How to Sell Products to PHP Developers Using Sponsorships

In this article you will learn about:

1. What Are Business Design Patterns

2.2. The Advantages of Being the Manager of Your Own Business

2.3. Make a Smooth Transition Between Being an Employee or Autonomous Worker to Become a Business Owner

3. How Can a Product or Service for PHP Developers Succeed

3.2. Test Your Product or Service with Real Customers

3.3. Find the Community Where Your Customers Are

3.3.1. Find a Large Community of Common Interests

3.3.2. Grow The Number of Customers Improving Addressing New Needs and Desires

4.3. Measure the Sponsorship Results

4.4. Keep Users Interested in Your Product or Service

1. What Are Business Design Patterns

Business design patterns are very similar to software design patterns.

Business design patterns are good practices that help a business succeed.

Illustration is based on thumbs up image.

2. Why You Need to Learn Business Design Patterns

2.1. The Disadvantages of Being Employee or Autonomous Worker

When you are an employee of a company or an autonomous worker who works by contract with other companies, you usually obey company managers' orders.

Often you do not do what you want, but rather what the managers tell you to do.

Although you can make good money as an employee or as an autonomous worker, you are often subject to pressure from managers who want the projects to finish faster than what is possible, disagreements with your manager about the solutions to implement, and other issues that cause stress and make you unhappy, and in some cases be fired by the manager.

2.2. The Advantages of Being the Manager of Your Own Business

Alternatively, you can become the manager of your company, so you only do what you love and never be fired. Only you can fire yourself.

I have had that privilege since 2001 when my son was born. I can make my schedule, see my son start walking, see him grow up, and attend almost all parties and meetings of my son in school. I was also able to make the work in the PHP Classes site, my full-time business.

I was able to give priority to myself and the people that I love the most.

2.3. Make a Smooth Transition Between Being an Employee or Autonomous Worker to Become a Business Owner

Anyway, there was an important detail. When I started, I was not aware of the business design patterns. I needed to learn from the mistakes that I made. That took me a long time because I knew doing it rather than learning from those who had more experience.

I spent years learning business design patterns that you can learn in minutes.

To prevent wasting years waiting for results, you can discover key business design patterns here and apply them in your own business. This way, you can take charge of your life while pursuing your passions.

To make this transition smooth, do not fire yourself. You always need to have at least one source of revenue to pay your bills.

What you can do is to use your free time, like weekends and holidays, to learn and develop your own products or services until they are ready to sell and generate enough revenue to pay for your cost of life. Only then you can fire yourself from a job that you work as employee or as a autonomous worker.

3. How Can a Product or Service for PHP Developers Succeed

3.1. Focus on the Customer Needs and Desires Doing Research

3.1.1. Do Not Follow Everything the Competition Does

Often I see candidates become business owners focusing on existing competitors that do something similar to what they do.

If you focus on competitors, you will always be behind the competitors. Competitors will not give you money. They will only want to make your market smaller while they grow.

What you should do with competitors is to stay silent. Do not brag about what you do, nor reveal plans to avoid the competitors doing what you should have done.

3.1.2. Do Research to Learn What Customers Want and Are Willing to Pay

Instead, you should ask your potential customers what they would like you to do for them and how much they are willing to pay.

You should do research. There is one very good research method called design thinking.

I have explained this method in detail in an article about design thinking that I wrote after having applied it many years ago to improve the package pages of the PHP Classes site.

Although the article mentions building perfect sites, there is nothing perfect. You need to apply this method regularly because there will always be improvements to be made.

You can apply this method yourself after learning the steps. Alternatively, you can hire a specialist to do the research process, so you can focus on the business activities that you love most.

If you would like me to do the research process, you can use the Contact link at the bottom of this page, or contact me using the WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger buttons that you may see on the top right corner of this page.

3.2. Test Your Product or Service with Real Customers Are

Once you have developed the product or service that the customers told you to implement, ask the customers to test the product or service.

This is an important step to implement what we call user-centered design.

Based on image of people.

This way, you can find issues to fix before you release the product to more products. This is very important to ensure the quality of your product or service.

3.3. Find the Community Where Your Customers

3.3.1. Find a Large Community of Common Interests

Your product or service may be great, but not all interested people will buy the product. Some may not buy due to the lack of money.

So it is important to find a large community of interested people so that at least part of the community will buy the product, and you can continue to pay for the costs of keeping the business open.

Based on community image.

3.3.2. Grow The Number of Customers Improving Addressing New Needs and Desires

If you are starting a business, you will not profit right away. You need to keep improving the product or service with the requests of the majority of the people interested in using it.

When you have a well-tested version, you can make a public release that some people in the community will buy.

If you continue to improve the product or service, more people will buy it, and eventually you reach profitability later.

So, having a community around your product or service is very important. If you do not have your own community, you can participate in communities of products or services that have common interests.

For instance, the PHP Classes site is a community of PHP developers. If you have a product or service for PHP developers, the PHP Classes can help you to have your product or service better known.

3.4. Distribute a Limited Free Version of Your Product or Service

3.4.1. Let Your Users Try Your Product or Service For Free

Before people buy your product or service, they need to learn about it and be able to try it to evaluate if the product addresses their needs and desires.

So basically you need to have at least two versions. One version the people can try for free with some limitations. The paid version is the same without those limitations.

3.4.2. Free Trial Version Limitations

For instance, you can allow people to try the product or service for 7 days or 30 days. It must be enough time for the people to try the features they want.

The exact length of the free trial period needs to be tested. Log the usage of the free trial to see the length of the period that people tried until they stopped.

You can also apply other types of limitations. For instance, if you are selling a product or a service that your disk space as storage, you can limit the amount of space used during the free trial.

4. How Can Sponsorships Help Selling More Products or Services for PHP Developers

4.1. Advertise Your Product or Service Using Sponsorships

Before selling a product or service, you need to advertise it to the community that is interested in the product or service so you can attract potential customers.

One way to attract more potential customers is to sponsor the community.

You can sponsor events that the community organizes.

4.2. Sponsored Tutorials

Another kind of sponsorship can be publishing tutorial articles that educate the potential customers about solutions for a problem that they may have and your product or service can solve that problem.

Here at the PHP Classes site, we have a blog section for sponsored articles.

We publish tutorial articles about problems that PHP developers may have and can be solved by sponsored products.

For instance, recently we published a tutorial article about a PHP low-code solution. That article talked about the problem that many PHP developers have to finish the projects of their customers as quickly as possible, so they can be paid sooner and move on to other projects.

If you have a product or service that you would like that the PHP developers to try, the PHP Classes have a sponsorship service that may help you to attract more potential customers. 

We can publish a tutorial article like the one PHP Low-Code Solutions. We can use the article to educate the developers about the benefits of low-code solutions. Then we end the article by inviting PHP developers to try your product or service.

4.3. Measure the Sponsorship Results

Every blog article we publish on the PHP Classes site is distributed via our newsletters to about 135000 site registered users. Users interested in learning about the problem and solution will come to the site to read the article. If they are interested in trying your product or service, they can go to your site and try the product.

We partner with a company named Paved that manages our sponsorship campaigns. They provide nice reports that show how many people have been exposed to the sponsorship campaign message, how many have opened the message, and how many have clicked on the sponsor link and went to the sponsor product or service site.

4.4. Keep Users Interested in Your Product or Service

I recommend that you make your product or service available for free to your registered users. This way you can keep the contact with the users and send them email messages when there are new versions, or you have nice articles to share with those users.

You can also conduct a research process using the Design Thinking method like I mentioned above so the users can tell you how you can make your product or service better for them.

If you would like to know more about the PHP Classes sponsorships, you can visit the sponsorships page, post a comment here, or send a message using the WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or email buttons that you can see in the bottom right corner of this page.

5. How to Learn More About Business Design Patterns

There are more business design patterns that you can apply to your present or future business.

In recent years I have been a business mentor helping many companies to have successful businesses.

I can also provide personalized mentoring specific to your business any time it is better for you. I do not give old-school teaching classes. I mostly answer the questions you have to help you solve your problems.

For instance, some mentoring students ask me how to price your products and services. Then I teach good pricing methods to increase sales.

I already give mentoring sessions to entrepeneurs that have startups that joined the business fostering iniatives of Centro Paula Souza of the São Paulo government in Brazil and Inovativa program of the federal government of Brazil.

If you are interested in having more success in your present or future business by growing the number of paying customers, feel free to contact me to ask about how I can help you with your business using the contact link at the bottom of these pages or the buttons on the bottom right corner of this page to contact me via WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or Email.