Elementor is a free plugin, it's a full-featured product with lots of great features (it recently surpassed 200,000 active installs). Elementor Pro includes more comprehensive design and marketing features.
While you can create stunning websites with the free version, many users demand more advanced features and hence choose to upgrade to Elementor pro.
Elementor Homepage
Elementor Homepage
How did you come up with this idea?
When we started working on oman phone number library WordPress, we saw recurring patterns. The client was never really satisfied, even though our themes answered most of their needs. There was always a minor change they had to make and they couldn’t do it alone, that’s when we understood the need and started working on Elementor, a drag-and-drop visual page builder that works on any template and theme.
How long did you work on it before launching? When did you see your first dollar?
It took us a year to launch Elementor and another 6 months to launch Elementor Pro (and make our first dollar).
Who are your customers? What is your target market?
Most of our customers are web designers, freelancers, and agencies, there are also a lot of site owners and marketers. Those are the main segments that should benefit the most from Elementor.
Are you profitable? If not, when do you think you'll get there?
Not yet, we never try to convince free users by hard selling, we try to focus on solving a real problem for them and providing them with better service.
We are a fast growing company, currently we focus mainly on development and reaching new markets, our main goal is massive growth.
We believe we'll get there soon, Elementor has already proven to be an invaluable tool for many professional designers. It eliminates design pain points in WordPress, allowing our clients to create better websites in half the time.
That's why we believe our customer growth rate will continue to accelerate weekly.
Number of paying customers: Over 10,000 paying customers
Number of free users: Over 200,000 active installations
How did you get your first 100 customers?
Two weeks before the official launch of Elementor pro (during Black Friday), we ran an email marketing campaign with pre-orders and got our first 100 paying customers in less than a day.
What are the top 2-3 distribution channels that work best for you? Which channel didn't work for you?
Our main channel is WordPress Repo (WordPress plugin directory). Other channels that work very well for us are: SEO, AdWords and Facebook.
We briefly tried other programmatic vendors, but it didn't work well.
Growth is about deciding what you want to achieve, understanding what blocks people and what really motivates them, which is why we put more emphasis on intention-based targeting.
Our growth strategy is simple:
– Get good data (if it doesn’t exist)
– Build solid conversion funnels, break them down by sub-audiences
– Find a huge, low-hanging fruit (the biggest conversion drop-off)
– Attack it with some innovative ideas.
Each channel has a different purpose, and while spreading resources thin can be risky, we have seen how a multi-channel strategy produces a higher return on investment.
Tell us 2-3 growth challenges you've encountered recently (and if you have a strategy, how to solve them).
We're always working to improve our product and messaging.
Everything can be a challenge - there are no magic solutions or one-size-fits-all tricks. You need to put in the effort.
Or at least learn them, but then forget them. In the end you'll have to do it your way.
We always have an urgency mindset, we are never complacent and we are constantly on the move.
There is no clear way to map out the path of a satisfied paying customer, nor is there a clear way to focus on the aha moment they experience that flips the switch for them.
Personally, I'm not happy with our pace of experimentation. We're not trying as many things as we should be.
Attribution can also be tricky, as we respect our users' privacy and use all other channels to fill in the blanks.
Supporting our free users can also be a challenge. Since we're growing so fast, it's hard to keep up, but luckily we have an amazing Facebook group (it already has over 6700 members). We've received a lot of feedback and support from our community, and they're always happy to help other members of the group.
Creating high-quality content is always a challenge, but we are doing our best to provide more detailed tutorials on our website, YouTube .
How we try to tackle most of those challenges: testing.
Our framework: having a clear understanding of the test hypothesis, the metrics we need to monitor, and ensuring they are fully trackable.
The more qualitative (and quantitative) research you do before coming up with ideas, the better your chances of finding a winning variation.
Some tasks are not worth doing in-house. What do you outsource?
Everything is scalable until it isn't; we sometimes outsource writing, mostly to other designers.
What are 3 tools that you and your team can't live without?
I'm probably the biggest tool expert you'll ever meet, but I believe that the tools don't matter as much as the philosophy and framework.
It will come as no surprise to anyone: Slack, Google Analytics, Google Sheets.
Personally, my favorite tools are: Mood (content), Supermetrics (Data/Analytics), IFTTT & Zapper (productivity).
Tell us what was the biggest mistake you made while creating and promoting your product and what you learned from it.
We have our core values, being customer-centric is the most important thing. In the beginning we assumed that marketing should not be our main emphasis, we focused most of the resources on development and support. Now we understand that no matter how good your product is, you will not be able to achieve massive growth without exceptional marketing and always being skeptical about data as mistakes will happen on the way you want to be sure of something before investing resources. That is why premature optimization or focusing on the wrong things at the wrong time is still one of the leading causes of death for many startups.
If you were to start Elementor today, what would you do differently?
We always had a customer-centric approach, but we should have done more.
Invest more in customer success and remarketing (bringing visitors back is key), eliminate channels that never got traction, and experiment more at a faster pace.
