The Press Room Your Small Business Never Had
Large companies usually have a press room on their website — a place where journalists, customers, and search engines get official news directly from the source. Small businesses often do not have dedicated press rooms. The reasons vary, whether the tools are too complex, lack of in-house technical resources, or the software costs too much. When the only options are geared to enterprises with larger teams and budgets, that leaves few choices for the boutique agencies, the startups, or the local businesses that want a press room of their own.
We are a long-time Silicon Valley agency, and we had startup clients requesting a press room feature on their websites. We did the usual process of looking for a plugin or a commercial service that we could drop into WordPress. But we ran into the issues listed above. Cost, complexity, limited staff, enterprise-only choices, or no options at all.
Why we built NoozRoom
We did not set out to build a product at the time. We were responding to a client request to add a custom feature to their WordPress site, because we could not find something in the market. Clients made those requests all the time, and as WordPress developers, we built solutions for them. We were also maintaining many of the websites for resource-limited startup clients, so we were users of the software, too.
With each client install, new features were added. Some by request, others suggested by our team. It continued to grow into a mature, feature-rich plugin.
We made it simple, easy to operate, and useful. We added it to the next client site. And the next, and so on. In time we released an open source version to the WordPress plugin repo. We had a fair number of downloads, and positive feedback.
NoozRoom had potential
We always had product ideas, many of which we prototyped and tested. Our press room plugin kept improving. We used it almost daily, and we continued to refine features and functionality.
We remained busy with our agency, and taking care of clients was full time work. Our business was steady from years of relationships in Silicon Valley, but we continued to work on the plugin as time allowed. It was a side hustle, a someday/maybe project.
Then a user from the WordPress plugin repo commented that they would pay money for it. Now we had unsolicited market validation. We began to think more about making it into a commercial product.
Launching the product
There is always more than meets the eye with a new venture. Having a product is a great milestone, and then there is more work involved to setup licensing, payments, documentation, and support. That will be the subject of another post.
In the meantime, we are happy to announce that NoozRoom is available now.