nRelated is going to shut down their service and a lot of people are moving over to Related Posts for WordPress as an alternative. These ‘movers’ are different than people that decided they needed related posts on their website, found my plugin and installed it. These ‘movers’ are already used to specific features, so their expectations are very specific. For many people the move from nRelate to Related Posts for WordPress is a good fit but not for everyone.

Not everyone will like your product

I love it when people take the effort to leave a review on wordpress.org or just send you an email saying they love my plugin. Ideally I would want everyone to like my product but realistically that’s not going to be the case. There will always be people that don’t like my related posts for WordPress plugin and that’s ok. Some people are just looking for features that I don’t see as a good fit in my product. It’s better to be clear when this is the case so I can keep the product the way I want it to be and the user can move on to another solution. Let’s be clear here. I’m talking about people don’t liking your product because it lacks features they want/expect. I’m not talking about your plugin simply not working due bugs. Without counting conflict edge case plugin conflicts, your product should just work. If a lot of people don’t like your product because it’s not working, it’s not ok.

Dare to ask why

If someone doesn’t like your product ask them why. A lot of users aren’t great at or simply don’t take the time to give you proper feedback. Most of the time they’ll just tell you: I didn’t like the plugin or It didn’t do what I needed. Whenever you get this kind of feedback, ask them why! Say you’re sorry to hear that it wasn’t a good fit and you would like to know what it is that they didn’t like. If a lot of people give you the same feedback, maybe you were wrong. Maybe you might want to reconsider adding a feature a lot of people are requesting. Even if this isn’t the case, even if the feature that was expected is too edge case. People appreciate it if you care about your product and about them. They appreciate it that you take the time to listen to them after they had a complaint. They’ll be thankful you did, even if you tell them you won’t add that feature that they want.