CWICLY’s demise – a lesson in specialization

A looking-back at the highly speculated (and shocking) announcement of CWICLY’s sudden abandonment in the past week.

It was a shock to many WordPress developer circles because of how personal it felt to everyone. Whether or not you’ve even tried CWICLY, a modern Gutenberg pagebuilder only several years old, you could still relate to its personal challenge in today’s WordPress workflow. One of wrestling between pagebuilders and Gutenberg, and page load and page scores. An elusive (if not mythical) balance hunted for by all WordPress developers.

CWICLY was trying to do what we were all trying to do…make sense of WordPress’ most recent evolution into Gutenberg. It had evolved to a point to where it was almost no longer the same platform we had started with years prior.

And you would think that the people would take up CWICLY with open arms. Heralding this new challenger as their potential champion of the future. But it wasn’t so.

The usual fights broke out online:

• While some people loved and praised CWICLY every chance that they could.
• Others poked holes at its flaws or shortcomings.
• Comments and sub-comments went back and forth between users arguing their experience of CWICLY compared to other tools.
• The founder was active in quelling misconceptions, justifying its differences, promising new features.

CWICLY followed the familiar path of every new product entering a market, diving into a sea of both haters and lovers. Until suddenly, it jumped into another path…announcing its shutdown. Particularly shocking considering its recent announcements and updates just released. It’s founder, Louis-Alexander citing the team’s lack of morale in the face of constant criticism.

The sea of voices rose yet again. Many chastising the critics for being too harsh, too personal, attacking the product without concern for the human being behind it. Even some bloggers posted feelings of compassion and perhaps felt the need to explain their past critique as being fair and objective, with no intention to hurt.

Still…there were those who felt the true reason for CWICLY’s shutdown had to be with something else…which was what I felt…

CWICLY went out of business because the money wasn’t there.

Make no mistake, this is the truth of it.

I’ve seen so many plugins hated far more than CWICLY. And I don’t mean regular run-of-the-mill hate. I’m talking about venomous rent-free toxic spite. CWICLY’s biggest haters don’t come anywhere near the hate I’ve seen for DIVI, WP Bakery, or Elementor. And yet those god-awful plugins are still in business…making lots of money, releasing updates, forging forward despite the sea of haters and hate-posts and hate-comments.

Money makes it worthwhile.

If you were getting handsomely paid, you wouldn’t care who talks crap. And I’m sure the CWICLY team made money. Just not enough to justify all the criticisms, and all the work required to satisfy the critics.

They were brought to a crossroads where they saw how much work it would take to satisfy the critics, satisfy even the happy users, and see if the dollars would even pan out in the end. And decided it was better to just drop it and do something easier.

Of course…I don’t know this for a fact. It’s just my guess.

So what’s the lesson?

CWICLY should be praised.

It’s a massive success to even launch a product that somebody else loves just as much as you do. To be a DJ playing music that makes other people dance. To be a chef that cooks food other people love to eat. To have a strong opinion others agree with. Even just this in itself is very hard to do.

Then to put in the hours working. Then inspiring and leading a team to venture out into the unknown with you in pursuit of this completely made-up goal. It’s very hard to do. Then to push forward when things get difficult and no money is made. And to ride that ship to the very end, until “the wheels fall off” so to speak. For this, CWICLY’s team deserves all the respect in the world.

To ride this ship yourself to its own failure, witnessing the death of your baby, perhaps shooting it in the head yourself (haha so dramatic), is a whole other level of pain. It’s not easy.

Could CWICLY have done something different?

Sell to another owner? That’s one idea existing users were wishing they did instead. I’m just not sure who would want to take it up. Especially when CWICLY’s approach to Gutenberg was so different from anything else on the market. It would be difficult to find someone with the same vision and adequate skills to carry it forward. Especially considering that even the original team itself was not able to execute the vision so perfectly themselves.

I personally felt CWICLY tried to do too much and satisfy too many users. Its true market was much smaller and they should have more carefully targeted this smaller niche of users. Instead of going to war with so many products, and having to justify their use-case for some many users. All the extra development they did had the opposite intended effect. It gave existing users more things to critique instead of be happy about. It gave the plugin more exposure to unfitting users instead of more reasons to sign up.

But most of all, the business model wasn’t right in the first place. I can’t say it was wrong, as you only see things in hindsight, but for sure it wasn’t the right one.

• They lacked a free plugin version in the official WP repo. Losing out on lots of free exposure.
• They went the AppSumo route, which for me is shooting yourself in the foot before a race.
  • First by listing (and associating) yourself with other cheap plugins that don’t have a user-base.
  • Second by starting off with a userbase who pays almost nothing yet expects you to be better than all your competitors. Literally the worst kind of exposure to the worst kind of users.
• They didn’t polish the plugin soon enough. This is my strongest criticism of the CWICLY pagebuilder.
  • I loved what it was trying to do, it was the only one on the market re-visualizing Gutenberg’s editor WHILE still keeping it Gutenberg. My complaint was that it wasn’t easy to use and not so intuitive. It had too much learning curve in the beginning still.
  • It’s fine for a plugin to grow into a place where it becomes complicated, but only after you’ve started off easy. You cannot start off a plugin UI with anything other than super dead simple easy! I’ve seen this time and time again. Many inferior plugins make more money and have more users JUST BECAUSE IT LOOKS EASIER-TO-USE.

Did CWICLY go out the best way possible?

I don’t know what CWICLY was thinking. And as much as you should always go with your gut, and follow your inner feelings…I also think you should wait for strong reactions to settle and bring in rationality before making rash decisions.

If you’re going to fail, do it gracefully. And I mean this in every sense. Do it with absolute composure. And most of all, do it in a way that garner’s respect, compassion, and unity. Not in a way that hurts your brand and future offerings you may come out with.

What could users have done?

I blame the users more than the critics. This is what happens when you strongarm developers with constant demands and critiques despite paying only a measly $100 for a “lifetime deal”. Even IF you paid $300, it’s really still nothing compared to the work a small-time developer has to do. As I’m sure you know, that’s easily the price for even a tiny custom-development task for your site.

Just because you paid $300 doesn’t mean you can sit back and expect constant perfection. You have to be reasonable. Sure, give feedback…those things do help the development team. But it has to be clear and concise, AND REASONABLE. Think ahead and see if you can organize your asks in an easier way.

Likewise, when things go awry as can be the case with a mixed environment of plugin conflicts, please be patient. Be clear about the errors you’re facing, explaining what you expected vs what happened. When asking for help, be kind and patient, AND THEN BE GRATEFUL.

Most of all…take the time not only to help the developers but to help other users as well! The less time the development team spends supporting other users, the more time they spend developing your feature requests.

But most of all, be reasonable. Because if their business model goes under, you can kiss your LTD-promise goodbye…and spend the next few months pulling your hair out to rebuild sites and even rebuild your future development strategy moving forward. Remember this when you choose future plugins and your expectations of them.

Rest & Relaunch

I hope the CWICLY team takes their much needed break, to rest and recharge. Find themselves and their identity. To listen to their own inner voice and what makes them happy. And then come back with a new product in the future that brings forth all of CWICLY’s past successes and lessons learned, along with new innovations. They’re ballsy and innovative, that’s proven. They can rise again no doubt.

I hope everyone else has learned some lessons in what it takes to make a successful business. To also come forward with your new products and innovations using lessons learned from the past.

See you in the future, my friends.