PlushForums hosts online communities for businesses and groups of all sizes – from farmers to film-makers. The business was born when former web product manager, Adrian Flitcroft, saw an opportunity to make forums more user-friendly and easy to manage.
PlushForums aims to provide customers with all the features they need – like real-time discussions, blogs and private messaging – without any of the technical challenges usually associated. We caught up with Adrian to find out what keeps PlushForums running smoothly.
PayPal (PP): What have been your greatest successes?
Adrian Flitcoft (AF): Industry website CMS Critic named us Best Commercial Forum Solution in their 2014 awards. To win that accolade from a respected industry publisher is a fine achievement. To do so in our first year of operations – beating out many of our big-name rivals – was hugely encouraging.
The feedback we get from customers is also incredibly rewarding. We love making it easy for their communities to flourish. With the help of our early adopters, we’ve built a fast, reliable and secure platform. It’s amazing to watch our customer base grow each week. When people start opening their second and third forum with us, we know we’re doing something right.
PP: What is the greatest challenge you faced in setting up your business and how did you overcome it?
AF: Like any software company, it took us a while to get our mix of features right and iron out bugs in the system. You can do all the planning and testing in the world, but you only really know how good your product is when customers put it to the test on a large scale.
It took more 100 hour work weeks than we care to remember, but we’ve built Plush into an exceptionally reliable service. We couldn’t have done this without the loyalty and patience of our early adopters, who took a chance on a small start-up. We tried to go the extra mile each day to make them happy and they rewarded us with their business.
PP: What advice would you give to other small businesses and those thinking of taking the plunge and creating a start-up?
AF: Know your industry inside and out, and where your service fits in. From the start, we had a reasonably clear idea of what market segment was underserved by the existing players. I’ve participated on web forums for over 17 years now, so I knew the market. I’ve also managed internet products for the last 9 years, so I understood the challenges we would face.
Beyond that, I would say do what you already know, but do it better. So often in our careers we find ourselves making compromises, executing an ill-conceived project or just rushing work to make an arbitrary deadline. Starting out on your own is a chance to do things your way. Take advantage of the expertise you already have.
PP: When did you start using PayPal and why?
AF: We’ve been using PayPal as our primary payment solution since day one. PayPal is widely recognised and trusted by consumers, so it’s an obvious choice for a new company like us. It’s also the easiest way to create a monthly subscription service with a variety of price plans. We simply created a new payment button for each plan, added its HTML code to our pricing page, and then styled it to match our branding.
PayPal is also vital to our technical operations. The IPN service notifies our system of each new subscriber, enabling us to create a new forum for each customer automatically. The PDT feature lets us update customers about their purchase in real-time, without leaving our site. All in all, it takes just two minutes for a customer to subscribe via PayPal and receive the keys to their new forum. This kind of automation helps improve our service and keep costs down.
PP: Has using PayPal helped your business? How?
AF: Our favourite PayPal feature is probably the ability to build in a free trial to your subscription plans. When you’re new in the marketplace, there is no better way to earn a customer’s trust than a free trial. It’s been a hugely successful strategy for us.
What’s more, using PayPal to facilitate the free trial completely eliminates fraudulent signups and waste. You know your customers are legitimate and that a successful trial will lead to a proper billing relationship. While at the same time, your customer doesn’t have to share their credit card details.
PlushForums use PayPal Business Solutions.
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