How to Market and Monetize Adobe Express Add-ons

Prolific plugin and add-on developer Eugen Pflüger shares his knowledge to help you make your add-ons a success, too.

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As developers, designers, plugin creators, and add-on builders, we have the tendency to skip marketing and monetization and would rather code the whole night through rather than think about this topic. However, whether you’re a seasoned developer or just starting out, understanding how to monetize the creative tools you’re building is critical to your long-term success.

Over the years I’ve been part of many launches, so I decided to share my personal experience and what I’ve learned about successfully marketing and monetizing add-ons (and plugins). In this article, we’ll cover the three phases of a product launch, how to choose the most appropriate pricing model, the role of the merchant of record, and more.

You can also watch this special edition of Adobe Express Office Hours where I gave this presentation:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/5cIeAlqcmWk

A little bit about me

I’m a product designer and developer specializing in building innovative plugins for creatives that I publish under the brand OMATA Labs. I’m a Creative Cloud Developer Champion and recipient of the Adobe Fund for Design, which has been really helpful. So far I’ve released 10+ plugins and add-ons — each with its own business model and monetization strategy.

Arranger, for example, a plugin that helps you arrange design elements in various layouts, is free to use but with it I promote other products that have a paid-for pricing model. OMATA, on the other hand, a plugin that lets you “visually program“ Adobe Illustrator, uses a freemium model, while my latest plugin, MATE, is an AI assistant that uses a subscription model. So I tend to experiment with several different models that fit the offering of the add-on.

Here’s an overview of the plugins and add-ons I’ve built so far:

Adobe Express add-ons

Creative Cloud plugins

Why build an Adobe Express add-on?

In my experience, there are three main reasons why you might want to build an add-on:

  1. You want to build a solution for yourself, your colleagues, or your company to improve and automate a workflow.
  2. You want to build a solution for others and help them, which can be very fulfilling. This was the motivation for me to build Arranger.
  3. You want to earn money with your side projects. If that’s the case, I highly recommend this talk from Sahil Lavingia, the founder and CEO of Gumroad:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/GORdNh6GGd4

Next you need to define your goals and success criteria: What problem does your add-on solve? And what do you want to achieve? For example, do you want to drive sales numbers, do you want to get it out of the door as a test, or do you want to promote another service? Answer these questions for yourself and make a plan. This will help you find the right strategy to market and monetize your product.

Marketing your add-on

The usual way developers approach marketing is to develop the product, release it, and then hope for the best. Somebody will just come across your add-on and download it. This may work but it’s too simplistic, and I’ve made this mistake too.

Development and marketing go hand in hand. So think of the complete life cycle of your product in three phases: Prerelease, Release, and Post-Release. Let’s go through them one by one.

Prerelease

The marketing starts earlier than you might think. Announce your product very early on, maybe even before you write your first line of code. You need to commit yourself to the project that you will release and let people know about it.

The single best thing you can do in this phase is creating a simple waitlist page. Write a short description about your project, add a sign-up field, and — if you can — include a quick demo. This can be a prototype or even just a screenshot. Then announce your product and send people to this waitlist.

Next, post about your progress. Write about every step you’ve made. People are interested in hearing about how products come together, and it doesn’t matter if your add-on is not perfect or not finished yet. That’s the magic of it: You share how your product grows and gets better over time, and that’s a great phase for people to observe.

Send people to your waitlist from everywhere you talk about the product. Add the link to your bio on every social media account and to your email signature. During development this list will grow, which is very motivating. These are people that are actively interested in your product, so talk to them and ask them for feedback and feature requests. And then use your waitlist to recruit beta testers and refine and iterate the product together. Closer to the release date the waitlist then becomes your launch audience.

Release

For the release you can choose between two strategies:

The benefit of the big launch day is that you get everyone excited but it’s also extremely stressful. Everything needs to be ready by that day, your documentation, your website, videos, maybe your Product Hunt campaign as well. In my experience it’s too much for a small team or a single indie maker.

Personally, I like to just release the product and then improve it. Once you get it out into the world, the first few users will find your biggest bugs. Fix them, and after one or two days your product is so much better already. Then gradually roll out your other marketing activities that you have planned.

Next you want to let press people, bloggers, and influencers know about your product. Contact them very early on, after the first round of bug fixes, and give them free access. Make it easy for them to write or talk about your product and include everything they might need in this email: the logos and app icons, text snippets with the unique selling points, etc.

Then replace your waitlist page with your final website and switch the sign-up for your waitlist to a regular newsletter, so you can continue to collect leads. Build this up again and offer a launch discount to your launch audience. Finally, make sure to list your launch on sites like Product Hunt, launching.today, BetaList, and Indie Hackers.

Post-release

The last phase is a marathon, so prepare for an endless race! Try to get featured or reviewed on a blog or a YouTube show, as this will always produce an enormous spike and grow your audience. It also has a long-term effect: I launched Arranger in 2018 and to this day I get visitors from six-year-old blog posts that reviewed my product at the time.

Also, get into the habit of posting on a regular basis. You can do this in batches and write a few posts at the same time. Then schedule them, for example using the Scheduler in Adobe Express, and you can go back to developing.

Send out a regular newsletter, not only when you add a new feature to your product. Treat it as a summary of what happened since you sent out the last newsletter. For example, include a summary of your three most successful social media posts, tips and tricks for using the add-ons you’ve built or about using Adobe Express itself, use cases, case studies, industry news, reviews — there’s so much you can talk about beyond new features.

And then, of course, there are the typical marketing activities around sales promotions (for example, Black Friday).

The opportunities in the post-release phase are really endless. Do a bit of research and get creative. You can even ask ChatGPT for ideas, it’s a fantastic resource for this!

Monetizing your add-on

For your monetization strategy, you need to again decide on the goal of your add-on. Do you want to sell it, or use it to promote another service, for example? Or do you want to cross-promote other add-ons, or use it to collect leads?

Next find a business model that matches your goals and consider offering a free trial for your add-on. Then pick a payment service provider or merchant of record. Do this early on, as account approval takes a few days or even weeks to be complete. And you’ll also need to thoroughly test the payment system before you go live. I test out every single payment plan of the add-ons and plugins that I offer because I want to know what my customers are experiencing firsthand. If something isn’t working that well, I’ll know straight away.

For more tips and best practices that will help you plan your monetization strategy more effectively, also check out the Adobe Express Add-On Monetization Guidelines. And here’s an overview of the various business models that you can choose from:

Which business model is available to you depends on which merchant of record (see below) you decide to go with. Adobe Express does not come with a merchant of record at this time and therefore also does not take a percentage of sales from your add-on.

This isn’t exclusive to Adobe Express, by the way. It’s good advice to follow when thinking of monetizing any plugin, add-on or extension in any marketplace.

Using a merchant of record

A merchant of record (MoR) provides the payment system, so that people can buy your product. These services handle the payment, ensure global tax compliance, and also deal with any errors or disputes that may occur during the purchasing process. Your customers essentially buy your product from the merchant of record, but you keep all of their contact information.

A lot of people tend to just use Stripe but it’s worth considering a merchant of record like Gumroad, Lemon Squeezy, FastSpring, or Paddle. With Stripe, you have to manage everything yourself (either via a third-party solution or your finance department if you have one). This works if you have high sales numbers and are part of a big business. However, if you’re just one person or work with a small independent team, the fact that a merchant of record manages the global tax compliance is a huge selling point.

Merchants of record are usually also simpler to set up and make it easy to integrate additional features, for example, the validation of license keys. They also often offer affiliate programs or marketplaces, which means people may just stumble upon your product while they’re browsing or searching for other digital products.

Here are some examples of Adobe Express add-ons and the payment services they use:

To help you decide on the right merchant of record (and also the right business model) for your projects, I have created an open Google Sheet to compare providers, including some new ones like Polar and Creem. It would be amazing if you could help fill out this document based on your experience, so we have an overview and feature comparison for every merchant of record out there. Hopefully, this will grow into a really useful resource.

And that’s it! I hope you found my tips for marketing and monetizing Adobe Express add-ons helpful. I’d love to hear from you about your own personal experiences, and you can reach me on email at info@omata.io and @plugisto on social media.

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