Today, Easy Digital Downloads is two years old and we’d like to celebrate by looking back at some of the achievements of the last two years.
Downloads
Since we launched on the WordPress.org plugin repository two years ago, we have had 278,687 downloads and counting. Currently we are seeing an average of about 500 downloads per day. We reached the 100 thousand on June 7, 2013. It took us 14 months to reach 100 thousand downloads, but only another 10 months to reach 278 thousand. That’s almost twice as many downloads in less time. We can’t be anything but thrilled with that.
Releases
Over the last two years, we have had more than 66 version releases and are rapidly approaching our version 2.0 release. We’re averaging a release about once a month, though sometimes we see a few releases in a single month as we work quickly to make improvements as users notice problems or have requests for how Easy Digital Downloads could be improved.
Ratings and Customer Satisfaction
On WordPress.org, we have 152 5-star ratings. The vast majority of users that leave a review of Easy Digital Downloads give it 5-stars. That means the world to us and are so happy to hear that we’ve managed to build a system that our users love. We never tire of seeing new 5-star ratings come in.
While the vast majority have given us superb ratings, we have also received negative ratings, including 7 4-star reviews, 1 3-star, 1 2-star, and 4 1-star reviews. We take anything less than a 5-star as an indication that something needs to be improved and we seriously take all criticism to heart and work to see how we can improve the pain points for future releases. While we love to hear what we did well, we also need to hear what we did poorly on as that’s how we get better and better.
A few months ago we began actively asking customers to let us know how we did by filling out a customer satisfaction survey. Here are the results to date:
Are there a few that indicated they were downright unpleased? Yes, unfortunately, but the vast majority were thrilled with the level of support they received.
We strive to provide top notch support because we believe it is our obligation to do so and because we truly believe in and stand behind our products. Unfortunately it’s impossible to please everyone, but we will do our very best to fight that impossible battle.
Extension Downloads
Our extensions marketplace is the heart and soul of our business model. The extension sales through this site are what allow us to give away such a feature-rich e-commerce plugin for free. Over the last two years we have seen the adoption rate of Easy Digital Downloads sky rocket, and with it, our extension sales have grown substantially. I remember being thrilled the first time we broke $500 in monthly extension sales; now we’re paying out nearly $20,000 per month in developer commissions. That’s humbling to say the least.
To date, we have delivered more than 19,863 extension file downloads to customers that have purchased one or more extensions.
Support Tickets
Support can make or break a business. I believe the level of dedicated we put towards helping our customers as best we can has dramatically improved our business. Is support difficult? Absolutely. Is it worth it? 100%.
Since opening our support forums with version 1.0, we have had 7,301 tickets opened. In the early days we had an average of a few tickets per week, now we see an average of 20 new tickets per day.
Contributors
One of the most beautiful aspects of open source software is seeing people come together and work as a community. We have an amazing community of users and developers around Easy Digital Downloads.
To date, there are 92 individuals that have contributed to the EDD code base and even more that have contributed bug reports, feature requests, and general suggestions.
We cannot thank you all enough.
Going Forward
We are not even close to being finished. In reality, I’d say we’re just now really getting started. We’re working harder than ever to make Easy Digital Downloads the best and easiest way to sell your digital products through WordPress. While users often tell us EDD is easy, we don’t believe it’s easy enough yet. With “easy” in the name, it’s vitally important that we stand behind that and make it our mantra.
As we’ve added more and more features, there are times we’ve lost sight of what it means to be “easy”. It is my goal to ensure that we not only return to being “easy” but that we succeed with flying colors. I truly want Easy Digital Downloads to be easy and awesome for everyone, and version 2.0 will be the first step towards making that a reality.
We are truly grateful for everyone that has helped us reach this point and we cannot wait to see what the future holds. As a thank you to everyone, we’re offering 25% off all extension and themes sold through this site until the end of the day Friday, April 18, 2014. Simply use the discount code HAPPYTWO at checkout.
