever.
It's the agencies who build for it.
[00:21:50] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's interesting. Okay. Yeah
[00:21:53] Amber Hinds: they have that demand from their customers, and their customers are saying, "Our websites have to be accessible." and so what we have figured out is how do we speak to them, and then they come and buy it. But then how do we build a tool that empowers them to be able to deliver on the, deliver on these contracts to their customers?
[00:22:13] Nathan Wrigley: So you have a lot of relationships with, WordPress agencies. the kind of companies that are building 10, 15, 100, 200 websites a year, and they don't necessarily wish to have the accessibility person in the office somewhere. They would far rather buy that expertise from you in the form of a plugin and implement it that way.
Okay, that's really interesting as well.
[00:22:38] Amber Hinds: audits. We
[00:22:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:22:39] Amber Hinds: of audits for WordPress agencies. built the website, they have us test it, then they go fix everything.
back and we retest it and, along the way we may answer questions and help them figure out what the best approach is.
[00:22:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so that then represents a bit of the jigsaw puzzle. It sounds like you have a customer base which is really attuned to what you are offering. They have a need for it, and then obviously they're going out and trying to discover it. and then let's move into that little bit. So dis- with the best will in the world, you could have built the best tool that a human being can create.
like absolutely everything, but nobody'll discover it. And so that's the other bit which kind of comes out of your piece, is this long and winding road of turning up to events, speaking at events, being in the, the hallway for the chats, mixing with people online and so on and so forth.
And maybe I would imagine that's the bit that is often missing. So Amber, I'll let you into a secret, which is no secret 'cause I talk about it all the time. I get quite a lot of email, you might be surprised to learn, from plugin developers who want a quick way to get their thing out in front of the audience.
they built the thing and it's ready to go and y- and it's virtually impossible if they won't commit to the things that you're talking about. showing up, doing the events and what have you. So how do you... w- when was the point, if we rewind the clock, when was the point that you there may not be a point, but let's just talk about it anyway. When was the moment where you committed to doing all this stuff which many people will see as unnecessary? Perhaps it doesn't fit their psychology. "I don't like showing up to events. It makes me feel uncomfortable," that kind of thing.
When was the point that you committed to doing that as an unseen, way of making ROI within the business?
[00:24:49] Amber Hinds: Yeah, so I've thought for a while about to write a blog post with a title something along the lines of why my first agency failed
because Equalize Digital was a, maybe, so it was a spin out of what was more of a traditional web agency where we built websites and we did marketing and we ran AdWords campaigns and we did social media for clients. And we rode the agency wave, the up and down of now we have work and now we don't and what can we do to create more recurring revenue and struggled a lot. even though we experimented with social media and we tried to write blog posts occasionally, we didn't have an email newsletter right? we didn't really do enough marketing for ourselves.
And Equalize Digital and Accessibility Checker specifically was in it a very intentional pivot. we decided, already knew there was this need because we were already doing some accessibility work under the old brand and, we, we realized, okay, we need this plugin. Our customers need it, but we decided instead of just building it for one or two people, like we had another plugin we had done that for that we actually ended up selling a couple years ago and, but we never intentionally really marketed it and this one we're like, no, we're gonna turn this into a product
[00:26:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. d- we-- it's fine to have a dog, by the way. You just let the dog bark n- it's totally alright, yeah.
[00:26:27] Amber Hinds: was like, "Should I pause so you can cut it out?" so that, that pivot point for us really was with starting Equalize Digital. We said, "Okay, we're going to be intentional about marketing." Now, I do talk about this in my blog post, which is that in the early years it was very difficult to put huge amounts of time into marketing because the plugin was making no money.
[00:26:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Gosh, what a calculus
[00:26:59] Amber Hinds: do all of the client work. I haven't worked a 40-hour week for a very long time, let's put it that way. And in the wrong direction, not in
[00:27:09] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Yeah,
[00:27:10] Amber Hinds: the founders like to brag about, right? but, so we decided very intentionally we are going to get out there.
We have to be more visible. And then I realized pretty quickly, especially on the side of wanting to pivot and have more of our revenue come from the accessibility services verse, know, building websites, I needed to position myself and our team more as accessibility experts. and so that also is part of what motivated us to get more involved with contributing to WordPress Core and participating in the accessibility team and leading the meetup, which a lot of people are like, "There is no ROI.
Why would you volunteer your time?" I think, the amount of time that we put into just running the meetup, finding speakers,
[00:28:11] Nathan Wrigley: Oh
[00:28:12] Amber Hinds: to help us cover the cost, and if we don't have sponsors, we pay for the things that we have to pay for in order to run the meetup, right? there definitely is ROI.
It's just not immediate,
[00:28:23] Nathan Wrigley: It's over years, decades maybe. yeah
[00:28:26] Amber Hinds: I will say I've tried a few times over the past five years to run paid ads, either retargeted or very tightly keyword targeted so that I don't, get on weird things, and I could never make it work. which is weird because I still to this day have two legacy clients that I run very large AdWords campaigns for, and they work very well for them
[00:28:51] Nathan Wrigley: That's fine for them.
[00:28:53] Amber Hinds: But I could not get it to
[00:28:55] Nathan Wrigley: yeah
[00:28:55] Amber Hinds: for us in our plugin.
we would get a few sales, but never enough to make up for the cost per click. so yeah, I kept being like, "I want this to be the magic answer," but it wasn't. And I think it, what really helped us to get over that up and down was being very consistent, very intentional about our marketing. and we went from, having a content specialist and me who did marketing to everyone on our team contributes to marketing, every
[00:29:25] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Yeah, ta--
[00:29:28] Amber Hinds: Our accessibility specialist also writes blog posts.
[00:29:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yep
[00:29:32] Amber Hinds: they get QA'd by our content specialist to make sure, she remembered to fill in all the Yoast stuff and set the... And she cr- she doesn't have to create graphics, but she writes blog posts. Our, lead plugin developer, the last year has been doing YouTube live streams with my partner Steve, our CTO, showing the product and talking about how they're building the product, a little bit of a behind the scenes of the plugin, right? so everyone is doing that. Chris and Steve and I If we have other people go to conferences, we're all like, "Okay, you need to apply to speak." everyone has to apply to speak. because we realized pretty quickly too that it can't just be the Amber show.
[00:30:23] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. All right.
[00:30:25] Amber Hinds: think that's a hard...
so I'll admit here, going back to your original question of f- thinking about these plugin founders that aren't willing to get out there, I will fully admit it is really hard if you are a solo person. So we are a management team of three. Now, it came from, Steve used to be our employee. He was our developer. And we realized when we, after we had launched the plugin and built it and Chris and I were talking and we were like, we want to offer him ownership and ask him if he wants ownership. Of course, there were all kinds of things that I'm not gonna get into around that.
I had people say to me, "Why would you give away part of your company to someone?" and I had the same people say that when we went in to get investment. But the reality is that I would much rather have a smaller ownership of something that is much bigger
[00:31:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:31:22] Amber Hinds: of something that is
[00:31:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah
[00:31:25] Amber Hinds: And I would tell any plugin founder, don't do it alone. The three of us are a really good team because we have very different skill sets. I am the marketer. has all of the technical side. and I have, and he and I together have the accessibility knowledge. And then Chris does all that ops and HR and invoicing and all that crap that none of us want to deal with, right? but I think that is what has helped us to be able to market and to grow faster. And yes, you could hire a great developer to do all the development of your plugin, but if you can't pay them enough or they get unhappy, they'll leave. then if you're a non-technical founder, where are you, right? Or you can be a technical founder who's really good at the code, not good at marketing, and you're going to avoid it and you're not gonna do it, or you won't invest very much in it because you hate it, And so finding a balanced team, I think, is very helpful
[00:32:31] Nathan Wrigley: You know what is coming into my mind as you're saying all these words? It sounds like you want your company to be like a family, like a little... Do you know what I mean? there's that aspect to it. we're all in it together. we all share the responsibility for the, obviously there's people that do the technical stuff or what have you, but you've, made it so that everybody's responsibility is in terms of the marketing.
You've offered people who previously were employees, a share in that so that they've got, I don't know, ownership of it, and they feel like it's more worthwhile putting their back into the whole project. And I don't know, there seems to be some sort of family. I don't know, I'm just getting that vibe a little bit.
I don't know if that fits or if you feel that's weird, but that's the feeling that I'm getting. You're all in it together, and the closest word I can come up with for that is like a little family, basically.
[00:33:23] Amber Hinds: I think I like that concept. I'll never say that I ever expect our team members to think that
[00:33:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it was me. I said it.
[00:33:31] Amber Hinds: is their
[00:33:32] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. No, but it...
[00:33:35] Amber Hinds: weird, and when you hear
[00:33:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah
[00:33:37] Amber Hinds: or owners say that, I'm just like, "No, their
family,"
[00:33:40] Nathan Wrigley: but I'm getting that vibe from you. yeah. It's like fairness, equality, all of those kind of things. Interesting.
[00:33:48] Amber Hinds: we're very transparent with the
We make decisions. la- last... every December, we sit down and we, plan strategy for the next year, and we make our budget and all that kind of stuff. And we actually... Because it was the five-year mark on marketing, I was like, "We're gonna actually have a half-day workshop."
And everyone came, we talked about what we'd been doing for marketing, how much it cost, what should we do, in 2026? What was the ROI on everything that we've been doing? And everyone got to have an opinion and got to contribute to that. So yeah, I don't wanna be the person on a throne just dictating, because we've gotten lots of great ideas from employees
[00:34:43] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.
[00:34:44] Amber Hinds: helped a lot. yeah
[00:34:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. more of a flat structure, yeah. C- can I just ask, in that meeting, what did you cut? What was the marketing bits which fell by the wayside, which when you look back you thought, "You know what? That was worth it," but it was more throwing spaghetti at the wall a little bit, some of it stuck, some of it didn't.
What are the bits that you jettisoned? And then if you're willing to share your expertise about what's been successful, what are the bits that you've, doubled down on? So let's start with the bits that just fell by the wayside 'cause they felt like wasted time and effort.
[00:35:18] Amber Hinds: So it's hard because I don't, know if everything is wasted time. I will say, the thing that we are not going to do is pay to post our plugin in any Black Friday
[00:35:34] Nathan Wrigley: Okay
[00:35:36] Amber Hinds: roundups. That is probably the least ROI I have ever gotten over multiple years of trying to do it. We're also maybe in a slightly different space where our buyers don't care about Black Friday.
[00:35:51] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. They're seeing Black Friday as an opportunity to go out and spend their own cash. You know
it
[00:35:56] Amber Hinds: but also it's it was interesting. Last year in November was the best November we've ever had, but it was, most of the sales happened before the Black Friday
[00:36:08] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting. Okay
[00:36:10] Amber Hinds: people were buying and buy-, like even days before the sale. And we kept being like, "Wow, why are so many s- sales coming in?"
And then we had the sale, and our numbers during the sale period were flat 2024 numbers. They didn't
[00:36:25] Nathan Wrigley: That's great.
[00:36:26] Amber Hinds: even though
[00:36:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:36:27] Amber Hinds: the pro-
[00:36:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah
[00:36:29] Amber Hinds: We made more money because, was, like, a lower discount. But it was... so we actually decided this year not to do any public sales at all because it's a lot of work to modify our website and to create the graphics and to go put it in all these listings, and we always use UTM parameters, and we could only track a small handful of sales from any of those directories. and we were just like, our buyers need accessibility when they need accessibility. They're not sitting around waiting for Black
[00:37:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's a really interesting point. and I think with Black Friday, we've got to peak saturation with it all as well and,
[00:37:10] Amber Hinds: Yeah
[00:37:10] Nathan Wrigley: trying to, just trying to make yourself stand out in the crowd when everybody's probably already decided months ago what they're gonna buy. that's an interesting observation.
Yeah, I get it
[00:37:20] Amber Hinds: sales a year and th- and we've already... So the first one has happened and we tried this different approach, which is that we didn't change any of the pricing on our website. We three emails to our email list to people who are subscribed to the discounts list.
and we ran a flash sale during Global Accessibility Awareness Day, which is when we would normally have had our
[00:37:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah
[00:37:50] Amber Hinds: of Black Friday, for days only. And during that time, we made the same number of sales that we made last year off the sale, the discount code, we also made sales that just came to our website and paid full price
[00:38:11] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, curious
[00:38:13] Amber Hinds: they didn't have the email with the discount.
[00:38:17] Nathan Wrigley: That's so interesting.
[00:38:18] Amber Hinds: money
[00:38:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:38:20] Amber Hinds: did, almost no work because we didn't change anything on our website and all we did was draft three emails, and we didn't, shout about it everywhere, and we still made the same amount of money
[00:38:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So the, the-- as is always the case, the-- there's a lot of interest in the email list. Having an email list is, in that case, was absolutely golden. Yeah, that's brilliant
[00:38:40] Amber Hinds: that's probably one of the biggest, most interesting things that we changed that we were like, "This is not... I don't think this is worth the effort."
the other thing that we changed, we talked about this briefly when we were chatting pre-show, and I'm a little sad about it, but we, have been saying for a while that we really needed to redo our website.
It's, mean, it's six years old.
[00:39:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah
[00:39:05] Amber Hinds: time anyway, but the design is not enterprise enough for us. It doesn't communicate where we are today, where the software is today. and we knew that when we did that, we were going to go out and find a designer who was very experienced at doing, SaaS mock-ups and things, so it's not just "Here's a screenshot of our plugin."
very clear, graphics, spot graphics that illustrate and highlight specific features a-
all that kind of stuff. And so we decided that we were going to have to move all of our travel budget into paying, not for the development of the website, because we're gonna do that ourself, but to paying for design in Figma. and so I d- we have not gone to any conferences this year, and I've serious FOMO during WordCamp Europe, and we won't be at WordCamp US. but it's also, for us, it felt right
[00:40:10] Nathan Wrigley: Okay
[00:40:10] Amber Hinds: we needed that budget, and we w- we're always a little cautious when we budget. So now I think with how well we're doing, we could totally afford to pay
[00:40:21] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.
[00:40:21] Amber Hinds: and go to the conferences.
[00:40:22] Nathan Wrigley: get on the plane as well as hiring the designer.
[00:40:26] Amber Hinds: it's also interesting because we are very saturated in the WordPress space right now.
And so I don't think n- not going to those events is going to hurt us.
[00:40:40] Nathan Wrigley: No. No
[00:40:42] Amber Hinds: when we look at conferences for next year, I'm already looking ahead at accessibility and higher ed conferences, we may not be at WordCamps next year
[00:40:54] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's really interesting. So the target market previously has definitely been like the WordPress folk, but you've now grown to...
[00:41:03] Amber Hinds: higher
[00:41:04] Nathan Wrigley: but you've now got an appreciation.
[00:41:06] Amber Hinds: conferences
and we've been doing that for years.
[00:41:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:41:11] Amber Hinds: but
[00:41:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah
[00:41:12] Amber Hinds: gone to any of the big... there's an accessibility conference called CSUN that happens in March in San Diego that is one of the biggest accessibility conferences in the United States, maybe the world. and we've never been to that.
[00:41:24] Nathan Wrigley: Oh
[00:41:25] Amber Hinds: a lot of folks about it, and we're "Okay, maybe we need to get more known in the accessibility space as a
[00:41:30] Nathan Wrigley: Y- yeah, I mean i- in effect, so obviously the WordPress folk are your customers, but it feels like there's a whole untapped resource of people in that accessibility space who've probably been, fishing around for a WordPress solution and probably haven't stumbled across what you've got. Oh, that'll be interesting.
I, I'm gonna guess that will go gangbusters for you. You're just gonna prize open a whole new interesting market that you maybe didn't tap into before. I guess
[00:41:58] Amber Hinds: I hope so. We'll
[00:41:59] Nathan Wrigley: only time will t- yeah, only time will tell. If it doesn't work out that way, you can blame me
[00:42:04] Amber Hinds: yeah, the last thing that we reduced this year, which was really just for my sanity and me knowing that, we were going to rebuild our website, is two things around content. last year we published over 70 blog posts,
[00:42:23] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, wow.
[00:42:25] Amber Hinds: lot. All of which were either written by me or edited by me.
[00:42:32] Nathan Wrigley: Huh
[00:42:32] Amber Hinds: And so that was a big time piece. And then, and this year I am writing... I'm not writing one a week, and then editing someone else's every week. I am only doing maybe one a month. So we are, our total content output is going to be down for this year. But that said, there's gonna be so many other content changes on the website as part of the rebuild, I think it will be f- end up in wh- I'm not worried about the SEO or the,
[00:43:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that whole...
[00:43:04] Amber Hinds: well
[00:43:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:43:07] Amber Hinds: search.
[00:43:08] Nathan Wrigley: I was gonna say it feels like the whole, the wisdom of just churning out a ton of blog content, that seems to be in question. I'm not entirely sure that the
[00:43:19] Amber Hinds: So
[00:43:20] Nathan Wrigley: got the perfect answer to that yet
[00:43:22] Amber Hinds: have w- so what I think is super not wise writing thin, short posts
that are clearly written for SEO. And
[00:43:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah
[00:43:35] Amber Hinds: I mean, even WP Beginner, right? a lot of those sites have seen huge drops in traffic.
[00:43:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yep
[00:43:41] Amber Hinds: which is part of why I'm writing fewer. Because when I write blog posts, I don't know, like 2,000 words is short. I've
[00:43:49] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like a novel to me.
[00:43:51] Amber Hinds: blog posts with tons of screenshots or a video to go with it, and those still continue to do well. And we get traffic, and our documentation actually is one of the largest drivers of traffic to our website. But our documentation has really detailed explanation of accessibility problems and how to fix them and that kind of thing.
And are seeing people come off of a ChatGPT URL or similar and then join our email list or try the free plugin because they hit good content. So I don't think that... I do think that content is important, but you have to put effort into content. And on that note, this year we're not gonna do our page builder report, which I struggled with because that is, has been the last two years, one of our top drivers of traffic, it gets us a ton of backlinks, and people share it, and they talk about it in groups and all of that. but
[00:44:56] Nathan Wrigley: was a lot of work though.
[00:44:58] Amber Hinds: Yeah, we spent over 200 hours on it
[00:45:01] Nathan Wrigley: yeah
[00:45:02] Amber Hinds: with knowing that I wanna touch every piece of content on our website, and every old blog post, every pod- our, we're moving our podcast into our website, like everything with our rebuild, I was just like, realistically, I don't have it in me to do that.
[00:45:18] Nathan Wrigley: No.
[00:45:19] Amber Hinds: have so many 3:00 AM mornings.
[00:45:21] Nathan Wrigley: yeah,
honestly, from reading your, from reading the blog post that we mentioned at the start, it feels like you are a bit of a dynamo actually. A- and w- I'm gonna end it there actually, and I... Not right there. I'm gonna ask you some follow-up questions to that. It does feel like, how to describe this?
please don't... So if this comes out wrong, I apologize, in advance. Do you think there's something of your personality in your success? Because you seem to be willing to do whatever it takes, and sometimes with no ROI, you turn up to the events and you do all of these things, and that stuff is unmeasurable.
do you think there's a bit of that in the success of it? this dogged determination that many people... Honestly, I could not have done what you s- did. I would've fallen off the wagon sort of six months in. But y- there must be some component of you in there that is responsible, and maybe that maps to, your husband and various members of the team.
Maybe there's a bit of that. So apologies if that is awfully personal, but do you get what I'm saying?
[00:46:37] Amber Hinds: Yeah, I've... it's interesting because I didn't always get the best grades in school, and I would either get A's or I would get, And the difference was did I do the homework,
[00:46:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay.
[00:46:54] Amber Hinds: which is so weird now because I, get started on something and I will work like crazy and not stop. And I even, last week I heard our 16-year-old talking with my husband and she's wouldn't even stop for dinner if you didn't go get her." I, I think, something about school just didn't mesh well with me, or
[00:47:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:47:18] Amber Hinds: I was
[00:47:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah
[00:47:19] Amber Hinds: And now I know, like, why I'm doing this and, going from, we lived on a very small amount of money, and we had talked about this before, but like what I'm trying to provide for my kids and all of that sort of thing, I think, having that very tight goal very, helps me a lot.
[00:47:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah
[00:47:44] Amber Hinds: and I am very detail-oriented. I have always been hyper detail-oriented and and anyone on the team will tell you, the things I remember, I just remember all kinds of things that they're like, "Oh my
[00:47:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. From s- from nine months ago. "But you said..." Yeah, okay. Yeah,
[00:48:01] Amber Hinds: But like our, the whole we sit down and we do goal setting and we write SMART goals and we...
that is very me. I'm like, I wanna have a plan and I like having a plan, and then it gives me something to work, and then I will just work until it is done. sometimes to the detriment of my I think, to a degree. But,
[00:48:27] Nathan Wrigley: But it sounds like you're enjoying it, 'cause you know what? If you're detail-oriented and you enjoy being in the detail, that's fun, right? Although, you can
[00:48:37] Amber Hinds: d-
[00:48:37] Nathan Wrigley: You know what I mean? even though everybody around you perceives it as "Why is she working so hard?" You're like, "Oh, I'm having a great time over here."
[00:48:45] Amber Hinds: Oh
[00:48:45] Nathan Wrigley: and it might not feel like that, but there is ... I get it. If you're enjoying your work, the work becomes fun. It's this self-fulfilling prophecy. Off it goes. It spirals. Yeah, just make sure that it's not 3:00 every night, Amber. that's all I'm saying.
[00:49:00] Amber Hinds: yeah. I do
[00:49:01] Nathan Wrigley: in, in summary then, I'm gonna paraphrase what we've just said, I think.
it feels like, A, you have to have a bit of a killer product. if the product's rubbish, all bets are off. you're not gonna s- succeed with that. You also have to have some clients who, fit right in, and in your case, have also got, wallets which are big enough to satisfy the pricing requirements.
And then, so that's half of it, and then the other half just seems to be this, do the work. Just sit down, get on with it. Don't overthink why you're doing things in terms of ROI. That's not necessarily the way to do it. Show up, be there, be present.
[00:49:43] Amber Hinds: You're
[00:49:43] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.
[00:49:43] Amber Hinds: what ROI is years.
[00:49:46] Nathan Wrigley: No. Okay. Yeah.
[00:49:47] Amber Hinds: of us wish
[00:49:48] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, yeah
[00:49:50] Amber Hinds: leave a conference and be like, I... So Chris, he does all of our sales, and he actually posted last week. says, "You remember two years ago, we went to this happy hour for WordPress VIP during the South by Southwest Conference.
We drove down to Austin, we had a few conversations with some people, and we left, and that was it." He's the owner of a very large media pub- like, publishing brand that has many magazines that everyone would recognize reached out," and he's "Hey, I met you at this VIP happy hour,
and we're ready to move forward now."
And
[00:50:34] Nathan Wrigley: You never know.
[00:50:35] Amber Hinds: on following up
[00:50:37] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah.
[00:50:38] Amber Hinds: of
n- it takes... It's way long tail. And so I think, that was in my summary. You have to play the long game.
[00:50:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah
[00:50:47] Amber Hinds: expect to see ROI even maybe this year,
But
[00:50:54] Nathan Wrigley: yeah
[00:50:55] Amber Hinds: it enough, then it builds, and it becomes a snowball, and then you see more
[00:51:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that, that was one of the messages that I got from yours. marketing is a snowball, I think was the phrase that you used, and, that sort of hit home. there we go. it's not like we've provided any answers, dear developer, dear plugin author, theme developer, whatever it may be. We- there is no, open up the box and here's Amber's pre-prepared solution.
That's not what it is. But hopefully you've got a little bit of wisdom here and there. There's certainly a lot to bite into on that. A- Amber, I think you mentioned equalizedigital.com, is it? .com? yeah, at the beginning. I'll put that into the show notes. But is there anywhere else that you hang out online where if somebody, listening to this wants to, wants to make you work even harder where can we find you?
[00:51:46] Amber Hinds: am most frequently on Twitter,
[00:51:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:51:50] Amber Hinds: in Post Us
[00:51:51] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, I'll put those in the show notes as well. So Anne Hinds, that was brilliant. Thank you very much for chatting to me today. I really enjoyed that
[00:51:59] Amber Hinds: Thank you.
[00:52:00] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I hope you enjoyed that. Head to wpbuilds.com and search for episode number 476, or just search for Amber's name in our search facility, and you can go over there and leave us a comment. We really appreciate it when people do it on the WordPress website. That would be most appreciated. If you've got any commentary, leave it there. Let us know what you thought. Maybe you are struggling. Maybe you are succeeding as Amber did. Go and leave us a comment and start the discussion over there.
Don't forget that we've got the This Week in WordPress show on Monday, 2:00 PM UK time, wpbuilds.com/live. Other than that, I'm just gonna fade in some cheesy music and say stay safe, have a good week. Bye-bye for now.
