Podcast appearances and mentions of pippin williamson

I recently caught up with Pippin Williamson, who as many of you know was a prominent figure in the WordPress world for over a decade. He founded Sandhills Development and created popular plugins like Easy Digital Downloads before selling to Awesome Motive a couple years back. (Watch my previous interview on YouTube.)I was curious to hear what Pippin's been up to and also get his thoughts on the WordPress ecosystem since his exit. A few things stood out that I thought would interest you all:First off, Pippin was very clear that his reason for moving on from WordPress boiled down to prioritizing time with family. After so many years of plugin development, he felt burnt out from being on that relentless “hamster wheel” of building and maintaining products. He had zero regrets about leaving.When it came time to sell Sandhills Development, Pippin made finding the right steward for his team and products a top priority over price or other factors. He felt confident Awesome Motive was the best fit given their product focus. Although he does wish there had been less team turnover resulting from the acquisition.And while Pippin keeps a very casual eye on WordPress these days, he did note how interesting it was to return to using it purely as an end user rather than a developer. Even being removed for a couple years, he immediately noticed some of the lingering friction between core, plugins, and the overall user experience.Anyway, those were just a few WordPress-related nuggets I wanted to share. Let me know if you have any other thoughts or reflections on Pippin's time in our community!Visit Pippin's Brewery: Sandhills Brewing ★ Support this podcast ★

We hosted our first WP Minute Live Twitter Space covering learning WordPress. It was Bring Your Own Link (BYOL) style where our guest panelists brought a link to share with the audience. Here were the guests that appeared on the live show: Hauwa Abashiya, Freelance Project Manager transitioning into the WordPress space; Board Member and Volunteer at Big Orange Heart including WordFest and one of the Make Training Team Reps.Joe Casabona, Joe started his career almost 20 years ago as a freelance web developer before realizing his true passion, which is sharing his years of knowledge about website development, podcasting and course creation to help creators, and business owners.Birgit Pauli-Haack,  Birgit is the curator of the Gutenberg Times and co-host of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast with Greg Ziolkowski. Automattic sponsors her work as a full-time developer advocate for WordPress. Daniel Schutzsmith, Web Manager at Pinellas County Government, one of the Producers at The WP Minute, maintainer of WP Livestreams Directory, and soon to be launched WP Developer's Toolbox.Matt Medeiros, Director by day at Castos.com; Creating community contributed news and journalism at thewpminute.com part of Matt Report media network.  Links shared from the guests Hauwa Abashiya: https://learn.wordpress.org/| https://make.wordpress.org/training/2021/08/08/who-can-learn-help/ | https://learn.wordpress.org/social-learning/Joe Casabona: https://wplearningpaths.com | https://maven.com Birgit Pauli-Haack Gutenberg Developer Hours 2/8 WordPress Social Learning Spaces. https://fullsiteediting.com/block-theme-generator/ Block Theme GeneratorDaniel Schutzsmith: https://make.wordpress.org/training/2022/01/18/training-team-goals-for-2022/ “Especially certification!” Episode transcript [00:00:00] Matt: This event is brought to you by malware and blog vault. Check out mal care.com and blog vault.net, helping you secure and restore your WordPress websites. Quite literally thank them without them. I wouldn't be able to be doing the WP minute live and Daniel wouldn't have that nice new gold chain around his neck. [00:00:18] Moving forward. I'd ask all of you to join the link squad, hashtag link squad, producers, and contributors, and the discord server share, vote and discuss their newsworthy links with others. When you're part of the link squad, you're part of making weekly word, press news. And we're talking about one of the, one of the biggest topics, 5.9, and learning a little bit more about 5.9, Daniel, your segments. [00:00:46] Daniel: Yeah. And really what we're doing here too, for folks that don't know the w the WP minute is that it's contributor, sourced news. We provide links basically every week of what we see out there in the industry. And so we often have discussions around those links, similar to what you'd see in a newsroom. [00:01:04] It's just done a discord. And so we're, we're talking with each other and talking about the various things we like about a link or whatnot  [00:01:11] Matt: WVU minute live is bringing you that discussion right here on Twitter spaces and streaming platforms across the internet, someday discuss hashtag link squad topics with us live and follow at the WP minutes. [00:01:23] Stay.  [00:01:25] Daniel: Yeah, given the, the new release of WordPress 5.9, we're going to focus on this week's topic, being, learning WordPress. And so everyone's brought at least one link, perhaps two or three that that share a little bit about learning WordPress. And so we're going to go through once and we're going to see how that goes and how long that takes. [00:01:43] But first, let me introduce our folks here. We already know kind of Matt, Modaris our fearless leader here, director by day at dot com. Creating community contributed news and journalism at the WP minutes. Part of the Matt report media network. We also have how ABA Shaya freelance project manager transitioning into the WordPress space, a board member and volunteer at big orange heart, including word Fest, and one of the make training team reps. [00:02:10] Thank you for being here. How all the way from London, I believe. Yep. That's right. Alright. Joe, Casabona coming straight to us from Pennsylvania. Punxsutawney Phil come up soon. Joe started his career almost 20 years ago as a freelance web developer before realizing his true passion, which is sharing his years of knowledge about website development, podcasting, and course creation to help creators and business owners. [00:02:38] And I'm subscribed to seven of his podcasts. They're all amazing. So checking out a peer get ball. They have. Beer is the curator of the Gutenberg times and co-host of the Gutenberg changelog podcast with Greg Koski automatic sponsors for work as a full time developer advocate for WordPress[00:03:00]  [00:03:01] and my cell phone, Daniel should Smith, a mild-mannered web manager at Raquel's Pinellas county government down here in Florida by day. But I'm also one of the producers at the w few minutes and a maintainer of WP live streams directory, which you may have heard me talk about before. And since we launched WP developers toolbox, so let's get to it. [00:03:23] We're going to go through each person. They're going to share a link. We're going to tweet out that link. So as you're going along to speakers, let me know if you've already tweeted it out and I'll go into your profile and find it last year. How you're up first?  [00:03:39] Hauwa: So I've just tweeted my now. And of course I have to tweet out the.wordpress.org, because I think it should be the number one tweet that goes out anyway, resource for everybody coming to learn about WordPress. [00:03:53] So if you don't know about it, it's a resource that's been built by the community and we have got lesson plans, workshops, and courses, and we also have social learning spaces on that.  [00:04:11] Daniel: That's great. And what what kind of things can we find there specifically, like on courses and such as it, is it like Courses around full site editing and things like that, or,  [00:04:20] Hauwa: yeah, so we as part of a 5.9, the training team, so I'm one of the reps on their make training team, along with Courtney Robinson and Pooja discharge. [00:04:31] And we took an undertaking to actually get content out ready for 5.9. First time we've done it and, please see that we did get some contacts out there. And one of them has been a course that was done by Roxy and it's about full site editing. So it's from a user's point of view and it's the first part. [00:04:49] And I believe the second part should be coming out later this month. And we do have a couple of workshops and lesson plans are out there as well, that are like 0.9. [00:04:59] I'm just going to tweet out that actually you said I can only do one thing. Can I have the link to the course? Sure.  [00:05:06] Daniel: We can do  [00:05:09] Matt: more  [00:05:09] Daniel: speakers, feel free to ask any questions or give any thoughts to these things. The I'm looking at the workshops here and I don't know how I missed this, that there's so many workshops. [00:05:19] Hauwa: The workshops work came about just around during the pandemic. So we'd always have lessons and obviously the lesson plans have been there to help meet up organizers. You couldn't get it. Speaker didn't know what to talk about and you could just go and get a lesson plan and walk through that during your meetup. [00:05:39] And I believe some people have used it in training general training of law students as well in bootcamps and things like that. I know Courtney's used it quite a lot as a resource and she has contributed quite a lot. And then she's in here listening. Yeah. And then yeah, workshops. So workshops, you can watch one of the videos and you can join a social learning space to [00:06:00] discuss it. [00:06:00] And I know we've been doing a lot more with social learning spaces now. So the formats of those could slightly change. It's experimenting with different ways of delivering special learning spaces. [00:06:15] Joe: I know that a other kind of core space like websites that have a lot of WordPress stuff have the notion of different. Tracks, I guess like UTA at word camps is, are there plans for that@learndotwordpress.org? Because I know that you cover a wide range of topics. It says here from first-time blogger to seasoned developer will, there'll be some guidance coming down the pike on if you're a first-time blogger, where do you go versus if you're a seasoned developer, where do you,  [00:06:41] Hauwa: yeah, so we've just sending out the latest course now we have been doing some work or the Sierra on looking she started last year in terms of defining what our goals are. [00:06:53] And I do believe dining, you might be bringing out a link up or on but we've been looking at what our goals are in terms of the training team. So one of the things that Courtney has done, she did a high level roadmap, which looked at it. So it's essentially, you could possibly think about it as planning your own. [00:07:10] If you are starting from a user or you're starting from a developer, it's a one room that you could look at  [00:07:19] Daniel: that shit. [00:07:23] I didn't even realize there's quizzes on here. Yep. You can take an actual  [00:07:28] Hauwa: quiz, test you to make sure that you're doing it properly now. Just checking. Yeah, there are quizzes on there. Each of them have quizzes a week within the lesson plans. We also have exercises that people can follow as well. [00:07:41] Yeah.  [00:07:44] Matt: How does one apply to be a teacher, somebody to present one of these workshops, so  [00:07:51] Hauwa: on Mary with me, we do have, and I will take you to, I wish I could type as fast as I talk. [00:08:02] Okay. So I would just share it out the link for the high level roadmap that Courtney did. So on. We do have a way that you can contribute and get involved. That link is right on land, but I will share it. And so if you want to be a facilitator and submit your workshop or create a social learning space, there are some guidelines, but essentially you just walk through and submit your application and the team reviews it and just puts you in. [00:08:44] Daniel: That's pretty cool. I know there's a few folks in the community that have said they were at least helping proofread and things like that. And to, technically read to make sure things were correct. And they were put together the past few weeks. So it sounds sounds like I need to get involved, actually [00:09:00] do some  [00:09:00] Hauwa: stuff. [00:09:02] Every month we, as a team, we discussed what we were going to do for that month. So we're looking at, we essentially, we run a sprint every month and we post out on make what we're actually working on for that month. So anyone came on, they would have seen what we were working on for January. And a lot of it was geared towards five point. [00:09:23] We're going to continue with that for February, and also look at some of the things that we identified during our team goal setting. That we're going to target for this month as well. So that should cause tomorrow, February, so we should be releasing that out tomorrow, but I will post the link just in terms of, if anyone wants to know what we're working on. [00:09:44] This is what we're working on.  [00:09:48] Daniel: Great. Let's let's move on to the next Joe you're you're on  [00:09:53] Joe: deck. All right. I, this feels like shameless self promotion, but it's something that I think about hopefully as evidenced by my question to how it's my website, WP learning paths.com where I break down. [00:10:07] Resources based on where you are in your WordPress journey. So I've got three resources for beginner, two resources per site builder, and then three resources for a developer. The reason I built this and the most lacking section is actually the site builder section. I don't, I haven't come across a lot of resources specifically for the site builders, the no code WordPress folks. [00:10:35] I was asked in another event the go WP, happiness hour last week who is full site editing for. And I think it's for a whole sect of no code people who can now make their way to work. 'cause you don't just need to know a page builder or you don't just need to know a specific theme to build sites without code. [00:10:56] I put this resource together. I actually I'm going to be, I'm going to see how far I can get with full site editing with just full site editing, even though I'm a developer. So I'll be using 2022 to customize this as much as possible without code. So it'll be my learning journey being built in real life, but it's also a resource for people who are looking to learn WordPress. [00:11:21] Daniel: Fantastic. And I mean that, this is awesome.  [00:11:26] Matt: The ban testing,  [00:11:30] Joe: this is this is  [00:11:31] Daniel: something that I've been tweeting a lot about in the past week or two. And I hear it. In your podcast to how you mentioned some of the same things and it's that it's that path. It just doesn't, it doesn't exist for some folks that are coming from outside of the space. [00:11:48] If you're not, and if you're not understanding the WordPress vernacular, if our jargon even the fact that.org.com are different, these are all things to people when they first come in. So [00:12:00]  [00:12:01] Joe: it's definitely, I've definitely made it a mission for 2022 to get some more pers perspective swapping. [00:12:11] I'm going to say between inside and outside the WordPress space, because I think you're right. People coming from outside the WordPress space the straw man is probably people who write WordPress with a lowercase P but it's the people who don't fully know the terms. They don't really know what to look for on the same token, the people who have been entrenched in WordPress for almost 20 years, I started using it in 2004. [00:12:32] Probably can learn a lot from people who have just started in the no-code space or who've been using Squarespace or something like that. So I think my mission is to connect the two this year and help them learn from each other, which hopefully makes a more rich community in both places. [00:12:53] Daniel: Yeah. Matt, did you have some say some? Did you have something you want to say?  [00:12:58] Matt: Yeah. I was, there's actually, and a question for Holly as well as which profile and I think Joe started to address it, but which profile of end-user. Do you, what do you see both of your the official learn path or Joe's path? [00:13:12] What type of WordPress user is this? I guess more specifically for how it's like WordPress sees every type of WordPress user. How do you even begin to prioritize the type of content or the type of educational content that you create, but show first to you developer, web professional end user, like, how are you categorizing your type of [00:13:49] Birgit: how to use one  [00:13:53] Hauwa: to get involved? Great bye. Make  [00:13:57] Daniel: cool. I know there's a few folks in the community that have said they were at least helping proofread and things like that. And I guess technically read to make sure things were correct. And they were put together the past few weeks. So it sounds sounds like I need to get involved and actually do some stuff. [00:14:15] Hauwa: Every month we, as a team, we discussed what we were going to do for that month. So we're looking at, we essentially, we run a sprint every month and we post out on make what we're actually doing. This is awesome.  [00:14:28] Joe: The ban, some more rich community. How do they use WordPress training teams  [00:14:34] Daniel: most I know you need people. [00:14:36] I know you need people to keep making content, but it's also, I think it's a marketing thing too. I'm like  [00:14:42] Joe: how do I learn it? [00:14:49] How do you how to use WordPress? Or it could be the official learn path pers perspective actually developer, so great.  [00:14:59] Daniel: [00:15:00] Let's let's move on to the next Joe, you're on  [00:15:02] Joe: deck. All right. I, this feels like shameless self promotion, but it's something that I think about hopefully as evidenced by my question to how it's my website, WP learning paths.com where I break down resources based on where you are in your WordPress journey. [00:15:20] So I've got three resources for beginner, two resources per site builder, and then three resources for a developer. The reason I built this and the most lacking section is actually the site builder section. I don't, I haven't come across a lot of resources specifically for the site builders, the no code WordPress folks. [00:15:44] I was asked in another event the go WP happiness hour last week who is full site editing for. And I think it's for a whole sect of no code people who can now make their way to WordPress, because you don't just need to know a page builder or you don't just need to know a specific theme to build sites without code. [00:16:05] I put this resource together. I actually I'm going to be, I'm going to see how far I can get with full site editing with just full site editing, even though I'm a developer. Using 2022 to customize this as much as possible without code. So it'll be my learning journey being built in real life, but it's also a resource for people who are looking to learn WordPress. [00:16:29] Daniel: Fantastic. And I mean that, this is awesome.  [00:16:33] Joe: The fan  [00:16:35] Matt: testing,  [00:16:38] Joe: this is this is  [00:16:39] Daniel: something that I've been tweeting a lot about in the past week or two. And I hear it in your podcast too, how you mentioned some of the same things. It's that past. It doesn't exist for some folks that are coming from outside of the space. [00:16:54] If you're not, if you're not understanding the word, press vernacular, if our jargon even the fact that.org.com are different. Like these are all things to people when they first come in. So  [00:17:07] Joe: it's definitely, I've definitely made it a mission for 2022 to get some more pers perspective swapping. [00:17:17] I'm going to say between inside and outside the word space, because I think you're right. People coming from outside the WordPress space the straw man is probably people who write WordPress with a lowercase P but it's the people who don't fully know the terms. They don't really know what to look for on the same token, the people who have been entrenched in WordPress for almost 20 years, I started using it in 2004. [00:17:40] Probably can learn a lot from people who have just started w in the no-code space or who've been using a Squarespace or something like that. So I think my mission is to connect the two this year and help them learn from each other, which hopefully makes a more rich community in both places.[00:18:00]  [00:18:01] Daniel: Yeah. Matt, did you have some say some? Did you have something you wanted to say?  [00:18:06] Matt: Yeah, I was, it was actually a question for Holly as well as which profile and I think Joe started to address it, but which profile of end user do you, what do you see both of your the official learn path or Joe's path? [00:18:19] What type of WordPress user is this? I guess more specifically for how it's like WordPress sees every type of WordPress user. How do you even begin to prioritize. The type of content or the type of educational content that you create, but Joe first to you developer, web professional, and user, like how are you categorizing your type of your  [00:18:44] Joe: yeah. [00:18:44] My, I mean like the courses that I create, or this site specifically that we're talking about now, this site specifically yeah, so I'm I'm going to say I'm optimizing it in search, but I don't know really how to do that properly. But I want this to answer the question, how do I learn WordPress? [00:19:01] This could be somebody who for a beginner, right? If they're like, I have no idea how to use WordPress or it could be the developer. Who's like, how do I make a WordPress theme? So I guess my target audience is people from outside the WordPress space who don't necessarily know. [00:19:18] Where to look to find something to learn. I wouldn't to say that this is probably not somebody who's like already a LinkedIn learning member, because they're probably just going to go there. Or not necessarily even somebody who who already knows who I am or my Gutenberg courses, because they're just trying to answer this question. [00:19:36] WordPress was dropped in my lap. How do I learn it?  [00:19:40] Matt: Gotcha. [00:19:40] Hauwa: Yeah, it's it just brought me to where I just tweeted out who can learn help. Cause we looked at this a while ago back August because the vision for land leasing and the training team is huge because you can impact so many different people. So you do have your users. Your extended, whether that is freelances or designers or developers. [00:20:01] And you've also got your contributors and your leaders as well. So it's highlighting, there are many different paths. And I think that roadmap that I shared earlier breaks down in terms of the sort of people that we think learn can help and the different pathways that they could go through or they could come from. [00:20:20] And to add to that, part of, like I said, when we had our goal team goal setting is looking at well, what are we actually going to focus on? Because it's so huge and it's looking at well, we need to have a needs analysis and determine what it is that people want. And by people, just not just our users, but also our employers, what are they actually seeking for in terms of the skills that they want to actually see candidates coming to them have. [00:20:47] Daniel: There's so much, there's so much content to it learn, but it's almost I know you need people. I know you need people to keep making content, but it's also, I think it's a marketing thing too. Like getting [00:21:00] people really to understand that exists there and in a way that, a similar thing that Joe has and here's the path that you should follow. [00:21:09] And I do see you have some things laid out like that there. [00:21:15] Hauwa: Yeah. In terms of, we, we do need a lot of bodies to help. So yeah, we need everyone really. It's not, the developers, the marketers, the designers, because, at the moment when you look at that and I know after the needs analysis, and there was a UX audit that was done last year, so that look and feel of learning and also change because obviously at the moment, when you go into it, it's just, you just see lesson plans and workshops. [00:21:42] So there is work on that needs to be done. But the training team is a small team at the moment. And so shout out to anybody wants to come and join and help me be more than happy to have you.  [00:21:54] Daniel: And I put a beer, gets link up top there to, for folks to who are interested in becoming a facilitator. [00:22:03] Matt: It's funny. I was on a webinar the other day for a piece of software called de script, which was very popular. And in the podcasting space, basically trans transcribed your audio when you edit audio through texts, instead of visually through wave forms and the CEO does this webinar, maybe once a quarter or something like that. [00:22:22] And I think it's one of the better pieces of software that I use fairly straightforward, pretty easy to use and understand there's a slight learning curve like everything else, but it's not tremendously difficult. And they have a ton of content and a ton of content. That's actually in the context of the app. [00:22:40] So wherever you're in the app, you can always get access to a knowledge base, article, a video. It's a tutorial and they do webinars all the time. At least two or three a month according to my inbox. And the CEO pulls up a person from the audience to ask questions. And that person says, gee, I wish you could sh I wish you could create more content around using this piece of software. [00:23:05] And I could see in his eyes, he just wanted to be like, do we not create enough already? And it's just, every person is going to want to learn it a different way. This particular person was like, yeah, but I want to start from scratch. And he's there's a whole course over here. There's an academy over there. [00:23:22] There's this three hour long video on YouTube. And it's, every person is always going to want something different. And even for an app like de script, the challenge for WordPress is just, wow, there's just, it's just a big challenge, I think for WordPress, but you guys are the team and everything is just doing an amazing job. [00:23:46] Daniel: Yeah. And to be fair too, there is a. Because I'm doing the WP live streams directory. I'm seeing all the different things that are coming across my feeds that I'm putting into our calendar and the social learning team there. They must [00:24:00] have at least four or five webinars a week, basically. [00:24:04] That's our kicking out. So it's been very fast and furious and they look like really good, attended webinars too. We're talking like, 70 plus people almost every time. So when people are interested in it, [00:24:19] Matt: Hey, if you're just tuning in, this is the first WP minute live session on Twitter spaces. WP minute is an experiment in community journalism and reporting news for WordPress. You can find us at the WP minute. It's hosted by Daniel shoot Smith. He's your navigator today. And the hashtag is hashtag w. [00:24:42] I am the creative genius behind that hashtag that is the value that I bring to the show. [00:24:51] Daniel: Absolutely. And it works well. Beer  [00:24:57] Matt: let's hear from you.  [00:24:58] Birgit: I'm going right into the social learning spaces, which is a meetup group, and it's also on the longest learn. There's a social calendar. But a lot of these social learning spaces, or actually there, I'm here to share a link to the first event of the Gutenberg developers hours an event where developers can bring their the problems, the questions, the code, that demos to an expert panel and then get answers from the various people and February 8th event, we'll have Nick Diego developer advocate at WP engine and plugin developer and theme developer, and then also Fabiana Kagy who books 10 up and has done quite some Gutenberg demo. [00:25:48] Development and also some great apps around and always keeps the conversation flowing. And then the third panelist will be Tammy Lista, who is one of the designers of the Gutenberg project. And also now works for SWP and trains developers there and has some interesting ideas on gradual adoption of Gutenberg depending on your skill level. [00:26:15] So that's what we're going to going to discuss on February 8th 11:00 AM Eastern and 1600 UTC. And that's all on the the repressed learning, social learning group on a meetup, you can do that, or there is also a post on the make blog. Because I put a proposal together to actually rally some experts together who wanted to be participating. [00:26:40] This is only the first of four events. We will do it every other Tuesday. So it will be a February 8th, then February 22nd, March 8th, and then March 22nd. And we will have a changing panel. And also after that, we do a recap with the [00:27:00] panelists, with the participants and see how we can improve the event. [00:27:03] And then continue doing that also in an Asia Pacific. Comfortable time zone because this is in the middle of a night for them. So that's my link today. And I'm just yeah, totally amazed. How far the learn dot WordPress team came with all the content that they put out just about for WordPress 5.9. [00:27:27] Yeah. There's a lot of yeah. How to use the navigation, navigate a blog, how to use drop patterns, how to use all those on the site too, there are some great events coming up.  [00:27:39] Daniel: That sounds great. And that is quite a lineup is so that I hear you. So that's the lineup for the first one on that changes each session. [00:27:47] Is that right?  [00:27:48] Birgit: Yes. Yes. Yeah. Some of them are repeaters. I said, okay, I will do all four. Yeah. We will also have George mama dish villain. Is there also Joni Halabi and I forgot, sorry.  [00:28:04] Daniel: Oh, that's great. And next here in the audience. So hello, Nick. The so at this, it looks like you can actually bring your questions that you might have. [00:28:13] So if you're trying to figure something out, if you're looking to get more clarification on something, like actually getting the folks that do this regularly to walk you through it, that's pretty awesome.  [00:28:24] Birgit: Yeah. And I think that's a missing piece on the parts because we develop us, we are mostly trying to figure it out themselves. [00:28:32] Get some examples, go out in stack overflow or wherever, but there is not a whole lot of there's a lot of documentation out there, but never for that specific use case. And sometimes you just need have an expert kind of walk you through an approach. Like I want to do this kind of blog or block, what would what would be necessary? [00:28:50] I do I use the sidebar. Do I use a tube Quantway extend the core block or do I create my own block? Can I do this what I'm doing with custom fields, what I'm doing with custom post types, all these kinds of questions. And yeah, those panelists will have some answers for you that you can make a better decision on how to approach things. [00:29:09] Because of course there are always 15 ways to skin the cat. But what is the best one for you? Is hard to find out something.  [00:29:18] Daniel: Yep. And that's where I'm at as a developer. Like I'm the, yeah, I'm still the PHP based HTML developer. I didn't hate anyone's warning to learn JavaScript mowers though. I'm playing catch up as we go along most my, and [00:29:39] I think it goes back to what Joe was saying before, too, about, the different pathways and people coming to WordPress. I also feel, the questions around JavaScripts specifically in react and how we can use it in the block editor and also FSC I think is really important as well. [00:29:53] So to have folks that have actually worked on this a bit to give that clarification that's true. [00:30:00]  [00:30:00] Birgit: Yeah, that feeds right into, if I may, she has taken link, which is a block seam generator that Carmelina NEMA she has been on the representative for a long time. Also has a website called full site editing and she just published a block theme generator. [00:30:20] And you can create different levels of the theme that you want to try out. And if you want to have an empty seam, you get the six normal templates like index single page archive for four and search the theme, Jason file. And that. Yeah. No patterns, no block style. If you want to have a more elaborate theme that you want to learn from then you can get the basic theme, which also has a custom template. [00:30:46] Has two template parts three block patterns, and then also custom block styles that you can put in the sidebar as well as additional styles for the form elements. And the theme gees on that comes with it has quite a few different variations there that you can adopt there, be it custom colors or being dual tones or being stylings for for specific blocks on a general basis. [00:31:12] And the best one to learn from is probably the advanced theme that you can download there. That has seven templates has four. Templates for pages and posts, but also seven block patterns. Custom styles shows you how to include Google funds, how to create a unregistered block styles and patterns, and also how to ha have filters on there. [00:31:36] That's a quite learning tools when you know how to code, but you also want to look at code and see, okay that's interesting how she does that, or that's interesting. I've never thought that would work. Yeah. But here it works. And these are great examples.  [00:31:52] Daniel: That sounds great. I'm going to check that out. [00:31:53] Matt, did you want to say something?  [00:31:56] Matt: Yeah. So just quick question, maybe maybe you're just using zoom for now, but I'm curious because of the lack of WordCamps and meetups around the world. Is there a different tool being used other than let's say just the zoom of screen-sharing something that is more geared to, when I think back to work camps, when obviously when the most powerful thing is being in person, but I would just see people, sitting side by side laptop. [00:32:18] Side-by-side, here's how you code this, pointing to that. Obviously in person, much easier to do that. Is there a different tool in place for this sort of like side-by-side coding, learning, or maybe not yet? And just sort, just zoom sharing for now?  [00:32:31] Birgit: No fun for now though. You mean you couldn't work developer hours? [00:32:35] Those are zoom meetings. They're not webinars so we can see each other. Everybody can share when they want to. And but it's relatively informal, but it's not a kind of sit next to me and to coding, what you, what is out there are several Twitch streams. I know Ryan Welsh. Has Ryan Welches, R Y a N w E L C H E R. [00:32:59] On [00:33:00] Twitch. He does every Thursday morning at 10 30 Eastern. A livestream about two hours where he codes certain yeah. Problems. So yeah. Approach a certain things. Here's done yeah, block, how you create a meme block or how you create a poll block and how to yeah. Walks through on the Gutenberg release kind of thing. [00:33:21] So it's and it's interesting to see how he approaches every project pretty much the same way. And then leads down. Okay. Yeah. For this blog we need we need to enter some PEX controls. We need some we need to add work with data. We need to display something like for a poll you need to display some hierarchy some bar charts and all that. [00:33:41] There are quite a few interesting Streams out there they're recorded. And then he puts them up on the YouTube channel on his YouTube channel. If you follow the Gutenberg times weekend edition, I most, most of the time I have his link in there. So you can go to the Gutenberg times the last Saturday, a weekend edition, and you will see a few links that you can follow on the Twitch stream. [00:34:06] I know Helen who Sandy did a Twitch stream on where she tried to figure out full site editing for own blog. It was last summer, so there were still a few bugs in there, but there was an interesting of yeah. Follow along. So that kind of thing is out there right now. Yeah, [00:34:27] Joe: one of the things. That I think going going back to learning JavaScript and code one of the things that excites me a lot about full site editing, especially as we look at the preliminary roadmap for 6.0, is that I feel like we're getting back to basics, right? Justin Tatlock had a really good article on the, on WP Tavern. [00:34:53] This is, if this is modern WordPress theme development, sign me up where he was happy that he didn't have to spin up no JS or whatever, anything. And that, that really excites me too. Cause like I'm a. I had Pippin Williamson on my podcast like ages ago and something, he said that stuck with me. And it's like the thing that I carried through as a developer is if he dropped his laptop in a lake, he wanted to be able to walk into an apple store, buy a new one and have it up and running in an hour or less. [00:35:27] And with some of these developer tools, I don't know if that's possible. So it's cool. That theme development is getting easier. I think it's going to decrease the the learning curve, especially for first-time WordPress theme developer.  [00:35:41] Birgit: Yeah, I totally agree, Joe. There is no built step in there. [00:35:45] There is no note jazz. There is no big rap pack kind of thing. It's really relatively clean in HTML CSS and maybe a little bit PHP for the functions PHP, if you need it. But other than that, you [00:36:00] could do this. You could even create a theme in the full site editor, the site editor on once you log into WordPress and then export that and then use that same on another page or site Rather it's not completely perfect yet. [00:36:15] Of course, it's the first first version that's I don't think it's ready for production. And it still has the beta level beta label. But it's going there. It does not need the full JavaScript on, but it also means that theme the, a lot of themes have a lot of plugins territory in their theme packed in like custom post types and additional custom fields and all that kind of build into their themes. [00:36:44] So this method of theme developing is more for. Let the theme be a seam and everything else goes in plugins a way. And that's right. Yeah. Joe, you got it. It's back to basics. That's what a seam theme supposed to be.  [00:37:01] Joe: Yeah. I love that. That's something I thought too, is that this is, I think this is the next step in the, the great decoupling, the true decoupling of themes and plugins and layout and functionality, which is great, which is absolutely. [00:37:14] Daniel: It's a big a big proponent. I love the whole MVC framework, the whole concept of you have the model, you have the view viewer, and then you have the control and basically it's separating those different pieces to it. And we always had that with WordPress, but not completely, but now it really feels that we're going into that direction, that you truly could separate, the functionality from the design especially with what we're seeing with the Jason and all that. [00:37:38] So it's a very, it's a very exciting time to be working with that. You get, was  [00:37:42] Birgit: there something else you want to mention? [00:37:46] Any questions?  [00:37:47] Hauwa: No. I just had one thing to add to when I think Joe was asking about, or maybe it was UMAT about the different streaming platforms. We do have a post out that is asking for guidance on that. We recognize that, it's not just that when people do want to use Twitch and whatever other platform you want to use. [00:38:06] So there is a person I think Courtney's shared it out on the space. So if anybody wants to contribute to that, so things that we just need to consider around, if you're using your logo use and subscribing asking people to subscribe, that sort of stuff, but just the different platforms that people want to actually use. [00:38:23] Birgit: Just a comment from Courtney Robinson that she would love to see learned over P kind of work with code spaces and be as code and have a way to actually have code along that line. I think that's an interesting idea. Fabulous. Yeah. And I know that Favian, Peggy was also working on a tool that lets you when you do a tutorial that lets you embed some code with all the yeah. [00:38:49] Where you can change it on the browser. And then copy paste that into your own environment, but you don't have to just to do the example, you don't have to spin up all the things that you need [00:39:00] even for block development, but he's working on it. And I talked about it on the latest, a change log because he was. [00:39:07] I guess on there. And it's a very promising development there. He got the inspiration from the react documentation beta that they have published right now. And that is definitely going these places. Yeah. Thanks for the reminder, Courtney.  [00:39:26] Daniel: No, while we're, while you're mentioning it too, I think react is another area that I just keep thinking has so much potential to bring in a flood of new folks into WordPress. [00:39:38] And I figured this, something around that to me is very interesting and almost exciting about the fact that it's this wide open frontier, but, we really haven't had any, large as far as they know any large, JavaScript agencies come in or any of the larger movement other than, the, we. [00:39:59] The whole concept of Gutenberg around react. But now it's if you think about opening it up to people who were doing other types of status apps and the types of things out there, and they realize the potential that they can do inside of WordPress with what they already know about react, that's where I'm, to me, I really hope that we can attract those audiences as well and bring them over into the fold. [00:40:19] They're [00:40:26] very  [00:40:26] Birgit: exciting. [00:40:26] Daniel: Let's see. We just had me left. Matt, did you want to reset the room? Are we good?  [00:40:32] Matt: Let's reset. Because we're professionals around here. This is the WP minute alive Twitter space talking about learning WordPress with WordPress 5.9. That happened last week. There's less alert and we're excited to have three great panelists on to to help us learn WordPress. [00:40:50] You can expect to see us maybe once a month around here doing some live Twitter spaces with Daniel shoot Smith at the helm. Join the hashtag link squad@thewpminute.com. The WP minute.com. Your experiment in WordPress, community, journalism and news. I think now, if anyone has any questions about learning WordPress or any reactions responses to what our panelists have shared today, feel free to raise your hand request to speak. [00:41:20] And as long as you don't come at us like crazy folks in the movies on. We'll bring you up on stage.  [00:41:30] Daniel: Yup. No pitchforks. And also too, if you have a link that you'd like to share, feel free to tweet that out and then hop on here to ask the speak. I'll go and do mine now. So share mine. [00:41:40] And I got to preface this by the fact that none of us talked about our links ahead of time. It just so happens that a lot of shows like that were from the make team and the specifically learn WordPress team mine as well. So mine was specifically about the training team goals. And again, you'll hear [00:42:00] her name mentioned a lot, but Courtney was the one who showed this to me. [00:42:04] And I think it was maybe even yesterday or the day before that That the trading team goals for 2022 there's some really great things in here talking about the represent representation of stakeholders and making sure they have the right the right people at the table to be able to be involved. [00:42:18] Also talk about the different methods and priorities and what obstacles they're dealing with. But one of the things that really stood out to me, and it was almost a footnote that I heard was the whole concept of certifications that that we are experimenting, or looking into kind of certifications in Q4 20, 22 around around learned WP. [00:42:38] And this is something I think that's, everyone has their own opinions about certification. The reality is people do get attracted to having certifications, especially if it's done by a body that, that everyone sees as the expert or the lead, body and whatever that industry is. [00:42:52] And so to me, it just opens up another avenue of just, professionalism and also just the that capability there to attract, those folks coming from other industries and other areas where they're focusing on web development to now realize that they can do this type of thing over here. [00:43:07] I know it'll be a slow roll and it'll be something that'll have to be done over time. But I think it's just very exciting to see that coming, seeing that as a possibility here and putting things together. And Courtney is actually requesting, go ahead, Joe.  [00:43:22] Joe: I just want to provide a little bit of context for this cause I'm sure Courtney you'll probably remember, but. [00:43:29] Actually, I don't, I can't remember if you were at the 2015 community summit, but we we talked about certification, like official certifications. At the community summit where you there Courtney? I  [00:43:42] Courtney: was, yes. And so community summit, if people are listening that aren't familiar community summit happens every few years before one of the international level word camps, I would say. [00:43:56] So for a continental level, they've held it in us. And also EU I was not present for EU and I was petrified my mind during that conversation. And there are those that have spoken about WordPress governance that were very involved with. That was terrifying me at that point in my journey. I will be the first to tell you as a side note I later went on to teach at a bootcamp and my bootcamp organizers, where I advised how much PHP individuals would need even front end devs seeking beginner entry-level roles in the WordPress product space and that involved sufficient amount of PHP for plugin troubleshooting type of things. [00:44:40] And we went through a course about underscores and learn the template hierarchy and template tags, but the students still were not yet at a skill level where they would be able to. Apply and pass the tech screening questions for one of the plugin companies. I'm not [00:45:00] naming names in this one, but they wouldn't have been able to pass that exam. [00:45:03] And I told my bootcamp, organizers, look, this is problematic. If we're tacking WordPress development onto a front end bootcamp. And they're like we need some official direction or guidelines for that. And I am very thankful and fortunate that my role now means helping create some of those resources for outside of the WordPress bubble. [00:45:25] Those that would do that training.  [00:45:29] Joe: Yeah. Yeah. I was. I remember I remember everything that you spoke about. I was pretty warmed up at that point because we also talked about dropping the B this is the first time that we had like a real community discussion. Banning certain venues for word camps, local word camps. [00:45:45] And I was pretty heated about that. So this was like a cakewalk for me. But I know the big question was who would be the the kind of arbiter of certification, right? Because automatic was ruled out because this was more of a open source community thing. And there was no real arm or a governing body, to use maybe not the best term, but there was no arbiter for that. [00:46:11] It looks like, learned that WordPress is the thing that could serve in that capacity as the place that can determine what is certification and it's backed by the open source project and the foundation. But I know there were a lot of concerns around. Who's going to be the person who says that this is a certificate, right? [00:46:28] Cause like Microsoft can give out certificates for Microsoft CIP systems and Oracle can give out certificates for Oracle systems, but who's going to say this is an official certificate for the open source project.  [00:46:41] Daniel: Yeah. So  [00:46:43] Courtney: in that context, learn is a great segue for that and why the training team will be conducting first a needs analysis and then forming a curriculum advisory board. [00:46:57] And then further down the road, we're only talking in Q4 about doing discovery and discovery would look like learning what has worked and what did not work from other open source and proprietary organizations that have pursued certification or what was great and what was not great. And. Tapping into other places that have navigated those waters and also hearing the concerns for instance of web development related careers, the training programs for those. [00:47:31] So whether people take a pathway of design, develop content marketer, factoring in what the needs are for guidance from those types of organizations, what do they need to get their trainees up to jobs, sufficient, ready to apply. And I think that's a really big area to consider. And I always say you could get the jobs, whether you have gone through and gotten the degree or taken a couple [00:48:00] of Demi courses, LinkedIn learning courses are great to books, whatever method it is that you learn, you can still get jobs without these certifications, but I see certification as more of a framework for here is what would help someone be proficient in various. [00:48:16] John pathways.  [00:48:18] Joe: Yeah. It almost goes back to answering the question that we opened this whole space with. Which is what, who are you? And where do you go to learn? What? If you have a certification path, then all right, I want to be a WordPress content editor. Here's the path I want to be a WordPress developer. [00:48:35] These are the things that according to the open source project, or according to whomever that you should know to be a proficient WordPress developer, I think that's, I love seeing that on the roadmap for the learn team or the training team.  [00:48:49] Courtney: Yeah, but we're interchangeable, but I, again, a huge, thanks. [00:48:53] I see quite a few people that drop in through the training team. And Joe, I know that you were part of the training team in those early years, too. We were a group that was centrally based out of DC and all of those areas. So it's been exciting to see the work that this team has put in and the meetings that took place to form that goal-setting were three weeks, three hours ish, each time. [00:49:20] So there was a lot of work. I want to make sure that others are credited and attributed to that. That's not just Courtney sat down and whipped out a post. That was a lot of effort across at least a dozen people there in the meetings. [00:49:38] Daniel: That's great. That's, if it's things like that, that I think it's really exciting to know that. There are folks that are interested in this kind of thing. And if any of you are interested in this, we talked a lot about learning WP here, and we've put different links up top there that you can also get involved with some of those things. [00:49:56] Matt Madeiros any final parting thoughts?  [00:50:01] Matt: No, this has been fantastic. I learned a lot as I normally do. It's pretty easy for me to learn from smart folks that come together on Twitter and in the WordPress space. So I appreciate a beer get Joe and how how I can't wait for you to start a podcast because you have the podcast voice. [00:50:16] It's about time. You start the podcast. But I appreciate everything that you do there. Everything you share on the WP minute same with you, a beer get with all of your Gutenberg knowledge Joe give or take, but Daniel, thanks for hosting today. It was fantastic. Everyone follows. Daniel beer, get Joe and Howard on Twitter and follow us@thewpminute.com. [00:50:40] Daniel. Thanks again for everything you do here.  [00:50:44] Daniel: Oh, [00:50:48] Joe: thanks everybody. ★ Support this podcast ★

Síguenos en: Hoy traemos un episodio especial de Perspectiva WP donde analizamos, junto con Juan Hernando que ya nos acompañó en el último episodio, las últimas adquisiciones en el ecosistema WordPress. Últimas adquisiciones en la esfera WordPress StellarWP (LiquidWeb) adquiere LearnDash Justin Ferriman proceso de 11 meses - Chris Lema pasa a ser General Manager Así queda la cartera de productos de StellarWP: iThemesThe Events CalendarRestrict Content ProKadence WPGiveWPWP Business Review.IconicWP Awesome Motive adquiere todos los plugins de Sandhills Development Pippin Willianson se retira pero el resto del equipo (27 personas) pasan a formar parte de Awesome Motive (Syed Balkhi): Easy Digital Downloads AffiliateWPSugar CalendarWP Simple PayPayouts Service Así queda la cartera de productos de Awesome Motive: WPBeginnerOptinMonsterWPFormsMonsterInsightsAIOSEOWP Mail SMTPSeedProdRafflePressSmash BalloonPushEngageSearchWP… y más. Unos 17 millones de webs utilizan plugins de Awesome Motive. Un equipo de + de 200 personas localizados en 36 países distintos Motivos de Pippin Comenta que el destino de cualquier negocio será alguno de estos: Un día pasará a otra persona, quizás por herencia familiarDecaerá lenta o rápidamente y en algún momento se cerrará por completoSe venderá a un nuevo propietario por una u otra razón La salud de su padre le hizo reflexionar Se tomó 3 meses de sabático para reflexionar  Dar el salto al siguiente nivel es muy complicado Además había perdido la pasión por crear software para WordPress Una vez decidió que quería vender buscó alguien capaz de asegurar el futuro de sus productos, trabajadores y clientes Conoce a Syed Balkhi desde hace años y confía en que puede asegurarlo Sandhills Development se dedicará principalmente a la preservación de espacios naturales. Pippin dedicará su tiempo a eso y a Sandhills Brewing. Punto en común con Elliot Condon, 10 años y a otra cosa mariposa. Episodio de PerspectivaWP dedicado a Pippin Williamson y Sandhills Development. Episodio de PerspectivaWP dedicado a Elliot Condon y Advanced Custom Fields. Episodio de PerspectivaWP dedicado a iThemes/ Liquid Web Otras grandes adquisiciones recientes WooCommerce adquiere SomewhereWarmACF adquirido por Delicious BrainsYoast adquirido por Newfold Digital Movimientos de talento Brian Gardner vuelve a WP Engine Rich Tabor cambia Go Daddy por Extendify. Todas las adquisiciones de WordPress recogidas en Post Status. Debate Trasvase de datosHay hueco para pequeños negocio en WordPress Is There a Future for Small WordPress Businesses? - WP Mayor (Si quisieras vender un producto/plugin: https://flipwp.co/ de Iain Poulson y Alex Denning + 6 preguntas que hacerte antes de vender tu negocio de WP en el blog de StellarWP) Gracias a: Este episodio está patrocinado por StudioPress, los creadores de Genesis Framework, el entorno de trabajo de temas más popular de WordPress. Ya está disponible Genesis Pro para todo el mundo, 360$ anuales que dan acceso a: Genesis FrameworkChild themes de Genesis de StudioPress1 año de hosting en WP EnginePlugin Genesis Pro (Diseños y secciones, restricción de bloques por usuarios…) y Genesis Custom Blocks Pro.

"Remember to put people before software and community before code."In this episode of Post Status Excerpt, David and Cory recover from an overwhelming week of acquisition news in the WordPress space. Four well-known WordPress companies announced acquisitions almost back-to-back. Next, Cory notes Michelle Frechette's article on Post Status about the challenging and difficult choices some employees of newly acquired companies may have to make.Also covered in this episode: David shares what has (and hasn't) changed in the WordPress space in terms of business and opportunities. Then he considers the possible ways developers can look at acquisitions as a whole.Browse past episodes from all our podcasts, and don't forget to subscribe to them on your favorite players. Post Status' Draft, Comments, and Excerpt podcasts are on Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, iTunes, Castro, YouTube, Stitcher, Player.fm, Pocket Casts, and Simplecast. (RSS)

It's the WP Minute! This is Kathy Zant and I'm filling in for Matt. This episode is brought to you by Easy Support Videos. Support your WordPress users by embedding videos and screencasts right inside the WordPress admin. Learn more at EasySupportVideos.com! You know the drill, everything I mention here will be linked up in the newsletter and the blog post. Check out thewpminute.com for the links. News time! If you thought the WordPress acquisition train was safely tucked away at the station, think again, it's full-steam ahead! Breaking news announced earlier this morning, AwesomeMotive has acquired one of the — if not the most — highly regarded brands in WordPress: SandHills Development, widely known for Easy Digital Downloads. Pippin Williamson penned an excellent summary of the events sharing what led him to the decision. Every business owner knows (or will eventually learn) that there are three possible fates for their business:1. It will one day be passed on to someone else, perhaps through family inheritance2. It will slowly or rapidly decline and at some point be shut down entirely3. It will be sold to a new owner for one reason or another. If you're a business owner, his post is absolutely worth the time. Liquid Web announces another top-tier brand is being added to their stack, one of the most popular LMS plugins for WordPress: LearnDash. LearnDash will join the Liquid Web Family under the StellarWP brand, which is the umbrella for our premium WordPress software solutions and includes well-known and respected WordPress leaders such as iThemes, The Events Calendar, GiveWP, Restrict Content Pro, Iconic, and Kadence WP.” You can learn more about how the acquisition went down in our interview with Justin Ferriman and Chris Lema. Highlights include: How long the process tookWhat you should do if you want to get acquiredSpeculation on WooCommerce and the ecommerce space Speaking of WooCommerce, they've announced the acquisition of extension maker SomewhereWarm who currently has seven products available in the marketplace. “This is a huge opportunity for us to help shape the future of WooCommerce, having a clearer view of the path ahead, more resources than ever before, and the support of like-minded people.” DeliciousBrains did a stealth acquisition of the ACF Blocks plugin, picking it up from the folks at Extendify. Extendify acquired EditorsKit earlier this year and the Redux framework last year. The fantasy league of WordPress We're thinking about starting a fantasy league of WordPress business & All-Star communi

Awesome Motive Acquires Sandhills DevelopmentPost Status CEO Cory Miller chats with Pippin Williamson, the Founder and Managing Director of Sandhills Development, about Awesome Motive's acquisition of his company. Pippin announced today that Awesome Motive has acquired his company — their whole team and plugin portfolio: Easy Digital Downloads, AffiliateWP, Sugar Calendar, WP Simple Pay, and the Payouts Service. Syed Balkhi, Founder and CEO of Awesome Motive, outlines the commercial plugins and notes the deal includes several free plugins as well. From Sandhills, Chris Klosowski, Andrew Munro, and Phil Derksen will be joining Awesome Motive as partners, and Chris will continue to lead Easy Digital Downloads. Pippin, however, intends to take a very long break from WordPress and software development.Sitting down with Cory Miller for some reflection on the past and thoughts about the future in the WordPress space, Pippin offered advice to developers and product owners today. He also identified what he sees as the biggest threat emerging for WordPress today.Key Takeaway: "The Biggest Threat We Have Today"

Today's a bittersweet moment in WordPress business land with the announcement of Awesome Motive acquiring Sandhills Development suite of plugins including Easy Digital Downloads, AffiliateWP, and more. I'm honored to call Pippin my friend who has helped me "grow up" in the WordPress community. I'm happy for him, and sad that he's retiring from the WordPress world...for now. I had a chance to sit down with him earlier this morning to hash out all the feels around this news. I hope you enjoy the episode, please share it with others!

Today's a bittersweet moment in WordPress business land with the announcement of Awesome Motive acquiring Sandhills Development suite of plugins including Easy Digital Downloads, AffiliateWP, and more. I'm honored to call Pippin my friend who has helped me “grow up” in the WordPress community. I'm happy for him, and sad that he's retiring from the WordPress world…for now. I had a chance to sit down with him earlier this morning to hash out all the feels around this news. I hope you enjoy the episode, please share it with others! Episode Transcript [00:00:00] Hey,[00:00:01] Matt: everybody. Welcome back to a special episode of the Matt report, breaking news almost. And not this one's not erring on the WP minute, but we broke a lot of news on the WP men. They go to the WP minute.com. If you want your weekly dose of five minute WordPress news delivered in your inbox every week, uh, this episode is sponsored by easy support videos, easy support videos, support your WordPress users right inside the WordPress admin.[00:00:23] Using videos. Check out easy support. Dot com why am I doing this in line with the episode? Because we have a special guest today, Pippin, Williamson, Pippin. Welcome to the program. Thank you, Matt.[00:00:35] Pippin: It's great to be back.[00:00:37] Matt: I woke up writing my weekly script for the WP minute and I was getting all of the acquisition news in there.[00:00:43] I was getting all of the liquid web and learn dash and what WooCommerce was up to and I was ready to send it to my executive producer and I looked on Twitter one last time. And there you were saying that Sandhills was acquired. My awesome[00:00:59] Pippin: motive. Sorry to screw up your, uh, your scheduling plan.[00:01:04] Matt: I had a donut in my mouth and I'm trying to type in like, oh my God, what's happening.[00:01:08] I was real newsroom, uh, breaking moments here. First of all. Congratulations. Thank you. Um, at the top of this episode, what I want people to do is an, a link this in the show notes is please. For the love of all that is holy. If there's anything you do with what I say here at the med report, read the blog post on Sandhills dev.com that Pippin wrote about the breakdown, phenomenal piece, one of your best, the best that you have written, uh, you know, uh, to, to bookend this, this, this book, this chapter of your life.[00:01:49] Uh, you know, it's, it's, it's actually an emotional thing for me. I don't have a question straight away. It's an emotional thing for me. I feel like I've been part of this journey with you. Have you felt that same vibe from others in the WordPress?[00:02:02] Pippin: You know this entire morning, um, when we publish the, the announcement that all of the WordPress products were joining automotive and that after a transition period that I'm retiring from WordPress, um, and moving onto some other things, uh, it has been pretty much a constant stream of messages from.[00:02:25] Friends colleagues, people that we've met once or twice at word camps and, and so many friends. And, um, from over the years, just, you know, saying hi, saying congrats, mentioning, you know, something about, you know, what we did together. You know, there's so much. People that we have worked with over the years and that I've had the amazing opportunity to get to know.[00:02:51] Um, so yeah, it was it's, it's been a pretty wild ride and a journey and hearing how many different people, um, have been impacted by the work that we've done over the last 10 years is an amazing way to, um, you know, maybe conclude this part of it.[00:03:14] Matt: They're in my, in the WP minute, uh, script that I wrote today, I said that you are your Sandhills and you specifically are either one of the most respected.[00:03:30] Product companies in the WordPress space, if not the most respected, uh, WordPress plugin company in the space. There's yeah. There's such a deep connection that I think a lot of people share this. It's what makes WordPress special, I guess, is because we all get, so the reason why we're all so emotional about it, or at least I know I am is because we all get so connected with one another.[00:03:51] We want to see each other when we want to see the software do well. I'm retiring from work. I was, I just ran to grab a coffee before we hit record. And I was thinking about some of the questions that I was going to ask you. This is probably a pretty blunt question to ask, but there's the side balconies of the world.[00:04:13] And then there's you and me, right? How do you frame yourself to be able to say, okay, I'm retiring with WordPress from WordPress. I don't even think the word retire is. In vocabulary. What do you think makes the entrepreneur your yourself as an entrepreneur versus SIADH maybe so different and has that played a role into making this decision?[00:04:40] In other words, we're world domination,[00:04:43] Pippin: really? So it absolutely played a role. You know, one of the, one of the most challenging parts of, of this type of transition is we have this, this huge history of, of, of customers, of our team, of our products that, you know, those don't just turn off those don't just suddenly go away because I'm moving on to other things.[00:05:11] What we have to try really, really hard to do. I spent an enormous amount of time on over this last summer is finding the best avenue for those to carry on for the products to carry on for the customers to continue to be supported better than we were ever able to do. And, you know, finding the right fit that ensures that that will happen.[00:05:34] Truthfully requires someone like CYA, you know, SIADH is extremely laser-focus. And driven for his mission of helping small businesses. And he, his, you know, the first thing when, when he, and I started talking about this in depth over the summer, one of the first things that I, I asked him is, you know, what are you, what are you going to do?[00:05:58] And what is the time, um, you know, do you plan to continue working on these and building these for years to come quick answer was, yeah, for at least this next 60 years, uh,[00:06:12] You know, that is something that is a huge amount of reassurance for someone in my position that is, you know, knows that it's time to move on to something else, but also, you know, agonizes over the details of how do we ensure that the customers and the team and the products are taken care of and, you know, knowing that he is committed to the long-term future, um, is extremely important to me.[00:06:36] Um, You know, I, I recognize a couple of years ago that while I have had an amazing time and I absolutely loved the last decade, I'm not ready to keep doing it for another decade, you know, I need to do something else. Um, so[00:06:56] Matt: yeah. I mean, it takes a lot of courage to admit that you've always been one, that's been transparent with your posts and, you know, income reports and all this stuff with, with the product and the services side of the product services side of things.[00:07:08] Uh, but to sort of put your entrepreneurship. Scars, you know, in front of everyone. Right? Cause I know what it's like to run a business at a very much smaller scale than obviously you, you and I had spent some time in a mastermind years ago where we were just banging heads with things that were just so uninteresting, probably to both of us, like talking about taxes and like when VAT came out and you're like, good, I don't want any of this.[00:07:36] I didn't choose to be the janitor and the tax guy doing this stuff. It's not fun. I just want to code and. You stumbled onto the success that you had, and it is, it's a totally different weight. And I think a lot of people are jaded in this space. Sometimes myself included saying he's got everything he wants and needs right in front of him with this busy.[00:08:00] But sometimes it's not what you want. And, and what you wrote in this piece. Uh, again, please read this people about family, your father, your grandfather has a deep connection to me because I started a business with my father. He started a business with his father and it's this lineage that has, you know, gone on.[00:08:20] So, I mean, it really hits home with me. But I think a lot of people just want you to keep going. And sometimes it's, it's not what you, what you want. And, uh, again, no real question here just like applauding you to,[00:08:32] Pippin: you know, the thing that I think so often people don't realize or think about enough until they find themselves in that position.[00:08:40] Is any, anybody who is, is heading a team or a company. When they no longer have the passion for it or the drive, or maybe not that their passion for it has gone away, but maybe passion for something else has eclipsed. It is the longer that they stay in that seat, the more disservice they are going to do to their customers and their team and all of the people that they work with in some capacity or other, you know, anybody who leads a ship needs to be the best of themselves.[00:09:16] As much of a time as they possibly can. Um, because that's the only way that you can do your absolute best to take care of, of your team, of your customers and of your business. And when you are no longer your best in that seat, the best thing you can probably do, if you can, if you know that that is a permanent thing and not just a transitory.[00:09:40] It's put someone else in that seat. Uh, it's hard to do, and it's really, probably even harder to admit to yourself when you reach that point. But if you don't, you know, that that's what causes amazing things to decline over time. That's what causes businesses to slowly fail and, and start to suffer is when, you know, obviously there's other factors too, then, you know, there's other things that can cause somebody to go downhill.[00:10:03] But when, when the captain of the ship is, is no longer. Wanting to be there, no matter what their level of dedication, you know, it hasn't been.[00:10:12] Matt: Yeah. How does that unfold internally at, or how did it unfold internally at Sandhills? Like when you got the gut feeling, did you gut check and, uh, you know, talk to the, the, the top brass at, I dunno, what, what you, what you title them, but do you talk to the top brass and say, I got this feeling.[00:10:31] What do you all think before. Dispersed[00:10:33] Pippin: everywhere for this one. It, um, it unfolded in a couple of ways. So first, uh, you know, a much longer string of events is I'll say that it first started to happen years ago for me, which was basically the day that I, you know, one day I recognized I had hired myself out of it.[00:10:54] 'cause I had, you know, we had, we had grown the team. We had hired, we had grown the dev development team, the support team, the marketing team, even the leadership team. And I re realized that like, I don't, everything that I did, everything that I used to do that I was passionate about is now somebody else's responsibility.[00:11:13] So that happened years ago. Uh, and that was probably one of the first periods where I started to like really recognize that, you know, I don't know that being a CEO is. What I desire to be in the long-term future. I just want to write code again. I spent the next few years trying to get back into code and it, it never happened for one reason or another.[00:11:36] There's lots of reasons. Um, you know, here, here and there, I would, I would dive back in and have a little bit of, of success building something for fun. Um, but like on a day-to-day basis, I never returned to being in the. And it, and that was where my, my true passion was. I loved writing code. I loved the, you know, just cranking something out and, you know, more or less building something from nothing.[00:11:58] It was so fun and magical. So that when realizing that that had happened, that, that transition where I was no longer doing that. Is the first step to what got us to today. And that was years ago, much more recently. Um, basically, uh, when my, my dad's health issues that I mentioned in the blog post popped up, that was when I, I think I really got serious with myself to admit that it was probably time.[00:12:31] Um, at that time I wrote out a message to my partners, um, and. Basically told them. I wrote, I wrote up this very, actually a very short message and it was just titled the exit is near and FYI. Here's basically the way that I'm feeling now. And I think I'm going to start having conversations. And, and that was, it was very, it was very brief, but then we, you know, we followed up and had a lot of in depth conversations as, as a partners group for the next several months.[00:13:05] And then, you know, I kept wavering. I kept going back and forth and, you know, deciding to, to sell something you've spent 10 years building isn't some, like, at least I don't maybe, maybe some people, it happens this way, but for me it was not like a light bulb moment. It was not this, you know, one day I just know, you know, okay, that's fine.[00:13:27] Let's do it. No, it wasn't that at all. It was, you know, it's this, this inkling, this feeling, this, this like weight in your stomach that says. I think it's time, but I'm a F I'm truthfully terrified of that commitment of that, you know, actually making that choice. So over, over a couple of months, you know, trying to figure out if that was the right move or not, I finally decided, you know what, I'm going to take a sabbatical.[00:13:54] I'm going to take three months off the entire store. I'm going to close slack, I'm going to close base camp. I'm going to close emails, disabled, all notifications. I'm going blackout mode for the next three months and see what happens that the, you know, our, our team was set up and so effective that, you know, I was able to do that.[00:14:17] Um, I was not necessary for the day-to-day operations. And so I knew one of two things was going to happen. Through that sabbatical either. I'm going to go out, get refreshed and decide, you know what? I love this. I want to keep going. Um, I'm back, I'm 100% committed and let's put the pedal to the let's hit the gas, or I'm going to know for sure that this is the right move.[00:14:44] Um, and obviously with today's new news that we announced, um, we know how that ended. I knew that it was the right move after I'd spent several months away from it. And you know, it just helped me realize that I'm ready for this.[00:14:59] Matt: Yeah. I mean, and again, I've known you for awhile. A lot of people have known you for awhile, but if you haven't known PIP in, um, You know, just all like the moments at word camps, replaying in my head with like sitting with you and you sitting with your team and just like whatever diving into code features, new product announcements.[00:15:18] How are you going to market this? How are you going to grow the team the whole, how do I get a great team chemistry? Like your. Like the painting that I have of you over your time in this space has never been like, how do I build this thing to sell it? Right. And over the years I've seen which I guess, like, I don't fault anybody anymore.[00:15:35] I used to have like really strong opinions on it, but now people want to build a business and sell it, whatever, Hey, that's just another way of going about it. Like you're building it to sell it, to acquire it. And it's all strategically done. Thumbs up, Hey, that's your way of doing it. Um, you know, and, and just seeing the way that you've done over the years, you know, knowing that this was, this wasn't the intention, although as you highlight, it was[00:15:57] Pippin: a reality that was known to have a strong likelihood of happening,[00:16:01] Matt: right?[00:16:01] Yeah. There's a, there's a point in the, um, in the blog post where you say every business owner knows or will eventually learn that there are three possible fates for their. One one day it'll be passed on to someone else perhaps whose family inheritance, uh, to it's solely or rapidly decline at some point, uh, be shut down entirely three.[00:16:22] It'll be sold to a new owner, uh, for one reason or another. I want to just shift gears a little bit in the conversation. Get a little bit more like strategic businessy, uh, on number two, uh, it'll slowly or rapidly decline at some point be shut down entirely. Um, before we got on, I was talking to somebody else.[00:16:39] Who's going to be writing up a piece on the business of WordPress space. They asked me a couple of questions about what I think about this and why acquisition is so hot right now. Um, I think that there are a lot of mature businesses like yourself, or like Sandhills, where you get to a certain point where, Hey, it's successful.[00:16:57] It's good, but you hit this plateau. And in order to get to the next step, the next stage. You have to almost build a whole other business model or hold a product whole or business. It's not just, Hey, two X, my effort now it's like 50 X my effort to get to that next point strategically that did that have a, a role in this.[00:17:20] And then we'll talk about awesome motive and how I feel like you slot into that, that suite of services. But was that a thing for you?[00:17:26] Pippin: Oh, absolutely. Um, you know, like any, any business that has been going for. Uh, while, you know, and, and at this point we were, uh, almost 10 years old. Um, the sandals development as a, as a company, as a brand is eight years old.[00:17:41] But the products, you know, it's been, I think, 10 years since we launched EDD, um, or close to it, um, you know, what, what used to work, what works when you're really, really small and you're new and you're growing. It's not the same thing that works today. You know, when, once you reset maturity point, um, it's a totally different set of challenges.[00:18:05] Um, and the consequences for getting your approaches wrong are a lot more significant. Um, you know, w at our peak, we were a team of 28 people, you know, if we, if we screw up and we do. Aim for the future properly. And we don't manage our growth and we don't recognize where our pain points are. You know, the consequences of that are a lot more significant than when, you know, it's just two or three people that are, you know, mostly just late night keyboard hacking and having a good time doing it and, you know, have a little bit of success with it.[00:18:41] Yeah. So, you know, when I said that when I, when I went on a sabbatical, I knew one of two things was going to happen. And one of those possibilities was that we were going, I was going to come back refreshed and ready to just hit the gas. We have definitely been at that stage for the last couple of years where we were trying to figure out how do we hit the gas?[00:19:02] You know, we're, we're still doing good. We're still comfortable, but the signs are there, that what we're doing. Is not going to sustain us for the next 10 years or even the next five years. There are, there are changes that we're going to have to make. Um, you know, we didn't, we ended up going through this process with automotive before we really had to dive into what those changes were going to be.[00:19:27] And so, you know, I honestly, I can't tell you what they are cause I, cause I don't. Um, but we knew that we were going to have to adapt our approaches and adapt our strategies and adjust, um, and do things in a different, in at least some form of different ways. Um, because it wasn't going to be enough to get us through the next five years.[00:19:46] Matt: I think a lot of successful. And this is, and again, these are just my opinion and obviously happy to hear yours, which just, you just hinted that really. But, you know, you get to a certain point where it's like, Like, if you looked at EDD or your suite of prod products, let's say affiliate EDD. So you have like the affiliate side of e-commerce you have e-commerce, but then it's like, okay, what does everybody want?[00:20:10] You know, with e-commerce is, I don't know, maybe like the hot thing of, uh, customizing checkouts or lead gen or all of this stuff. And it's like, man, That's like another 10 years, right. To like, think about how to build that, like the thought process on how to succeed with that. Yeah, man, it takes so much time and money, um, to really get to that.[00:20:34] So, and I[00:20:35] Pippin: thought a very careful planning. Yeah. I had[00:20:37] Matt: a lot of planning. It's. It's not like the concept of cowboy coding in the early days where it's just like, yeah, just throw another feature and see what happens when you say throw another feature. It impacts 28 employees that you're responsible for tens of thousands.[00:20:52] I'd imagine customers that you have, and it's not just as flip, flip of a switch. That is, is that easy to just change? Oh, that feature wasn't good. Let's pull it back out. Like no, maybe nobody will notice. Oh no, it doesn't work that way. Uh, it's very hard. Uh, I want to talk about finding a suitor for the company.[00:21:11] Now I know how SIADH found you because quite literally, I was at a word camp where I think SIADH was walking around, asking if anyone was for sale. This was like five, six years ago. And I think he would literally walk around, Hey, you want to sell? Hey, you want to sell? Hey, you want to sell? So I know he's got into your ear years ago.[00:21:31] I wrote a blog post back in February, 2020, where I predicted they would buy e-commerce. And I had a discussion with somebody privately that they would probably look to EDD to sell, to, to acquire. Did you look at anybody else? Did you have those conversations and what was[00:21:45] Pippin: that like? So when I first announced, uh, to my partners team, that I felt it was time for me to, to find an exit, uh, immediately after that.[00:21:58] I started reaching out and having conversations with people. Um, and I talked to quite a few. Um, I had. Uh, and I, I mentioned this a little bit in the, in the blog posts, but there were a couple, there are some requirements that I really needed to have met. Um, and so as I, as I started to reach out to, you know, people that I thought might, might be interested, I had a, I had a list of, you know, maybe 10, 10 companies or individuals that I felt.[00:22:29] Would fulfill the requirements that I needed. So number one, that, you know, obviously they had to be capable of doing it. Um, and, and both, you know, both from a finances perspective, but also from, you know, their ability to carry on what we had built. You know, I had no interest in. You know, selling, selling this to a private equity group that, or venture funded group that their goal is just to, you know, cash cow and kill and shut it down.[00:22:56] No interest whatsoever. So I had, I had a few requirements. The, I had to trust and know that their ability. Was there to carry on what we built to. They had to take all of the products. Um, I was not interested in piecemealing, the suite of products that we've built. We have a lot of overlap between our products, between the team that works on the products, um, and our customer base.[00:23:25] I did not want to, you know, send one, one, place one to another one to another, and then try to figure out, okay, what goes there? What goes there? What goes there? That just sounded like a disastrous nightmare that wasn't going to end well for anyone except maybe myself, maybe. So they had to take the whole suite of products.[00:23:43] They had to take the whole team, you know, no acquisition is perfect. No transition is perfect, but I needed them to commit, to taking the whole team, be willing to take everybody, you know, if somebody didn't want to go over, that was, that was okay. That was understandable. But they needed to have that commitment from day one.[00:24:00] If we're taking this as a complete package, um, and. You know that as we, as we had those requirements, um, it, it, we, it, it narrowed down our candidates list, if you will, um, pretty quickly, um, because for one, you know, we'd go in, we'd have a conversation and then somebody would be like, this is great. I really love this stuff.[00:24:24] But honestly, I only want to feel like it'd be cool. Thanks for your time. Maybe I'll circle back to you if you know, if something else doesn't work out and we repeated that quite a few times, uh, CYA. And I have known each other for a long time, uh, actually fun stories at site. And I have had conversations in the past, um, specifically around EDD.[00:24:45] Um, and I turned them down early on and that was several years ago. Um, so it's kinda fun to come full circle now, but with when, when I approached SIADH, um, and I, I told him very bluntly said, are you interested having a conference? If the answer is yes, here's my four main requirements. And if the answer to any one of those is no thanks.[00:25:09] Um, let's not waste each other's time and it was immediately. Yes. Um, so he, he was very, very interested and was immediately happy and will in knew that he wanted to meet all of those requirements.[00:25:22] Matt: Yeah. I mean, I could see, I could, I could definitely see like the negotiation room where like you're both in the room and then SIADH leaves and his lawyers come and you're like, Hey, we say, Hey, where are you going?[00:25:32] Like you leaving, are you staying up, stay around for this conversation. How long did that process take? Was it months Fido two months. But[00:25:39] Pippin: so, um, it, it's, it's funny the way that you characterize it, because while like, I think that's probably how a lot of people expected negotiations with sign to go.[00:25:48] Honestly, that couldn't be further from the truth. Um, it's when, when you negotiate with SIADH, when you sit down and have a conversation with him, it's a very one-on-one candid conversation. We hopped on a lot of zoom calls and we chatted face to face, and I never once negotiated with the attorneys or anything.[00:26:06] You know, it's always cited is extremely personable actually. Um, and he and I have always had a really good relationship. And so we were able to be very candid with each other and, you know, share what we, what we need. What we wanted, what our, what our desired outcomes were and what our challenges were. Um, and then, you know, when an issue was raised, um, you know, whatever it was, we addressed it and we worked through it.[00:26:30] Um, it was, uh, it was a wonderful experience. Honestly, I would, I would repeat the process with SIADH again in a heartbeat. Yeah.[00:26:40] Matt: Uh, we, uh, you know, Matt report listener, you can look forward to a, uh, interview with Saya next week. He's a little. This week. I don't know why he does things on his plate, but we are going to S we are scheduled for an interview next week.[00:26:53] So look forward to that PIP and wrapping up, wrapping up here. Um, yeah. So the hinting at the size of the deal, I won't directly ask you the questions. I mean, you are retiring. Life is probably pretty good for at least the next couple of years. Yes, no, we'll be, we'll[00:27:12] Pippin: be. Okay.[00:27:14] Matt: Uh,[00:27:14] Pippin: we are plenty to put our focus on you.[00:27:17] Matt: I like in the blog post, uh, you sort of say, uh, in the section, what's next for Pippin, uh, after finishing the transition period with automotive, I'll retire from WordPress, then put my focus into spending time with family nature conservation efforts, which I know you've been big on even years ago. I remember you talking about some of the stuff you were doing in Kansas, uh, in Sandhills brewing.[00:27:40] Listen, you, I like how you just threw that in there, kind of the Sandhills, really. But if anybody who does, like, I follow you on Instagram, right. For Sandhills brewing. And I remember it's this like, Hey guys, like on our mastermind calls, check out these bottles I made. Right. And it's just like, you know, You got like a six pack and like I made these bottles and then like our next call, you were in like your tub in the bathroom.[00:28:01] Like, look at my tub full of beer. And then it was, Hey guys. Uh, I got so many crates in my basement. Like I have to get like a rental store. And then now, like Instagram, you have people working for you. I see the, you know, the Instagram models holding the beer there's food. There's build-outs, that's like a whole, like you're not retiring from businessman.[00:28:19] You get a whole.[00:28:20] Pippin: Other big things. It's a pretty, pretty hefty operation at this point.[00:28:24] Matt: I mean, that's going to probably still take up a lot of your time, I'd imagine. And you run that with your brother.[00:28:29] Pippin: I do. Yes. Uh, my, my twin brother and one other business partner. Um, so we, we built two different locations.[00:28:36] Uh, my brother and I live about three hours apart and, uh, we, we really wanted to build this brewery together. Uh, and then we realized like, well, I'm not going to move and you're not. So obviously the next best thing is we build, do locations. Let's do it.[00:28:53] Oh, COVID tool is a interesting monkey wrench. You know, all of them. Everything about COVID aside. I will tell like the, the health and the, the stupid politics around it and all of the worries and the concerns and the financial sides I was telling you that that is one of the most interesting business challenges I have ever gone through is trying to run a hospitality business during a global pandemic.[00:29:16] I have no interest in repeating it. But it is something that I think has been a very, very valuable experience because of how many different things it taught us. You know, if you want to see a great like years from now, we're going to go back and look. At businesses that, that survived businesses, that failed businesses, that thrived and businesses that you know, everything in between.[00:29:43] And we're going to have so much valuable learning about building resiliency and flexibility, and like the ability to pivot in businesses, because that was what, you know, March, 2020 was like, that's when, when that happened. Your businesses that succeeded and made it through were those that had some level of financial resilience because do the hit the hits to the hospitality industry was brutal to had the flexibility and the willingness to change.[00:30:20] And then, and three, just the, the wherewithal to. Chug on and no pun intended, but like seriously, like that was a drag. That was probably the hardest thing that I've ever done in business was surviving COVID as a hospitality business. Um, and, uh, yeah, there's, there's gonna be so much to learn from it in the years to come, uh, as we, you know, are able to take steps further back and reflect on it.[00:30:50] Matt: Yeah, man. Uh, yeah, even, I mean, congrats on that. You know, as somebody who. Again, has been in a S has seen a small, uh, portion of your experience growing a business. When I see these things, when I see like the success of like, where you're going with that brewery, like as fast as it happened, I felt pretty fast to me.[00:31:11] I'm sure it felt, I dunno, maybe fast to you, but yeah, it depends on the day I looked at that. I was like, man. Yeah. This, dude's not long for WordPress, because like I know like, man, if I could just give up everything, I would just go cut people's grass and just be like, there's no worries about the colors I'm picking for you.[00:31:28] There's no worries about like sound audio quality. I just go cut your grass. You just tell me where to cut the grass. And like, that's what I would do for the rest of my life. If it could sustain, uh,[00:31:37] Pippin: you know, three kids you're years ago when, when my brother and I. Well, we're getting ready to commit to building this brewery.[00:31:45] Um, he, he said something to me. I think we were just sitting down late at night. One time. He was like, you know what? I realized why I liked beer and he wasn't talking about the why he likes drinking it or making it, it was why it likes the business of beer, you know, in the software world, we get this opportunity to work with and keep my, my brother runs a software company, 3d animation, right?[00:32:05] Yeah. Uh, so, you know, we get this opportunity to work with. Amazing customers and amazing people. But do you know what the truth is? Like the only time that we actually get to talk to customers, unless we, except the outreach that we do do with them is when there's a problem at the end of the day, all I am is a problem solver.[00:32:27] People bring me problems. Good, bad, enormous, small. It doesn't matter, but I just, I solve problems. You know, like if you've ever heard somebody describe themselves as, you know, like a code janitor or something like that. Like I was not for the longest time that my, my role as, uh, as the CEO of this company was basically to be a janitor, you know, because at the end of the day, everything that comes to me is typically a problem.[00:32:52] I'm kind of tired of solving problems. So the beautiful thing about. Do you know what happens? People come to celebrate. People are happy to see you. You know, when you work customer support, most of the time, people aren't happy to talk to you. People are doing so begrudgingly because there is a problem and they want, and you have the ability to fix their problem.[00:33:14] But with, with beer, people come to celebrate, they're happy to see you. They're thrilled to be in your space, you know? Yes. There's the, there's some darker sides to it. They come to more and they come when they're sad or upset. But in general, you, you are a bearer of good news and they're there because they want to be there.[00:33:33] Um, and that is a very interesting, like psychological difference in the industries. Uh, And it was so refreshing. Yeah. Yeah.[00:33:42] Matt: I can imagine. And look, if I had beer in front of me right now, I would raise a toast to you and everything early in the morning. Well, you know, it's never too early when you're selling beer.[00:33:53] Um, I'd raise a toast. To you and everything that you've done over the years, uh, you know, we hopped on this call last minute. I feel like I was rambling with some of these questions as a seasoned podcaster, but I feel like I'm just trying to hold onto the final threads of my Pippin in the WordPress world.[00:34:10] Um, like, like the Sopranos ending and just watching that last episode, like, I can't believe it's over. Uh, w will you show up at other WordPress events and do you have any final statements for the WordPress community?[00:34:22] Pippin: It's been an amazing journey. Um, you know, my, my current intentions at this point are, you know, truthfully to see what happens.[00:34:33] I don't have any short-term plans to continue working in WordPress, but I don't know what the future is going to hold. Uh, My, my goal and my hope is that sometime in the future, be it in six months in nine months, in 10 years, the itch to code again will strike and I'll build something completely for fun.[00:34:55] Uh, and it might be a WordPress. It might be something totally unrelated. Um, but if it does then, you know, I'm, I'm looking forward to that. Um, so truthfully, I, I don't know, uh, it's been work. WordPress has. Been a wonderfully weird world. And, uh, some of my best memories, the best people I've ever met are from WordPress.[00:35:20] Um, it's given me the opportunity to travel around the world and visit so many amazing places and see, and meet people from all of them. Uh, I, I realized something a few years ago. That was really pretty cool. Is that because of WordPress and because of what this. Community has made possible. I think I know somebody in probably every major city of this world, you know, I may not realize they're there, but I think it's pretty darn close because of just the connections over the last 10 years that have been made.[00:35:58] And that's amazing. And so fricking cool. Um, so you know, this might be the, you know, the end of my WordPress experience, uh, And I will miss it. I will, but I'm happy to end it on a high note where I know my team, the customers and the products are an exceptionally good hands. You know, the truthfully the future for them has, has never been brighter.[00:36:32] And, uh, I'm really looking forward to watching what they do.[00:36:36] Matt: Yeah, absolutely. Bravo to you, sir. Thanks again for everything. Uh, Twitter, I guess now is probably the best place or do you know anyone? You don't really want to talk to people anymore? Stay away from me. I'm come[00:36:46] Pippin: buy some beer, email me, uh, you know, my Twitter account is still active.[00:36:51] But, uh, I, I'm not very active on Twitter. I was very active today for the first time in months and months and months. Uh, but so contact me via email. Um, it's pippin@sandhillsdev.com. Uh, you can find me@sandozdev.com. That is that's still my place. Um, and, or you can find me at my personal website.[00:37:09] Matt: Fantastic everyone else.[00:37:10] matterport.com airport.com/subscribe. Don't forget to miss. Don't forget to miss. No, don't forget to not miss your, your weekly dose of WordPress news. over@thewpminute.com. Support the show by buying me a coffee. Buy me a coffee.com/matt report. Thanks everyone for listening. Thank you again, Pippin. And for the last time, please read the blog post, which will be, uh, linked up in the show notes.[00:37:33] Fantastic PR. To the saga that is Pippin Williamson in the WordPress world. Thanks everybody for listening. And we'll see you in the next day,[00:37:42] Pippin: everyone. And thank you. Ma'am. ★ Support this podcast ★

In today’s episode, Joe talks to Pippin Williamson, the Managing Director at Sandhills Development, LLC - the home to several WP plugins such as AffiliateWP, Easy Digital Downloads, and WP Simple Pay. He's also the man behind Sandhills Brewing, a microbrewery that focuses on oak-aged and oak-fermented beers.    Pippin retells his day-to-day hustle in running two companies in entirely different industries, running his microbrewery and leading a team of web engineers. He also talks about success in affiliate marketing, implementing processes, and hiring skilled people that need less supervision.    Episode Resources: Sandhills Brewing Sandhills Development AffiliateWP  Payout Service Easy Digital Downloads WP Simple Pay Sugar Calendar Leave an Apple podcast review or binge-watch past episodes Send questions to yo@wpmrr.com for the next Q&A pod Visit the WPMRR website   What to Listen For: 00:00 Intro 02:40 Welcome to the pod, Pippin! 03:17 Have you heard about Sandhills Brewing? 06:09 Why build a brewing company? 11:27 Time management while running two companies 18:14 Role change and working as a CEO 23:00 Delegating jobs and handing off tasks 27:32 The importance of implementing processes 31:20 Latest developments at Sandhills 34:07 Any new big features for affiliate marketers? 35:37 How does the Payouts Service work? 40:37 Ensuring that you’ll have a successful affiliate program 44:25 The billing structure has to make sense for the customers 47:50 Find Pippin online!

One thing the global pandemic taught us is we need to have a great online presence. This is especially true if you need to sell online – and let’s face it, we all do now. Well Patrick Garman of Mindsize has the knowledge and experience to help anyone launch and improve their eCommerce store. And he gives us some of his best stuff in today’s episode. Plus, Mindsize went through a bit of a rebrand, and we talk all about it in Build Something More. (more…) View on separate page Transcript Joe Casabona: Real quick before we get started, I want to tell you about the Build Something Weekly newsletter. It is weekly, it is free, and you will get tips, tricks, and tools delivered directly to your mailbox. I will recap the current week’s episode and all of the takeaways, I’ll give you a top story, content I wrote, and then some recommendations that I’ve been using that I think you should check out. So it is free, it is a weekly, it’s over at howibuilt.it/subscribe. Go ahead and sign up over at howibuilt.it/subscribe. Intro: Hey, everybody, and welcome to Episode 211 of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” The podcast offering actionable tech tips for small business owners. That’s the new tagline that I’m working with. Today our sponsors are TextExpander, Restrict Content Pro, and Mindsize. Mindsize being of note here because my guest today is the CEO of Mindsize. His name is Patrick Garman. Patrick, how are you today? Patrick Garman: I am great today. It’s a little chilly in Texas. It’s not why I moved here. But we’re getting past that. Joe Casabona: Awesome. As somebody who is born and raised in the northeast, what is a little chilly in Texas? Patrick Garman: I think today it’s 60s-ish. It’s been bouncing between 40s and 60s. I grew up in Illinois, so I definitely know what cold is. Joe Casabona: Yeah, you know what cold is. Patrick Garman: And that’s why we don’t live in Illinois anymore. Joe Casabona: Yes. It feels like 34 here right now. I haven’t tried to talk my wife into… because as we record this, we just got dumped on like 10 inches of snow. I’ve been trying to talk her into moving to Texas, as a matter of fact. And she was like, “What about California with all your California friends or whatever?” Or her brothers in the Navy. And I’m like, “We’ll get tax to oblivion in California.” It’s like too expensive out there. Patrick Garman: I can summarize it very quickly for you how to decide where to move. Joe Casabona: All right. Patrick Garman: North half of the country, too cold. So you got to be lower half. Southeast, too humid. Southwest is either California or desert. You don’t want to live in California for taxes and all those reasons. You don’t want to live in a desert. Pretty much leaves Texas. So then within Texas and tech guys usually going to be near bigger cities. So you got DFW, Austin, San Antonio, Houston. Houston still got that humidity. San Antonio is a bit too far south. It gets a bit warmer than I care for. Austin is not much of a travel hub, but it’s still a kind of a great place for visiting. Would never live there. That leaves DFW. Joe Casabona: All right. Patrick Garman: Within DFW, Dallas is too busy. Fort Worth is really calm and relaxed. Now we live in Fort Worth. Joe Casabona: All right. There you have. See, we can end the episode right here. Where do you live? Fort Worth. I am being pulled towards Houston of course because our friends, Chris Lemma and Shawn Hesketh both live there. Yeah. And my favorite cigar shop, Stogies, is there. Stogies, world-class cigars. Patrick Garman: Three hour drive from Fort Worth. I’ll give it 10, 20 years. There’s that bullet trainer. Fast trainer button. So it’s not too far. Austin is right in the middle, too. Joe Casabona: There you go. Three hours not too bad. That’s the drive to my parents’ house, from Near Philadelphia to an hour north of New York City. Patrick Garman: At the end of the day, though, in the winter, Texas is about 20 degrees warmer than Illinois. In the summer, it’s 5 to 10 degrees warmer than Illinois. So during the winter, what that means is when you’re getting 10 inches of snow, it’s chilly here. During the summer, you’re really hot and you’re air conditioning on, in Texas, we’re really hot and air conditioning on. Exact same. Joe Casabona: I like that. Here we go. I’m going to present the evidence again to my wife. The only problem—this will be the last thing and then we’ll talk eCommerce after this—is if I do move to Texas, say I live near Houston, I am a die-hard Yankee fan and I will be in Houston Astros territory. That’ll be like me moving to Boston as far as I’m concerned now. So I don’t know. Patrick Garman: It’s tough choices. Joe Casabona: I know. I know. Baseball. I see you’re a baseball fan. You got the Cubs pennant in the background there. Patrick Garman: I was a Cubs fan before they won the World Series. When they were losers. My family’s all Cubs fans. My mom I think has the little ID card from I think my great grandma or her great grandmother says, “Cubs fan for life.” Joe Casabona: Nice. Patrick Garman: So we’ve all been Cubs. Joe Casabona: Very nice. Another thing I see in the background there is Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Patrick Garman: Of course. Joe Casabona: So we were introduced… You brought this up in the pre-show, so you can relay this story, but I remember it. Lindsey Miller, friend of the show, introduced us at Post Status publish, is that right? Patrick Garman: Yeah. I forget which one it was or where we were. It was the big garage space and I was talking to Lindsay. I think I was telling her something about how my wife and I were married in Disney. She’s like, “Have you met Joe?” I knew who Joe was, but she brought me over and introduced us, and here we are. That was a couple of years ago. I made it sound like it was immediate. Joe Casabona: Yeah. Gosh, well, it feels like a lifetime ago now. The big garage one, that must have been at Atlanta, right? Patrick Garman: Yeah. Joe Casabona: Because the first one was cold and in Philadelphia. Actually, it was unseasonably warm for Philadelphia the year of that WordCamp US—the first year of WordCamp US. But not as warm as Atlanta in August. I’m really glad to have you on the show. Of course, Mindsize is a sponsor of the show. Mindsize is a full-service eCommerce shop. We know each other through the WordPress space. I know you do a lot of WooCommerce work, and you’ve worked for a few of our friends in the greater hosting space and things like that. But you don’t just do WooCommerce, right? Patrick Garman: Yeah. We work with pretty much anything that our customers use. So even before Mindsize existed, I had worked on some of the largest WooCommerce and Shopify sites that had existed. And then Mindsize was basically built on top of that technical expertise. It’s very few people can walk into a room and talk eCommerce on multiple platforms that are running nine-figure stores. It’s a rare talent. It’s a rare thing to have any experience in. The people can run large sites, they can run load tests of, yeah, we can theoretically handle this amount of load and traffic. And then there’s actually taking in millions of dollars of sales in an hour. There’s a big difference between theory and real life. So we work on a variety of platforms. They’ve all got their pros and cons. We always look and see what platform is going to fit the need of that site. Joe Casabona: That’s actually a great thing to think about, right? Because as we record this, we are still in the midst of a global pandemic. That global pandemic drove eCommerce growth 77%. Patrick Rowland was telling me 77% growth in 2020. That’s about as much as they expected it to grow in four to six years. Patrick Garman: We saw stores doing, I mean, basically their year’s worth of sales in the first quarter last year. Joe Casabona: Wow. Patrick Garman: I mean, doubling overnight effectively. Especially in the grocery space, I saw a lot of grocery chains that were quickly trying to turn digital and get to curbside. And then there were some shops that would literally turn their entire site off effectively and say we’re working on a new digital experience but they couldn’t take orders online. They had the platform and it just buckled under the stress. And that’s what we’re here to solve. Joe Casabona: That’s super interesting, right? Because actually, you mentioned something that I also learned in my… I did a project called WordPress Year in Review, and I looked at WooCommerce and the eCommerce space in general. It sounds like BOPIS. Is that what it is? Buy online pickup curbside? Patrick Garman: I hadn’t heard of that acronym but I’m sure it exists somewhere. If it didn’t exist before, it exists now. Joe Casabona: Yeah, right. But I heard that that the biggest growth actually happened there. It wasn’t necessarily lots of people trying to fulfill and ship orders online. It was like people selling their wares and then people coming to pick it up. Patrick Garman: That was true of stores big and small. Grocery was really picking up in the beginning and then other brick and mortar stores were adding it. I can remember vividly black Friday, Saturday right after Cyber Monday, my MacBook actually died right before that. So I needed a laptop to work. I placed an order on Best Buy. It was a deal because it was right. But I drove to Best Buy to pick it up, which Best Buy previously I don’t think they had pick up in their parking lot, but then they had it. I mean, it’s DFW sales all over. You imagine the lines that existed in the stores previously. The line was now outside. There was an hour wait to get curbside pickup at Best Buy. Joe Casabona: Oh, gosh. Patrick Garman: There were parking spots numbered up to around 100. So I found a parking spot in their parking and then we just sat there and waited for an hour for someone to bring our laptop out. The sales were still happening. And because of COVID, they were happening in the parking lot and people bringing stuff out. So logistics completely changed for all these stores. And I think they expected some of it since they did have parking spots numbered to the 90s and I think a hundreds but I wasn’t expecting that at all. It’s crazy. Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. What were some of the things that you and your… Well, first of all, Mindsize, we were talking about – what? 11-ish people? Patrick Garman: Yeah, including myself, 11 people. And only two people in that are nontechnical, non-developers. The rest of the company, including myself, are developers actively working on our client sites. Sponsor: This episode is brought to you by Restrict Content Pro. 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The plugin has worked extremely well for me and I was able to get memberships up and running very quickly. Right now, they are offering a rare discount for how I built it listeners only: 20% off your purchase when you use RCPHOWIBUILTIT at checkout. That’s RCPHOWIBUILTIT, all one word. If you want to learn more about Restrict Content Pro and start making money with your own membership site today, head on over to howibuilt.it/rcp. That’s howibuilt.it/rcp. Thanks to Restrict Content Pro for supporting the show. And now let’s get back to it. Joe Casabona: What did you guys see going into the pandemic? Was it a lot of businesses they’re like, “Oh man, I need to set up a website”? Or was it more like, “I’m online and I need to do something better because my logistics has completely changed.” Patrick Garman: We focused a lot more on the digital for businesses. So they usually had a website and either had eCommerce or needed eCommerce added. We helped a lot with that transition and bringing people to digital and selling online where they weren’t before. One of the biggest things I learned though from it all, in a lot of meetings with people, I would almost sound like the crazy, paranoid person. Like, “We’re going to build this for scaling even though we’re probably not going to scale anytime soon. We’re going to build it the right way. You don’t need 20 web servers, but we’re going to build it to at least run on two so that if you ever need it, it’s there. We’re going to build it in a specific way where it’s scalable. We’re not going to take the shortcuts.” We lost some work because of it, because we wanted to take what we believed is the right path. When COVID really hit and things really started blowing up, the sites that we were working on and built in that way, we didn’t have to go back and make it scalable, because it already was. We didn’t have to have that transition from “Okay, we built the site for x scale, now we’re at 3x. How do we go make it work?” We instead took all our efforts with our clients and put them into how to better serve their customers. Instead of figuring out how to sell online, we figured out how to better serve their customers. We worked with clients to build programs for people to better get their grocery and other items from the curbside. Hotlines that people who normally wouldn’t order online, seniors, for example, being able to call a phone line and place their order and then pick it up at the store in the parking lot. Instead of having to have that 70-year-old person learn how to order online, they just talk to someone on the phone and place their order. So by building it right, one, it was extremely validating because now I’m not the crazy person, I’m the person who just planned right. But we were better able to help people. And as a company, and as we’ve been changing what Mindsize is and what we do, that’s the thing I’m looking to get out of Mindsize. I [unintelligible 00:15:13] a CEO now. We want to help people. We want to make people’s lives better, make the world a better place. And when I talk to clients and I hear the stories of their customers, of the work that we’re doing impacting their lives, it makes everything worthwhile. Joe Casabona: That’s truly fantastic. And that validation is always important. I mean, I’m a developer, too, right? Not quite at the scale that you do work. I do different kinds of development work. But I think about stuff like that, too. Even being overly paranoid, but not really. Even we were going to get together with some friends and I was like, “I don’t know if we should, blah. blah, blah, pandemic.” And it turns out that one of their moms got COVID. And I’m like, “I feel totally validated now.” It’s nice to not actually be the crazy person. But that’s great. When it comes to kind of scaling, how much of that is coding versus the server’s stack? Can I set up a Shopify site and understand that they’re set up to scale so that I don’t get slammed if I’m getting like a thousand orders a minute or something? Maybe a thousand orders a minute is not a lot. Patrick Garman: It’s different depending on the platform. So Shopify, scalability is usually handled for you. I’ve worked on sites where a single flash sale could bring more volume to the entire platform than their entire platform had in a previous Black Friday sale. I mean, a single site being able to handle that level of traffic broke stuff at the time. However, they took all their learnings there of caching in their database, sharding everything, and put it at the core platform level, where every store, in theory, should be able to handle that level of traffic immediately and succeed. So for Shopify, scalability is not your problem. What your problem is, is that it’s very Apple versus Android when you look at Shopify versus WooCommerce. Shopify is polished. They are very opinionated. “This is how you sell this is how you’re going to do things.” And if you fit that model, you’re going to have the easiest time in the world selling. They integrate with pretty much everything because they’re so big. They’re going to get those integrations first. I think they were the first platform to have shopping on Instagram. Joe Casabona: Oh, wow. Patrick Garman: As a customer, I use shop pay all the time. I go to an eCommerce site I’ve never been to before I see the shop pay button, I click it, I type in my email, and away I go. I just paid securely. I didn’t have to enter anything else after that. WooCommerce, if you don’t fit the mold, you need something custom. You need that Android experience of being able to change anything and everything. But you have to think a bit more carefully about what you’re doing. And it’s less the server stack and it’s less… I mean, it is the code, but it’s knowing how to architect things. To be honest, when we run servers for our clients, it is pretty much Vanilla. We like AWS server Google. But any other one, we use the Vanilla services they have. Very little customization. And the reason for that is it works. I’ve proven it works at very high scale. But then also, if our entire team, the Mindsize team has a trip and we’re all on a bus and that bus crashes and we’re no longer here, Vanilla means that anyone can pick it up that knows AWS and continue serving their customer. So complexity for the sake of milliseconds doesn’t actually gain you too much because you still have to pay for that in the back end of, “Okay, how do we actually support this?” It’s 3am, our server is down. Do we call the one person in the world who actually knows how to fix it? Or do we call any sysadmin who can come in and fix that, and then it’ll set up? But really it’s summarized in two things in WooCommerce: database reads and database writes. Write less to your database, read less from your database and your site’s going to scale. Joe Casabona: I love that. I love that philosophy. The server philosophy, I should say. I mean, naturally, the more static you can make your site, will say, the faster it’s going to be. You’re just serving up. It’s almost like you’re serving up flat files, right? Patrick Garman: Yeah. Joe Casabona: If you do it right. But the servers are Vanilla. That reminds me of a conversation I had early on in this show with Pippin Williamson, who I asked him what his development setup was like. And this was at a time where everybody was like grunting or golfing or whatever in Node JS ran everything or whatever. I didn’t see why people were doing it that way. And then Pippin really validated me. And Patrick, you just validated me more. He said, “If my laptop falls into a lake, I want to buy a new one and be up and running in less than an hour.” And if you like grunt and gulp everything, like it’s going to take forever. You got to install Homebrew and then figure things out and then update or whatever. Like whatever needs to happen to make all that magic stuff work. So I think you’re absolutely right. Patrick Garman: When my laptop died actually and I bought that new laptop, I had to do the exact same thing. I have the same exact philosophy there. Git clone, run a few commands, import the database, I’m up and running. I mean, Laravel Valet does everything I need. Joe Casabona: That’s fantastic. Yeah, awesome. You’ve mentioned Laravel. Maybe in Build Something More, the members-only show, we can talk about Laravel, if the developers and the nerds want to hang out. So we’ve been talking for a while and we haven’t… I mean, we’ve gotten into kind of your experience a bit. For a lot of the people who are not developers who are listening, what should they look for? Let’s say in two situations. They don’t have an eCommerce shop and they want one, or they have an eCommerce shop and they want to improve it. Let’s look at those two people. Let’s start with I don’t have an eCommerce shop, what do I look for if I want to start one? Patrick Garman: I speak a lot in analogies. It makes it very easy to talk to my clients and get complex scenarios described them in a way they understand. So I’ll use one here too. Building your eCommerce shop is not like buying a car. When you buy your car, if you don’t get that feature in the beginning, when you first buy it, you’re probably not going to get it later. Unless you own a Tesla and everything’s, you know, paywall and every feature. If you don’t have air conditioning when you buy your car, you’re not going to have it later. If you don’t have leather seats now, you’re not going to get it later. Your eCommerce site or any WordPress site, or pretty much any site at all is not that. It’s something you can gradually build on. So we talked to a lot of people who want a site that’s everything in the kitchen sink, every feature possible, single sign on, have 20 different social networks. You’re doing two things there. One, you’re adding a whole lot of bloat to your site. It’s just not going to help. And two, you’re losing focus of what you’re actually trying to do by adding so many bells and whistles. Just focus on what your business is, what’s the minimum that you can do to get this out and launch it. And then continue to make data-driven decisions based on what you add next. So that will ultimately give you a faster site because there’s less code and then also you’re going to have a cheaper build in upfront. You don’t have to pay for 50 features if you can get by with three. And then you can get live faster, start making money faster, if it’s eCommerce, at least. And then use that to continually reinvest in the business, either in the business itself or the digital side of it. But if you already have a site, whether you added 50 bells and whistles or not, the simplest thing you could do, whether you’re a developer or not, is install Query Monitor. Just install Query monitor, browse around your site. Does it turn colors on you? Is it turning orange? Is it turning red? I think there’s like five different colors it can turn. If it’s turning a color in your admin bar, something’s wrong. If it’s red, there’s errors. If it’s orange, slow queries. So first, see if it’s turning colors. If it is, it’ll tell you why, and then you’ll probably need to talk to developer about fixing it. If it’s just slow and not turning colors, look at the numbers at the very top. How many queries are there? How much time is it taking to run? On average, if your page is using over 100 database queries to build itself, find a way to get less. If your homepage takes more than 50 to 70 queries, get that number down. And just think of everything exponentially. It’s not if one user has a hundred queries to build a page. It’s if a hundred users or a thousand users get to it. If you can knock 20% of your queries off, that exponential savings is what will keep your site online when there’s a global pandemic and now you have five times the traffic. Sponsor: This episode is brought to you by TextExpander. With TextExpander, you can save time by converting any text you type into keyboard shortcuts called snippets. Say goodbye to repetitive text entry, spelling and message errors, and trying to remember the right thing to say. With TextExpander, you can say the right thing in just a few keystrokes. Better than copy and paste, better than scripts and templates, TextExpander snippets allow you to maximize your time by getting rid of the repetitive things you type while still customizing and personalizing your messages. TextExpander can be used in any platform, any app, anywhere you type. Take back your time and increase your productivity in the new year. And let me just say that snippets is not all it does. With advanced snippets, you can create fill-ins, pop up fields, and much more. You can even use JavaScript or AppleScript. I can type out full instructions for my podcast editor, hi, Joel, in just a few keystrokes. Another one of my favorite and most used snippets is PPT. This will take whatever text I have on my keyboard and convert it to plain text so I’m no longer fighting formatting. Plus, if you have employees or contractors, you can use TextExpander to manage and share snippets with them so you all get it right every time. I’ve recently started sharing TextExpander snippets with my virtual assistant. This year, How I Built It is focusing on being productive while working from home. TextExpander is the perfect tool for that. Plus, they’re providing resources and blog posts to help you make the most of their tool and be productive. TextExpander is available on Mac OS, Windows, Chrome, iPhone, and iPad. If you’ve been curious about trying TextExpander or simple automation in general, now is the time. Listeners can get 20% off their first year. Just visit textexpander.com/podcast and let them know that I sent you. Joe Casabona: First of all, great analogy. I think it’s really important. Because you hear it all the time, right? “I want this, this, this, and this.” “All right, let’s just start with the first thing that you absolutely need. We’re just going to make it so that you can accept payments online.” When I recommend podcasting strategy to people who have very little money to spend, they probably don’t want that monthly hosting bill, I’ll usually say something like, “Start on Anchor. Have a plan to get off of Anchor fast.” I mean, just because it’s on your platform, right? And if the product is free, then you’re the product or whatever. Is that a reasonable path to take with eCommerce too? Like start on something that’s cheaper and easier to spin up like Shopify or whatever, their Squarespace stores—I don’t really know the pricing off the top of my head—and then move to WooCommerce. Do you think that’s reasonable? Or should we just start on WooCommerce because the… non-technical debt, but the migration path is a bigger pain in the neck. Patrick Garman: It depends on where you’re heading. If you are going to have a site and you know you’re going to have subscriptions in it but you don’t want to start with subscriptions out of the gate, I wouldn’t start on Shopify first because you will have to move off to get a good experience. Shopify and subscription sites, you can do it. If you want to have two completely different checkouts and have a customer that has to have two different wallets of cards and they can’t share them, that’s a terrible experience. If you just want to get up online, cost wise, it’s probably negligible, about the cost, to build a site on one platform or the other depending on what you’re doing. I mean, small sites, if you’re just throwing up a site, I’m sure you can find the nickels and dimes that you can compare back and forth. Joe Casabona: Sure. Patrick Garman: For a reasonable size business, something that is large enough that it can be your sole income, at the end of the day, it’s not going to make that much difference. Shopify, you’re going to pay a monthly fee, but you don’t have to pay hosting on WooCommerce. WooCommerce, you have to pay more upfront for plugins. There’s usually an annual fee for support and updates. Shopify is lower monthly because you have to pay monthly, but then it ends up being the same. I think it actually ends up being more expensive on Shopify. I did a comparison. If you go back far enough in my Twitter feed, I did that comparison to someone on Twitter. And I think it ended up being Shopify was like 30% more expensive for a subscription site. But start wherever you can. If you can get a site up on any platform, start on the one you think you’re going to end up long term, then you don’t have to worry about replatforming later. But if you can get up now on Shopify and will have to move later, everything’s exponential no matter what we’re doing. The sales you start now, just like your savings account will continue to build on each other and you’ll get more word of mouth, more marketing. Even SEO, you’ll have more age with your business. Start now. Start getting sales in the door so then later you can get even more sales. Any sales is better than no sales. Joe Casabona: Any sales is better than no sales. That’s perfect. You mentioned subscription specifically. But even if you’re switching let’s say subscription plugins or membership plugins, you still might run into the issue of having to migrate users, right? Like if they’ve accepted auto payments monthly through one plug in and then you switch plugins, they’re going to have to redo that anyway in some cases, right? Unless maybe you use Stripe for everybody. Patrick Garman: It is tricky. There’s a migration no matter what. Replatforming costs generally don’t benefit your customers much. It’s going to cost a fair bit for you to do it. Customers aren’t even going to care to notice. Sure, maybe it’s a slicker interface, your website is a little bit faster. They’re already paying you they don’t care. Avoid replatforming if you can, but not at the expense of just not even starting your business. Joe Casabona: Right. Again, I think that’s great. I always wonder… this is a small tangent, before we get into, well, I guess what’s going to be like the tail end of this conversation, because we’ve been talking for a while. I always was kind of annoyed that WooCommerce memberships and WooCommerce subscriptions were two different plugins because it was double the cost for me. But then LearnDash, which is my online course platform, LMS rolled out memberships as part of the plugin and I could dump WooCommerce memberships because the only reason I was using WooCommerce memberships was to create access to all of my courses, which I needed custom code for anyway. So I was able to replatform the membership part without messing up my monthly subscribers, because WooCommerce subscriptions was still at the root of that. I don’t know that I worded that right. Basically, I was able to replatform part of it because the subscriptions was decoupled from the memberships. Patrick Garman: In this case, you couldn’t really plan ahead for that because they came out with a feature. But any planning you can do at the beginning of what gives you the best long-term roadmap and the most options will usually work out better in your favor. We do the same with data. When we’re building a large site, we have a lot of data involved. How do we plan this? Your data is going to grow exponentially. Do you need 20 metas to be saved on an order every single order to do these features that you don’t even know if you’re going to do? Then you think about the exponential side of it 20 metas per order times 1,000 orders a day times however many days you’re doing sales. Your database now is growing exponentially, and all your other costs continue to rise. So we always try and look at the big picture. We generally don’t do individual tasks work for clients because that one little feature, if you’re not thinking about the big picture, you’re probably going to miss something. We had that experience recently with a client where they asked for a feature and we built something that achieved it. But we built it in a very specific way that ultimately gives them even more flexibility, more abilities in their site. And they actually asked a question in a call, like, why did you choose to do it this way? It’s a better result but we didn’t ask for this yet you gave us something that serves it and more. And that’s because we’ve been working with them for months, so we know where they’re headed and what the goals are. And we can take all that into account. Joe Casabona: I think that’s great. You’ve mentioned a couple of times now planning for the future is so important. I tell people that I was always most successful at selling my security package to clients after they had some incident. Like they deleted their site accidentally or whatever and I happen to have like an early backup. Or their site got hacked. And then they saw the value in paying me to make sure it didn’t happen again. But planning on the front end, like you said, it’s insanely important not just for the unknown the kind of known unknowns or whatever. But you were able to spend your time servicing your clients, customers better because you took the right moves early on, you made the right investments. It is a bit easier for us compared to the typical WordPress agency. If you think back five years ago or even further, they’re selling sites to businesses. And you’re always going to have that executive in the boardroom of, you know, we’ve been selling in our stores for 50 years. Why do we need a website now? The internet’s fad, it’s going to go away. So why are we building a website? For us, in the eCommerce side, we can sit there and say, “You know, we did this work. Here’s the data to show that that actually increased your sales by Y percent, plus that other work we did that increased it Z percent.” So you can show the value of the work being done. Whereas a landing page or a blog is harder to do that. There’s a lot easier calculations for ROI on eCommerce than there is before. So we are benefiting a bit from that. And we can show in a project or two, here’s the ROI of the work we’ve done. So we can prove it and get more work going forward. I’ll gladly take that as my benefit over trying to sell normal sites, which I say as we’re trying to get into selling more normal sites. We’re known for eCommerce and 90% of our work is people saying, “I’ve got a site and it’s slow. Patrick, please save me.” What I keep telling people is if you build it right the first time you don’t have to be saved. Sponsor: This episode is brought to you by Mindsize. Look, it’s super important for stores to have an online presence these days. If customers can’t buy online, they might not buy at all. And while doing eCommerce fast has gotten easier, doing eCommerce right still has its considerable challenges. That’s where Mindsize comes in. They are a full service digital agency that focuses on WordPress and WooCommerce development. But that’s not all. They work with Shopify, big commerce, and more. And they’ll work with you to create the perfect strategy and website for your business. Already have an eCommerce site and want to make sure it’s up and running in tip-top shape? Their flat-rate site audit is exactly what you need. Over the course of two weeks, they’ll dive into every aspect of your site and deliver a prioritized list of actionable recommendations to make your site even better. That means more sales and engagement for you and your store. Or if you’re a freelancer or agency who feels in over your head or with an eCommerce build, their agency support plan is built specifically for you. There were a few times in my career where I really could have used that. They’ll take a high stress situation and help you relax while still delivering for your client. So check out Mindsize over at mindsize.com today. They will help you make more money, whether you need an eCommerce store, whether you need to improve your current eCommerce store, or if you build eCommerce stores for others. That’s mindsize.com. Thanks so much to Mindsize for supporting the show. Joe Casabona: Before we wrap up here, I do want to ask you about a couple of interesting services that you offer, and I’m wondering how you put them together. So this is like where the title question could be, right? How did you build it? One is the site audit, which is a two-week process where you audit an eCommerce site. And the other is kind of the white label agency service. So let’s talk about the site audit first. How did you kind of come up with that and what’s the process for it? Patrick Garman: Sure. So we’ve been doing site audits, basically, since the beginning of Mindsize. It’s a process we’ve refined over the years. It’s a process I had before Mindsize existed of how to look at a site and really drill down at the high level what we’re trying to solve. In that two weeks, it’s not two weeks of hardcore diving into code, looking at every single thing. It’s not a line for line review with a site. It’s looking at the analytics, looking at the data, looking at where the site is, where they want to take it, and determining what issues we see for one at the high level. We’re not going to find every single security flaw, and that’s not what we’re looking for. If you were to look at a chart of all the issues on a site, we’re looking for the mountain peaks. We’re looking for the big issues that we can solve, get those out of the way. You’re going to find more afterwards. But we look to beat up the site and make it more scalable as a business and as a website. If we do that right, at the end of the two weeks, we’re going to deliver a report that’s going to say, “Here’s all our findings. Here’s what we recommend.” And every report also includes, you know, “Here’s our prioritized list. If this were our business, this is the order in which we would solve things in the timeline we would solve them.” And usually, it’s “in this month, we do this, in the next three months, six months, twelve months.” However long we need to go out, depending on how many issues there are. So we’ll list it out. Of course, we’re a business. At the very end, it’s going to say, “We also recommend a retainer of this size. This is how we can achieve everything we just said in the timeline we just said.” I tell everyone that we’re going to do that at the beginning so they’re not surprised. But this audit you can take anywhere. It’s a flat rate. It’s two weeks. We’ll dive into your site, we’ll figure out what’s wrong, and tell you how to make it better. And then we can do it. We’ve worked with companies who had their own internal development teams, and we assisted them to knock out the work. And others have just taken it straight to their own development teams. Joe Casabona: I mean, that makes sense for situations like that. It’s like a discovery phase, right? Well, a paid discovery phase, where I will tell you everything that you need to do. “Here’s your whole plan. I can do it, because I just looked at the site, and I know how I’m going to do it. Or you could take it to another site, another agency who will do it may be cheaper or differently, or you’ve worked with them before.” It almost sounds like this is like the car inspection, right? Where you’re not going to fix like the stains on the seats or whatever. But if I need new brakes and rotors, that’s the thing that your site audit will uncover and you’ll mention in the report. Patrick Garman: Exactly, yeah. And we have found things from API’s that didn’t need to exist. The absolute worst offender was…I think, as developers, sometimes we get specs that had buzzwords in them. And I think this one included REST API. So they found a way to use the REST API. But the way they did it, it needed to talk to an external database. So they made a REST API endpoint that served database credentials that were already hard coded into the site. The REST API endpoint had no authentication. So you could just get it for free. Joe Casabona: Wow. Patrick Garman: And then code within the site. I’m pretty sure it’s in the same exact plugin actually would make a HTTP call to the REST API endpoint, which then bootstrap the site again to then get the database credentials to then put them into a SQL query. Joe Casabona: Oh, my gosh. Patrick Garman: We find some crazy stuff sometimes. We obviously fix that. We find security issues. Sometimes we flag it right away. We don’t wait for the end of the two weeks. Joe Casabona: That’s what I was going to ask you. Do you like find it, and you are like, “Put it in the report.” Or you were like, “Uh, guys, this is the worst thing I’ve ever seen.” Patrick Garman: We found a few cases like that where we had actually reached out… Usually, we start the audit and we ask questions along the way. But we try not to get too much bias. And at the end of the audit, we do a one-hour call just going over everything with the store owner. But in those cases, we reach out, we let them know. We’ll usually have some sort of fix ready or a recommended fix. So we do sometimes find the granular, but we’re usually not looking for it. Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That’s story reminded me of a site that I was working on for some people I worked for at some point, where they were taking donations and the credit card information was stored in a plain text file on the server. I immediately brought it to the manager and I was like, “This is bad for a lot of reasons, but number one is you’re violating… this is not PCI compliant. This is a data security issue. This is really bad.” Patrick Garman: Unfortunately, I think we’ve all got stories like that. We’ve run into it too. I’ve been running into those as long as I’ve been working on WooCommerce, which is starting around like version 1.1. Joe Casabona: Wow. It’s just like crazy. Because the first time a client brought that to me, I was still in college. They said that they were like raffling off a house, like a million-dollar home, and PayPal view that as gambling, so we couldn’t use PayPal. So they’re like, “Well, why don’t we just save the credit card information then we could process it on our end on our machine.” And I’m like, “You can’t do that. We’re not allowed to do that. It’s bad. People’s credit cards will get stolen.” I knew that as a college kid. I just don’t understand how it gets to a point where, I mean, I guess it’s just like my nephew can make a site and he’s just going to do whatever I tell him to do. Patrick Garman: Is that the guy I mentioned or referred to before, the executive in the boardroom that thinks the internet is a fad, yeah, let’s just get the credit cards, we’ll run them. Joe Casabona: That’s a good point actually. The CEO of that company is the person who made that recommendation. Thankfully for them and me, I was like, “We can’t do that.” Which brings me to your next service, the White Label eCommerce. Because that project, to use an Italian term, gave me agita. Once I saw that it was going sideways, it made me actually sick to my stomach. It was like the highest stakes site I’d ever worked on, and I didn’t have like the breadth of experience I thought I needed. I really could have probably used your white label service. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about that. Patrick Garman: I don’t remember where I first heard this phrase, but experience is what you needed when you didn’t have it. I’ve talked to a number of site owners, agency owners, I’ve talked to a lot of people in the eCommerce space. Mindsize, we’re 11 people. We’re not a tiny company but we’re not a huge company. We consider ourselves experts on the work we’re doing. So we charge accordingly. We’re not the cheapest, we’re not the most expensive either. But there’s a lot of work that other people can do with some simple guidance. Something where you can build it. Joe, you’ve got development skills. If I told you how to build something, you could build it. You just need the blueprint for how to build it, which you don’t have. As a company and me personally, I try and give back a lot to the community. My entire career is built on the community effectively. I got a lot of information from it. I’m the developer I am today with a lot of the code reuse I got previously. So I try and get back to the community. I try and do a lot of talks just sharing information. But at the end of the day, there’s only so much I can share. Our agency support plan, though, it’s $499 a month and basically gets you direct access to the Mindsize architects. So in our projects, we have the project manager, we have an architect and a project lead and then the developers on it. So an architect would be someone like myself. I can take the business needs and turn it into the architectural plans for a project or a task that we’re doing. Once we have that spec, we can then work with the project manager and project lead to turn it into what the tasks are and then have the developers do it. So with this plan, $500 bucks a month, you get five support hours with our architects. You could use those for asking, “Hey, I need to build this plugin. How do I make sure it’s scalable?” It could be “what kind of hosting should I look for this type of site?” One of the first questions I ask when we’re hiring and I’m in second interviews is, “What is your recommended hosting.” And for 90% of people in our interviews, it’s usually a shared hosting. And there’s different levels. I get all the way from Bluehost, to GoDaddy, to Siteground, one on one, all the big names that popped up. That goes to show you even people who are getting to our second interviews of senior developers may not know what the best hosting for a different type of site is. And our architects do. So, five hours a month, you can ask quite a few questions. If you were to ask me, What do I do to find out how the site is slow, and I tell you, “Install Query Monitor, look for pretty colors,” we’re going to have that conversation in five to 15 minutes. So you get that benefit of being able to ask questions to people you trust will get an answer to you within a day, you know, business days. I think, for most people will get a Slack channel set up to use. There’s quick and easy access. But what I’ve learned the most from other business owners and agency owners is we have nowhere to turn for this stuff. We’ll try slack, we’ll try different communities, we’ll try online. And I wish I could just have these questions. $500, for some people, it’s too expensive. For small mom-and-pop shops, they’re probably not going to pay $500 for support. But for a decent-sized agency that just needs this extra level of support, it seems like the right price point. And on top of that, I actually saw recently in some of the Facebook groups I’m in with different smaller freelancers and agency owners, how do you take vacation if you’re solo? Who do you give your clients off to? With our agency support plan, we also have an opportunity for getting our development hours at a discounted rate. So if you need to just have us do some work for you either for a large project or for someone who just wants someone to watch the ship while they’re away and having a vacation, they deserve to finally take, our teams available to help with that too. So we think we’re experts in what we do and we’re trying to share that in a way that benefits everyone involved—as you’re probably not going to ask the same question multiple times. So once we answer something for you, you’re going to learn from that, continue to know it, it will better your business as well. Joe Casabona: I think that’s great. There’s two points I want to just kind of drive home here. $500 a month you say might seem expensive to maybe freelancers or small mom and pop shops. But if you can sell an eCommerce site, right… I mean, I don’t want to anchor a price to an eCommerce site, but when people come to me, I say an eCommerce site sell at $10,000 for me to do the basics. Whatever, right? One guy came to me and needed like 10,000 products, medical products on the site. And I was like, “That’s going to be $30,000.” He’s like, “That’s expensive.” And I’m like, “Like, “It is $3 per product. $3 per product is what I’m charging you.” But if you sell on eCommerce site, you’re probably selling it where you can add in that extra 500 bucks a month to get access to deliver an even better site. The value that you are going to add by paying that 500 bucks is going to be much more than 500 bucks to the client. Patrick Garman: And if you think of the hourly rate, someone who’s going to be interested in this and is probably charging, it’s going to be somewhere…I’m assuming, $50 to $75 to like $100 $125 an hour. $500 monthly, that’s an hour to a week extra. If we can answer questions for you that can get you back an hour or two a week to better serve your own clients and immediately has ROI. Joe Casabona: Right, exactly. Spend that hour, go on a podcast. That’s a little bit of marketing to maybe get more clients, right? Patrick Garman: That’s what I’m doing. Joe Casabona: Yeah, exactly. The other thing is you mentioned taking vacation time and getting people to cover for you. I think this is another important thing that it’s easy for solo shops to overlook. But find somebody like a friend or Mindsize. When I went on my honeymoon, two weeks in Italy did not even take my laptop. I barely had internet. I asked my friend Matt Pritchett, Fort Worth natives, right? I think he’s living in Tennessee now. I’m sorry, Matt, you’ve moved a lot and I’ve lost track. But I asked him, I’m like, “Hey, man, I’ll just forward my emails to you. If there’s a problem with one of my clients’ sites, do the work, “I’ll pay you when I get home.” There were shocker there were no insane emergencies. So I think it’s really important. It’s maybe hard for some people but take that time. Take that time to yourself. Patrick Garman: We’re all working too hard. I mean, between the work I was doing prior to Mindsize, and then starting an agency, and then also just getting through a pandemic, I mean, as a business—not all businesses were as fortunate as we were to survive even in 2020—but I took my first vacation where I wasn’t working in 10 years last year. Joe Casabona: Wow. Patrick Garman: I spent a week. I did have my laptop on me. So I didn’t go that far. I’m too paranoid to not bring it with, but I trusted the team we have. Over the course of 2020, we put a lot of processes and policies in place that enabled me to finally take a vacation. I mean, I had taken trips to Disney and I was sitting in our resort room working. Joe Casabona: I worked from the Disney Vacation Club members lounge in Epcot one day. I had my laptop with me. It was kind of planned. It was like a half vacation day but I have my laptop with me. I’ll tell you. I mean, working at Disney World makes working a little less bad, but I’d still rather be. Patrick Garman: Yeah. It’s better not to. But walking down Main Street with my phone out on slack trying to tell someone how to reboot a server, that’s not what I should be doing on Main Street. Joe Casabona: Amazing. Well, this has been a fantastic conversation. I do need to ask you my favorite question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us? Patrick Garman: I’ve kind of given them away a little bit. But at the end of the day, for an eCommerce site or any site, keep it simple. I mean, that’s number one. Simplicity is going to make everything better. I run into that every week where someone’s trying to overthink a problem or clients building content had a scenario yesterday. One of our clients building content on a page and the page builders alert block that was there, when you click “dismiss,” it would throw the page out of whack a bit. So I have a question, “Do you need it dismissable?” “No. Okay, so don’t make a dismissable. It’s simpler content, and it’s not going to break.” We could spend five hours figuring out why the “dismiss” button is making the content go out of whack. But we have a problem now, so we solve it now with a simple solution. And number two is just look at your database queries. If you have an eCommerce site and it’s on WooCommerce, install Query Monitor. It’s free. It’s not that hard to use. How many queries are you running? How much can you get rid of? The less you do by keeping it simple, your site’s going to go farther, and be faster. Joe Casabona: Love it. And Query Monitor is fantastic. I think Brian Richards, friend of the show, recommended that plug in to me when I was having some issue. Well, this has been fantastic. What we haven’t touched on, which we’ll touch on in Build Something More, is you recently went through a rebrand and I would love to hear more about that because I just signed up as we record this for Design Pickle. So now I have a graphic designer who I love his work. I’m just so excited to have all of the things that I designed which is basically just like a font redesigned from a real person, a real graphic designer. So excited to talk about that in Build Something More. But first, Patrick, where can people find you? Patrick Garman: I’m usually on Twitter. My personal tag is @pmgarman. I’m not AGPS. You can also find Mindsize there @Mindsizeme, and then my own website Pmgarman.me and mindsize.com. Joe Casabona: All right. I will have links to those and everything we talked about in the show notes over at howibuilt.it/211. If you want to catch my discussion with Patrick on the rebrand and Build Something More, and you are not yet a member, you can sign up over at buildsomething.club. Thanks so much to our sponsors for this episode: TextExpander, Restrict Content Pro, and of course Mindsize. Thanks so much for listening. Patrick, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Patrick Garman: Yeah, no problem. Happy to be here. Joe Casabona: And until next time, get out there and build something. Sponsored by:Mindsize: Your WooCommerce Partner Restrict Content Pro: Launch your membership site TextExpander: Get 20% off your first year by visiting the this link. Source

Pippin Williamson lleva más 10 años creando plugins y es el creador de algunos de los plugins más reconocidos de WordPress como Easy Digital Downloads o AffiliateWP. Vamos a realizar un repaso cronológico sobre la evolución de su negocio haciendo hincapié en esos factores que no parecen la clave de su éxito o  2009 – […]

Síguenos en: Pippin Williamson lleva más 10 años creando plugins y es el creador de algunos de los plugins más reconocidos de WordPress como Easy Digital Downloads o AffiliateWP. Vamos a realizar un repaso cronológico sobre la evolución de su negocio haciendo hincapié en esos factores que no parecen la clave de su éxito o 2009 - 2011 Desde 2009 a 2013 trabajó bajo su marca personal Pippin Plugins. 2012 Ingresos → 68.496$ (Easy Content Types y Restrict Content Pro)Lanzamiento de Easy Digital Downloads. 2013 Ingresos → 360.000$ (Easy Digital Downloads)Cambio de nombre a Pippin's Pages, LLC. 2014 Ingresos → 782.000$ (Easy Digital Downloads + AffiliateWP)Primer empleado.Lanzamiento de AffiliateWP.Affiliate WP nació de una necesidad/resolver problema. La herramientas que usaban problemas.Limitaciones Envato 2015 Ingresos → 1.139.500$ (Easy Digital Downloads + AffiliateWP)12 empleados + freelancers (+11).Cambio de nombre a Sandhills Development, LLC para dejar atrás la marca. personalTuvieron que esforzarse en comunicar la nueva marca durante 2016-2017. → Reflexión: Marca personal vs marca corporativa 2016 Ingresos → 1.480.375$ (Easy Digital Downloads + AffiliateWP)15 empleados (+2).Crecimiento lento, 1-3 empleados al año. (3-12 meses salario en banca) → Reflexión crecimiento lento Condiciones empleados buenas basado en "It doest have to be crazy at work" de jefes de Basecamp (Aquí tienes todos los libros de Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson) 2017 Ingresos → 2.268.000$ (Easy Digital Downloads + AffiliateWP)15 empleados.Despedir a dos personas.Subidas de precios en los principales plugins.Simplificar pricing (3 planes anuales) / reducir fricción muchos pagos 800.000 webs con EDD - 30-40.000 clientes EDDSubir precios 2x hace 4 años, roll back priceRecurring payments viene de cuando ellos pasaron a modelo de suscripción. Primero custom code, luego addonCerrar marketplace de EDD y adquirir los addons (unos 40) que les interesaban.Creación de Sandhills Brewing.Diversificar cervecería y conservación espacios naturales. → Reflexión sobre los valores 2018 Ingresos → 2.747.500$ (AffiliateWP + Easy Digital Downloads)19 empleados (+4).Vendió varios plugins de Pippin's plugins.Compra de WP Simple Pay.Marcha de John ParrisParó durante 1 año por motivo de un burn out → Reflexión de darse la oportunidad de parar 2019 Ingresos → 3.454.759$ (AffiliateWP + Easy Digital Downloads)Nóminas → 1.874.802$24 empleados (+6).Pagar igual independientemente de sus características. 2020 Ingresos → 3.721.934$  (AffiliateWP + Easy Digital Downloads)26 empleados (+2), distribuidas en 5 países.6 incorporaciones (700 solicitudes de trabajo)Sueldos públicos Resolución para reducir huella de carbono y convertirse en carbon-negative:Comprar terrenos (tallgrass prairie) → secuestra CO2Instalación solarPlantar árboles Venta de Restrict Content Pro a iThemes / Liquid webEstaban abiertos a negociarGanar focoMejorar soporte AffiliateWP Subida de precio de 50€Eliminar la opción LifetimeAumento del 24,5% en gananciasProducto que más ingresos supone Easy Digital Downloads Equipo core totalmente formado por mujeresVersión 3.0 en el horizonteDecremento del 6,86% en ganancias Sugar Calendar Aumento del 52,94% en gananciasMenos de 15.000$ WP Simple PayAumento del 41,49% en ganancias Payouts + Sandhills Brewing + Compras de inmuebles Valores de Sandhills Development: CRAFTING INGENUITY: With commitment and a deep appreciation for the human element, we aim to craft superior experiences through ingenuity. ConservarDevolver tiempoLibertad (de ubicación)Promover la diversidadPensar a largo plazoAsumir buenas intencionesAdherirse a estándares estrictosSer honesto Publica anualmente resúmenes anuales compartiendo muchos datos interesantes de su negocio. Desde 2012: 2020 Year in Review – Sandhills Development, LLC Enlaces actuales a los proyectos: Pippins PluginsSandhills DevelopmentSandhills Brewing Gracias a: Este episodio está patrocinado por StudioPress, los creadores de Genesis Framework, el entorno de trabajo de temas más popular de WordPress. Ya está disponible Genesis Pro para todo el mundo, 360$ anuales que dan acceso a: Genesis FrameworkChild themes de Genesis de StudioPress1 año de hosting en WP EnginePlugin Genesis Pro (Diseños y secciones, restricción de bloques por usuarios…) y Genesis Custom Blocks Pro.

This week I talk to Pippin Williamson about how he turned a college dorm-room hobby into a thriving business that employs 26 people. Pippin not only builds products to help entrepreneurs run their companies, but he's also started a craft brewery and invests in property explicitly for conservation purposes. In this episode we talk about being a problem solver, how to price products, why he's always open to selling a business or product if the right opportunity arises, how he takes calculated risk, and we learn about Pippin's simple, but refreshing approach to hiring and treating employees right. - Sandhills Development - Sandhills Brewing - Easy Digital Downloads - AffiliateWP - Land Conservation As always, this episode of Starting Now is brought to you by BYLT. At BYLT we help you get started online. Whether you want to start a blog or a business head on over to BYLT.co to get started. Subscribe to Starting Now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Also watch the video interview on YouTube. And, finally, if you're enjoying our podcasts and care to learn more about us, at SPYR we build minimalist businesses and we help you start your own at BYLT. Find the full transcript and more at BYLT.co/pippin-williamson

My name is Pippin Williamson. I am a nature loving farm boy that somehow found his way into computers, Internet, and business. I run a company called Sandhills Development, LLC. We build eCommerce and membership software for websites.

As much as we like to think Open Source is all about giving and not getting, it isn’t a sustainable model. Peace, Love, and WordPress are great, but we still need to eat. So how are plugins really funded? We continue this series on funding open source with Russell Aaron. He has built and maintained several plugins on his own while an employee with a company. Russ says he supports his plugins “on his own dime,” so you’ll want to watch this episode for sure.Funding Open Source: The SeriesWatch Chris Badgett tell his story of how LifterLMS was funded on this episode.Jason Coleman gives insight into how Paid Memberships Pro was built and how it used the Open Source philosophy to grow in this episodeWPblab SponsorsServerPressThank you for being a preroll sponsor, ServerPress! ServerPress is the maker of DesktopServer, WPSiteSync, and so much more! serverpress.com. (It works with WooCommerce now!)KinstaIf you are tired of unreliable or slow hosting check out Kinsta.com, who takes managed WordPress hosting to the next level. Powered by Google Cloud, all their plans include PHP 7.3, SSH access for developers, one-click staging area, 20 global data centers, free SSL, free CDN and 24×7 expert support who will also migrate your site free of charge. demo.Kinsta.comAbout Russell AaronBorn and raised in Nevada, Russ is no stranger to hard work and the hustle. He started coding in MySpace “pimping out tables” for the “About Me” section. He then started learning some CSS and going to WordPress Meetups.He worked at a mortgage company and built plugins to work with the API to display rates on the website. He ended up selling that plugin to local real estate professionals and other loan shops. He knew these people personally.Back in the day, he was asked to help organize WordCamp Las Vegas so he put his Gravity Styles plugin on hold to work on it. Serendipity rewarded him. Ben Fox urged him to build the plugin. He said, “if you don’t build it, I will.” Pippin Williamson sat down at Russ’ laptop and a few minutes later, he had the plugin ready.Read more about Russ on his website and say hi to him on Twitter.Why Build Gravity Styles?When you’re creating a product it is important to solve an actual problem. He hated styling forms. So, he saw Suzette Franck made all of her forms pink. So he asked her if he could use her CSS. “Sure” she said. And Russ was off building Gravity Styles.“I hate styling Gravity Forms.” Russell AaronHow Long Before Gravity Styles Was Solvent?It was always solvent. Russ believes that you should only work on side projects after you feed your family and have a roof on your head.“Please keep a roof over your head.” Russell AaronDo the WorkDon’t be afraid to walk up and shake someone’s hand. Build relationships. Those are the most valuable tool anyone has. Also, don’t be afraid of guerrilla marketing.“Stop talking and start sweating.” Russell AaronFor example, he used DesktopServer, built a local version of a website that was fully operational and had content. He would go to that business (someone he knew) and say something like, “Hey. I built this for you. Would you like to have a website setup in an hour for your business?” Then he’d help them with hosting or whatever, got the cash, and moved on.“If you don’t have the passion to do this it doesn’t matter if you’re Bruce Wayne; you’re not going to get anywhere.” Russell AaronAdvice for Plugin Developers“They gave me hosting and I did something with it.” Russell AaronBe curious.Be passionate.Have a mentor then be a mentor.Solve a problem with your plugin.Hire or ask a professional to code it.Be accountable.Do the work.Build relationships.Don’t be a taker; be a giver.Use the tools you have.Go to Meetups and Conferences.Make friends.Do all of this after you’ve paid for your food and rent.Tool or Tip of the WeekThis Tool or Tip of the week is brought to you by Fat Dog Creatives. If you’re a service-based business serious about growth, Rhonda Negard is your rebranding and web design thinker, a strategic design specialist. Check out her website at FatDogCreatives.comRuss recommends getting a Chromecast. Use it to play videos from WordPress.tv while you work (keep learning), YouTube, or at social gatherings.Jason recommends Small.Chat. Even the free account allows you to integrate a chat bot on your website to your Slack channel. Respond in real time in a way that works with your team.Bridget recommends the DOSS SoundBox. The bass is awesome. Shows the best of Miles Davis which she is currently enjoying — especially Kind of Blue. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Pippin is the founder of Sandhills Development, creators of Easy Digital Downloads, AffiliateWP, and more. He has been in the WordPress product space for years and has had a lot of success. Recently he's been a bit MIA from the WordPress scene, so I talk to him about the brewery he started and what he's learned transitioning from software to beer.

Matt Medeiros continues Season 8 with the roundtable format asking the question is there change in the WordPress ecosystem?  John Turner and Phil Derksen are the special guests that share what significant changes they have made in their careers and what they see in the  WordPress ecosystem. Listen to this episode: Matt Report - A WordPress podcast for digital business owners Why exiting solopreneurship is the right move Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:47:53 Subscribe Share RSS Feed Share Link Embed Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:47:53 John Turner joined Awesome Motive through their customer accelerator portal to help his company grow. Syed Balkhi, Awesome Motive's owner,  suggested that John join the company as a partner since his product and strategy aligned with Awesome Motive. (3:10) Phil Derksen recently joined Sandhills Development LLC after running a one-man shop company called WP Simple Pay, which is a stripe payment and subscription program.  Sandhills Development, LLC  has a whole suite of products that was founded by Pippin Williamson. (4:20) What you will learn in this Episode: Startups in the WordPress economy were easy to start as a fully bootstrapped business. It can be a roller coaster ride of going solo and joining a company, then trying to go solo again. (6:48) John – Worked for 6 or 7 years and did not feel like he was continually growing. When the opportunity became available with Syed and Awesome Motive John decided to give it a try and take the growth to the next level. It was difficult where the uncertainty and change is concerned, but he is excited to be a part of the company.  (7:48) Phil – Phil had many happy customers with his product and support. Although he had a level of comfort with his company, he did not feel like he could release the features that customers were requesting. For example, EDD could offer many things that his product couldn't do. Phil had one product to focus on, but it was distracting to jump from being a developer, then marketing and support. It is exciting to work with a team and see the growth of the products. (11:11) Product Growth – Marketing or the Product Alone? Phil – Product features and planning for the future is critical. Then the focus needs to change to marketing to get the word out to the customers. (11:59) John– Marketing is the most important focus and the lesson to learn. You can have an awesome product, but you need to have the time and focus on marketing. (12:23) Matt – For people to scale their business they need to market their product successfully and make more money. It takes a lot of time and money to do marketing correctly.  (13:41) Marketing John – There is no magic bullet when it comes to marketing. When you find out what is working you need to concentrate on it. When your business is small, you don't have a lot of money to spend on marketing. You need to focus on one or two channels (like Facebook and Content Marketing) and focus on what is working for you. It could take awhile. (15:19) Phil – Phil has recently spent money and time on content marketing. Finding what works and knowing that changes over time are important. It is tough to get noticed with new plugins or themes on WordPress.org. Sandhills Development has a marketing team that reaches out and promotes products. (17:19) Matt – Some businesses try a blanket approach with marketing and cover too much. The person in the WordPress Community that is doing marketing well seems to be Brad Touesnard from Delicious Brains. His company does a great job with their brand and content marketing. Pagely is another company that does a great job with their quality and material. Phil: Chris Badgett at LifterLMS does a great job with content marketing and his podcast concentrating around learning systems. John: LifterLMS has very focused content with their brand and audience. The material has intent. Content Marketing Focus: Matt – Content Marketing is very expensive and very hard to do as a business owner. If you are preparing webinars and podcasts, it takes a lot of time when launching a podcast. It can be hard to produce quality content consistently. (19:54) John – To test the market in the WordPress space getting on WordPress.org is the best place to start and get some eyes on your product. It is essential to focus on the product name and reviews. You need to start somewhere and then figure out how to rank it. (21:03) Phil  – Some people go to the content route first without a free version of their product. Phil likes the podcast/YouTube style. Joe Howard has started the WPMRR Podcast and focuses on monthly revenue. When you find something that is working, you can double down on it.  While you are adjusting your approach, you should be concentrating on your email list. (22:09) John – Many niches are very competitive in the WordPress space. You need to build up the business and take baby steps slowly. It is not easy. (22:53) Matt – There are two sides to this. You can try to rank in WordPress. org. But as competition starts to grow, some new business owners find they start too late with the ideas for marketing. One great idea is to leverage customer stories with a podcast and repurpose the content.  (24:21) Forecasting the Future of WordPress: Matt – WordPress is becoming more competitive, and pricing in the marketing is still a challenge.  How is pricing changing in the WordPress space? (26:07) John – Many themes and plugins have gone to automatic subscription. Many customers are renewing without a discount in subsequent years (especially with hosting or SaaS products) (26:46) Phil – Larger companies can adapt to charge more because they have a reputation and support behind the product. The customer can count on them with staying power. (28:04) Matt – Prices in the space are tiered for support for products. Customers seem to value the product and as an end user, they see the value. (28:50) John  – Customers are buying the products and making money. There was a positive response from his customers with his joining a larger company. Phil – There were no complaints coming from customers when features were released and annual subscriptions were occurring. SaaS products seem to do this annually. Phil got a great response from his customers when he joined Sandhills Development. They were excited with the partnership and the solutions that can be offered. (30:32) Balancing User Requests and Feedback: John:  He would produce a yearly survey to stay on pace with his customers including the feedback that he received over the year. Every feature that you include will be a support burden down the line. (33:16) Phil – Sent out a survey as well as tracking support requests that looked like new features. Phil collected responses all year and weighed those requests with what it would take to develop and support. Phil was very cautious about adding features while trying to not take any feature away. (33:59) Monetization with Gutenberg and WordPress 5.0 John – Waiting to see what happens after the release. There seems to be a lot of opinions about what will happen with the newest release. (35:47) Phil – Is expecting support to be overwhelmed after the release. Documents and videos will help people with the release. WP Simple Pay will not be that impacted. The page builder and themes could be impacted but uncertain by how much and in what way. (36:36) Matt – There are a lot of folks jumping into the opportunity around Gutenberg with an opportunity to sell to customers. The release seems to be a way to create a SaaS around WordPress.org. With Jetpack enabled you will be able to remind the customer about what is coming and create upsells. (38:45) To Keep in Touch: John Turner: Hooked on Products Podcast Twitter – @johnturner seedprod.com Phil Derksen: Twitter – @philderksen Phil Derksen   Episode Resources: Awesome Motive MemberPress Formidable Forms Syed Balkhi Sandhills Development, LLC EDD Affiliate WP Restrict Content Pro Sugar Calendar Delicious Brains Pagely LifterLMS LMSCast WPMRR Jetpack To Stay in Touch: Watch the panel discussion on Matt's YouTube channel. To stay connected with the Matt Report, head on over to mattreport.com/subscribe. If you like the show, please leave a 5 Star review over on the Matt Report on iTunes. ★ Support this podcast ★

#316 WP-Tonic’s Friday round-table Show 3rd of August, 2018 at 8:30am PST In this weeks show our main starting story is from WP Tavern concerning Easy Digital Downloads and its decision to reduce company’s extension passes prices plus a statement on the company’s blog from its CEO Pippin Williamson which basically says that the company got it pricing structure wrong. Here’s This Weeks Stories 1 - Easy Digital Downloads Substantially Reduces Prices for Extension Passes https://wptavern.com/easy-digital-downloads-substantially-reduces-prices-for-extension-passes

As we ourselves approach the launch of a new version of the EDD Bookings plugin, we have invited Pippin Williamson to discuss the why, when and how of re-building an existing plugin. For those that are new to WordPress, Pippin is the man behind the Easy Digital Downloads, AffilaiteWP and Restrict Content Pro WordPress plugins. In this episode, we delve into the all-new Easy Digital Downloads 3.0 which is being built right now. EDD has been around for years, growing from a small plugin built by Pippin himself into a team of 15, including developers, support staff, content writers and more. As you would expect, when you're not building a product to scale in the future, you're going to make some mistakes. This is what happened with EDD, and it's what they are now trying to fix with 3.0. Listen to why EDD made the decision to rewrite most of the plugin, how they, and Pippin himself, are approaching the situation, and what the impact of these improvements will (or should) be. Links: Easy Digital Downloads Pippin's website Twitter: @eddwp Website: easydigitaldownloads.com Blog post: Easy Digital Downloads 3.0 Development Update EDD Bookings Twitter: @eddbookings Website: eddbookings.com Blog post: Building a Painkiller for the Appointment Bookings Space in WordPress Books Street Smarts - Norm Brodsky Small Giants - Bo Burlingham Start with Why - Simon Sinek

Photo credit: Gary Lopater on Unsplash Exploring Page Builders and Advanced Custom Fields in WordPress In this episode, Diane Kinney and I are talking about Page Builders and Advanced Custom Fields Pro. There are a variety of tools available when it comes to building a WordPress website - and choosing the right tool for the job -- can sometimes leave you feeling overwhelmed. No worries, Diane puts it all in perspective and provides some useful tips on choosing a page builder. Diane Kinney Yes, I’m a mega WordPress nerd and I’d love to share the things I’ve learned in the last 17 years of building both simple and complex sites. Listen to Episode 24 Where to find Diane: Diane's Business Website: The Versatility Group Diane's Personal Website: DianeKinney.com Diane's Twitter link: @dkinney Her upcoming book with Carrie Dils: Real World Freelancing Tools and Resources discussed: Advanced Custom Fields Pro CMB2 - Custom Metaboxes 2 Page Builders Beaver Builder Site Origin Oxygen Page Builder Elementor Tailor Page Builder Critical Review by Pippin Williamson

Pippin Williamson started out like a lot of us do: building websites for whoever would pay him. He decided to try selling one of his WordPress plugins. Now, Pippin's Plugins earns over $1 million in revenue a year. This Mega Profitable series aims to help founders, like you, get profitable!

Watch the video of this podcast here. Pippin Williamson has reached the goal we all dream of- having a company that can run itself. But how did he get there? And what happens when you get there? First up, Cath tackles a very important question - how did Pippin get such a cool name!? Well, you will just have to listen to find out! We then move on to where Pippin got started and how his business grew. He explains that he started out by creating plugins just for fun (as you do!) Then when he started doing some freelance web development work, he used his own plugins to solve all the problems that he was encountering along the way. This was in 2010-2011, before we had cool things like Google fonts and options in CSS. So, he would create plugins according to what he needed. Tune in at the 6.30 minute mark to find out what problems he faced and what plugins he created for this. Pippin started selling his plugins on codecanyon.net (run by envatomarket). However, he wanted to be able to sell them for himself, so he created a tool to be able to that. This is now the well-known plugin - Easy Digital Downloads Pippin speaks about how he had previously been able to manage his small projects himself, but Easy Digital Downloads was growing fast that he needed to start bringing in a team to help. Cath makes a good point that sharing the responsibility of your own project can be quite daunting. Pippin gives some great advice here – he uses his own products to run his company. By doing this he has a first-hand experience of what problems may arise and how they can provide a solution. This gives you “the incentive to make your products awesome” as Cath points out. “Being my own customer might be one of the most valuable positions I have ever put myself in” @pippinsplugins on the WPE Podcast Cath asks Pippin if he ever gets called entrepreneurial and he explains quite humbly that he doesn’t think of himself that way. Most of his friends and family have very little understanding of what he actually does and wouldn’t say that about him. However, people with an understanding of what his business is all about may refer to him as an entrepreneur. "All I’m trying to do is keep the business running, that's all it is!" @pippinsplugins talks being an entrepreneur on the WPE Podcast Cath asks if he still has his own clients and he explains that they rarely do custom development and if they do, it is directly related to their existing products in cases where the product can get close, but not quite close enough to what the client wants. Tips for growing your company and staying motivated: Be your own customer to ensure your product is the best it can be Hand over the reigns to employees and look at the bigger picture rather than get caught in the small details Have a project outside of your business and switch off digitally! We then move on to motivation - Pippin explains that you will absolutely get lulls in your energy along the way. The most significant lull for him being just last year when the company had got to a point where it was running itself. This was hard for him as he had come from a background of having to do it all for himself. This created a mental state of “I don’t know what to do with myself”. It took him quite some time to realise that he just needed another project, because for a while he wondered whether he was bored with the product and the company.   Great problem to have, right? Tune in at the 13-minute mark to hear Pippin’s other thoughts on lulls in energy and what happens when you get bored. So where to now for Sandhill? They are working on a brand new product which he can’t share too much on at the moment but you can visit www.sellbird.com for a bit more information They are also constantly pushing their current products and they are contemplating the possibility of bringing back a product or two. So, stay tuned peeps! Cath asks Pippin about how he runs his team of 15 people. Pippin says that there is no tier system but that the majority are in support. He also has about 5 developers who jump into support from time to time. This is a great way for them to get an understanding of what is happening with the products and this can sometimes then turn into a development project. He has about 1-3 people steering each project and he oversees all of these. He finds that when he hands over the reins to let others lead that they “grow better and move forward faster because it allows me to step back and look at it from a much broader perspective as opposed to stuck in the finer details.” And this beer thing… well he fell in love with brewing when his wife bought him a homebrew kit years ago. Now his brother and he are planning to open a local brewery which will open in 2018! Initially he thought he should just blog about beer but he tried it and didn’t like it. He realised that he needs to disconnect from digital world. “You need to switch off, disconnect and relinquish control”. Some great advice for those who are finding themselves in a lull! Enjoy today’s show with the legendary Pippin!  

On today's episode, Corry Maass and Sam Brodie are talking with Brad Touesnard. Brad is an entrepreneur, developer, and designer living in Nova Scotia, Canada. Brad runs a successful business called Delicious Brains which is known for two popular products called WP Migrate Pro and WP Offload S3. Brad discusses his approach to SaaS  (Software as a Service) and the challenges of getting users to participate in a beta release and provide productive feedback during testing. Matt Report - A WordPress podcast for digital business owners S5B: E7: Brad Touesnard from Delicious Brains Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:48:18 Subscribe Share RSS Feed Share Link Embed Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:48:18 Guest: Brad Touesnard is the founder of Delicious Brains Inc. Brad wears many hats; from coding and design to marketing and partnerships. Before starting Delicious Brains, Brad was a busy freelance web developer, specializing in front-end development. Brad also has a podcast which he co-hosts with Pippin Williamson called Apply Filters which is dedicated to WordPress development. What you will learn from this episode: Delicious Brains has two successful products Migrate DB Pro and WP Offload S3 Delicious Brains has now grown to eight full-time employees and is working on a new SaaS effort called MergeBot. (4:27)  There is always the problem of how do you merge database changes from the local site to the live database? (7:30) When merging data in a database, most people keep track of all changes made and differences from the local to the live database. All these changes become the deployment list. (8:28) Developers have been asking for about four years for a way to merge local and live databases for their web customers.(9:50) Mergebot launched early and was created from requests made to the Delicious Brains support channels to address database changes between local and live databases. It is now in an open beta with a limited amount of seats. (11:03) The modifications that are made to Mergebot are prioritized through the support channel and then added to the beta to address the amount of pain that the customer is experiencing. (13:00) The limitation to Mergebot that needs to be addressed is the 1000 query limit and the multisite restriction. (16:46) Building a SaaS (Software as a Service): There is hype around SaaS right now. (13:48) SaaS is a good fit for Mergebot because it provides a platform for collaboration for changes between users. (14:11) Changes to the database can be streamed to the cloud application where conflicts can be addressed. (15:00) Merging data is CPU intensive. (16:22) When selling products SaaS is a safer business model allowing you to get more money up front than you can from a WordPress plugin. (18:23) SaaS applications are often being offered with annual plans. This helps with having the cash needed for marketing your product up front. If customers do not renew the subscription, they will not have access to the software. (19:33) As more and more businesses are moving to SaaS you will see more sign-ups for annual subscriptions. (20:36) Starting a business from scratch without an existing customer base is difficult. (24:43) Marketing Validation when consideration SaaS for Mergebot: The Mergebot launch relied on the current customer base of Migrate DB Pro. (28:38) When you are launching something new you are constantly making assumptions. (31:00) The beta of Mergebot is a charged service. You want the active participation of early adopters and have their commitment. (32:33) When you purchase Mergebot's beta product, you also get invited to the Slack channel. This allows you to see what users are struggling with and to provide support when needed. (35:37) You can easily cancel the beta product if it is not what you anticipated. The first phase of the Mergebot beta was a “private” beta where the onboarding process was reviewed with clients. (37:00) Mergebot will do another round of feedback from customers before marketing a product launch. (43:44) EPISODE RESOURCES Delicious Brains Mergebot on WordPress.org Mergebot Hipchat Follow Brad: Brad on Twitter Brad's Website email: Brad@deliciousbrains.com If you like the show, please leave a 5 Star review over on the Matt Report on iTunes. Sponsors: Pagely Gravity Forms ★ Support this podcast ★

This week on WPblab we'll be speaking with WPShout about learning to do WordPress development. If you are looking to be a WordPress developer this should be the perfect episode for you.http://www.wpshout.comDavid B Hayes and Fred Meyer – WordPress developers, contributors, and enthusiasts. Our goal is to make the world of WordPress accessible to everybody.Alex Denning – started publishing about WordPress development on WPShout in 2009One of their projects for meditation – http://medivate.comWPShout – mostly writing for people who are learning or who already are developers – not aimed at beginnersDavid writes a quick guide every Thursday for simple tips and suggestionsGood starting place for someone wanting to get into development – Up and Running – step by step introduction to WordPress developmentUp and Running  – Discount code: WPBLAB – 20% off any package!! If you purchase before end of 3/24, you’ll also be entered to win some cool prizes!Up and Running starts with the core technical fundamentals (and terminology) and breaks it down into a factory analogy to make it easier to understand the process … (Up and Running synthesizes WordPress development into a cohesive package)The goal is to go from knowing about the concepts (html, css, php, wordpress basics, etc.) to becoming proficient and knowing how to use all the pieces and parts, and why & how they work, by the end of the program“Everyone should use CMS’s and WordPress is the best one, so use it!”Recorded a number of interviews with well known WP devs about how they got to where they are – Pippin Williamson, Helen Hou-Sandi, etc.Screenflow is used for their video screen captureEven if you never do the coding stuff or that’s not your focus, the hope is that Up and Running helps make it easier to understand the concepts and why it works the way it does – great for Designers too looking to level up their understandingDavid started using WordPress in 2007 – learned how to be a web developer by having a website and wanting to make little changes here and there and beating his head against the wall – it was something he cared about strongly so making it better was important to himWordPress is a great way to break into the entire field of Web DevelopmentLearn WordPress Plugin DevelopmentSome of the best ways to learn are to use Google to search for answers and to really dig through the Codex or the Code Reference* https://codex.wordpress.org/* https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/* https://learn.calderalabs.org/People come to WordPress from so many different backgrounds – sometimes it’s a nurse or an educator or a business person who was the most tech savvy in their office and they ‘inherited’ the site and the responsibility to market it* Udemy.com* Lynda.com* Stackoverflow*

This week on WPblab we'll be speaking with WPShout about learning to do WordPress development. If you are looking to be a WordPress developer this should be the perfect episode for you.http://www.wpshout.comDavid B Hayes and Fred Meyer – WordPress developers, contributors, and enthusiasts. Our goal is to make the world of WordPress accessible to everybody.Alex Denning – started publishing about WordPress development on WPShout in 2009One of their projects for meditation – http://medivate.comWPShout – mostly writing for people who are learning or who already are developers – not aimed at beginnersDavid writes a quick guide every Thursday for simple tips and suggestionsGood starting place for someone wanting to get into development – Up and Running – step by step introduction to WordPress developmentUp and Running  – Discount code: WPBLAB – 20% off any package!! If you purchase before end of 3/24, you’ll also be entered to win some cool prizes!Up and Running starts with the core technical fundamentals (and terminology) and breaks it down into a factory analogy to make it easier to understand the process … (Up and Running synthesizes WordPress development into a cohesive package)The goal is to go from knowing about the concepts (html, css, php, wordpress basics, etc.) to becoming proficient and knowing how to use all the pieces and parts, and why & how they work, by the end of the program“Everyone should use CMS’s and WordPress is the best one, so use it!”Recorded a number of interviews with well known WP devs about how they got to where they are – Pippin Williamson, Helen Hou-Sandi, etc.Screenflow is used for their video screen captureEven if you never do the coding stuff or that’s not your focus, the hope is that Up and Running helps make it easier to understand the concepts and why it works the way it does – great for Designers too looking to level up their understandingDavid started using WordPress in 2007 – learned how to be a web developer by having a website and wanting to make little changes here and there and beating his head against the wall – it was something he cared about strongly so making it better was important to himWordPress is a great way to break into the entire field of Web DevelopmentLearn WordPress Plugin DevelopmentSome of the best ways to learn are to use Google to search for answers and to really dig through the Codex or the Code Referencehttps://codex.wordpress.org/https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/https://learn.calderalabs.org/People come to WordPress from so many different backgrounds – sometimes it’s a nurse or an educator or a business person who was the most tech savvy in their office and they ‘inherited’ the site and the responsibility to market itUdemy.comLynda.comStackoverflowCarl AlexanderAdvancedWPOne of the most under-valued skills that most people in the tech field have is that they know how to use Google just a little bit better than everyone else!! You might have the ability to get an answer in 2 minutes that may take a non-technical person an hour to find. That’s worth a whole lot!One of the first and easier plugins you could tackle is a shortcode plugin – will teach you some of the basics of the hook system / registering a plugin, etc.One of the greatest ways to start learning PHP is to start with creating a child theme – it’s pretty safe and pretty easy to get startedIf you can safely “cowboy code” your website – it’s one of the best first steps to getting started with WordPress development… you get immediate feedback from the work you put in – a local development environment is great and you should use it as a professional, but for the beginner dev, it can be overkillLocal Development – DesktopServerText editingNetbeansBracketsPHPStormSublimeTextCoda2Thanks for helping us with the show notesCheryl LaPrade – @YayCheryl on TwitterSherie LaPrade – @HeySherie on Twitter✩ Twitter – http://twitter.com/wpwatercooler✩ Blog/Website – https://www.wpwatercooler.com✩ Facebook- http://www.facebook.com/wpwatercooler✩ Podcast RSS Feed – https://www.wpwatercooler.com/feed✩ iTunes – wpwatercooler.com/itunes✩ Stitcher – http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/wpwatercooler✩ Soundcloud – https://soundcloud.com/wpwatercooler✩ Google+ – https://www.google.com/+WPwatercoolerThe post WPblab EP67 – Learning WordPress Development with WPShout appeared first on WPwatercooler. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

  In episode 4 you can definitely tell that the crew is getting more comfortable and finding their voice. This was a great episode where we all share some of favorite resources for keeping up to date in our industry as well as dig into why James & Kevin chose to keep the WP Ninjas as an in-office team versus hiring a more distributed team. We share some of the in-office dynamics of our own space along with some of the challenges. Regardless of which option you choose, it should be based on the values and goals of your company. There may be lots of wrong ways to build a team, but there is definitely no right way. Resources Mentioned: yearinwp.com Favorite Things: How we stay up to date Kevin: Blogs (Josh Pollock, Tom McFarlin, Pippin Williamson, Brad Touesnard) WordPress Trac Tickets Kenny: Laracasts Advanced WP Facebook Group Jon: WP Mayor, Quay Morgan (wpninjas.com, ninjaforms.com) Competitors who shall rename nameless James: Twitter... Boooo... WP News Desk Pros of working in-office vs remote Chris Wallace Tweet bonlifecoffee.com Backwoods Alabama Cleveland, TN Sponsor: Wendy's Taco Salad Special thanks to the CrashJonesBand for providing us with our theme music. No One Can Tell You How To Live by CrashJonesBand

It’s the first episode of Season 2 and I’m glad to be back! Leading off, I got to talk to Pippin Williamson about resurrecting Restrict Content Pro, what it’s like being in the WordPress product space, pricing, developing, finding balance, and lots more in this jam-packed half hour. Show Notes Pippin’s Plugins Restrict Content Pro Easy […] The post Episode 18: Pippin Williamson & Restrict Content Pro appeared first on How I Built It.

In Folge 17, des WordPress Podcast sprechen wir über PageBuilder, Neuerungen in WordPress 4.7 und die Sicherheit von caching Plugins. Für manche Anwender sind Pagebuilder ein Segen für Webentwickler meistens ein Fluch. Warum dies so ist und wie viele Seiten solch eine Medaille hat, hört oder lest in folge 17 des WP Sofa. Diesmal in Vertretung für Hans-Helge, mit dabei David Remer bekannt aus dem Internet als Websupporter. Pippin Williamson hat die bekanntesten WordPress page builder unter die Lupe genommen und das ganze in einem laaaangem Beitrag auf seinem Blog pippinsplugins.com veröffentlicht.

Today we’re joined by Cory Miller. Cory is a former newspaper journalist turned full-time entrepreneur. In 2008, he started iThemes, which builds web design software and offers cutting-edge web design training for thousands of customers around the globe. Cory is a passionate entrepreneur who believes in finding and maintaining work happiness (for himself and others) that aligns with your purpose and plays to your strengths, talents and ambitions, while challenging you to do great things with your life. Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. Launch your new site today! In this 43-minute episode Brian Gardner, Lauren Mancke, and Cory Miller discuss: The founding of iThemes in 2008 Comradery and Co-opetition in the WordPress community What lies beneath the surface of entrepreneurship The importance of talking openly about mental health How mental health can affect your business How to find lasting career happiness Listen to StudioPress FM below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes The Show Notes Follow Cory on Twitter Visit CoryMiller.com It s Time To Start Talking Openly About Mental Health iThemes Leader.team: A Business Podcast by Cory Miller and Matt Danner The Div The Transcript The Importance of Entrepreneurial Mental Health Voiceover: Rainmaker FM. StudioPress FM is designed to help creative entrepreneurs build the foundation of a powerful digital business. Tune in weekly as StudioPress founder, Brian Gardner, and VP of StudioPress, Lauren Mancke, share their expertise on web design, strategy, and building an online platform. Lauren Mancke: On this week’s episode, Brian and I are joined by Cory Miller, the founder of iThemes, to discuss the importance of mental health in being an entrepreneur. Brian Gardner: Hey, everyone. Welcome to StudioPress FM. I am your host, Brian Gardner. I am joined, as usual, with the Vice President of StudioPress, Lauren Mancke. Lauren Mancke: Hello, everyone. We are starting a new series on the show this week, one that we’re very excited about. We’re taking a step outside of the Genesis community and talking with members of the WordPress community. Brian Gardner: Today, we’re joined by Cory Miller. Cory is a former newspaper journalist turned full-time entrepreneur, like many of us — the entrepreneur part, not so much the journalist part. In 2008, he started iThemes, which builds web design software and offers cutting edge web design training for thousands of customers around the globe. Cory is a passionate entrepreneur who believes in finding and maintaining work happiness for himself and for others that aligns also with your purpose and plays to your strengths, talents, ambitions, while challenging you to do great things with your life. That’s a mouthful. That’s awesome. Cory, it’s a huge pleasure to have you here on the show, StudioPress FM. Welcome. Cory Miller: Thanks, Brian and Lauren, for having me on the show. Brian Gardner: This is going to be a good one. I’m excited about this, mainly because it’s a little bit of a departure from the stuff we had been talking about, which was general business practice. Covering a number of different things. And it’s something that I know is very important to you, as it is to me. In a way, I’ve almost become envious of the way that you’ve been able to communicate and — I wouldn’t say grow an audience around this, but talk to a very particular topic that I think is important to all of us. I want to get this started by setting the foundation for you and I, going back to the beginning. You and I have known each other for almost 10 years, believe it or not. A time when we were both working normal 40 hour a week jobs. Back then, we were tinkering around with WordPress as a hobby. I think back to that time and remember all of the conversations you and I have had on Gmail chat. I wish I would have somehow saved those, because those were groundbreaking and set the foundation of where we are here today. It’d be fun to look back — almost in a diary sense — to see what were the things and feelings and stuff like that we were talking about. I want to ask you, what stands out in those early years about our relationship, but more importantly, what we discussed and built and started back then? How did that lay the foundation of where you and iThemes and those who work for you — where that’s all at right now. The Founding of iThemes in 2008 Cory Miller: Yeah, those were the glory days, right, Brian? Those were the fun days. How I originally met Brian was I needed a theme for my WordPress blog. I found one of his great themes. I was trying to think what the name of that was. I have to find that. Found this guy named Brian Gardner and decided to read his blog and thought, “Man, we have a lot in common.” I reached out, and before you know it we struck up this great friendship. I think we knew each other probably over a year before we actually met in person. What strikes me about that time back then, Brian, and I hope this is resonating for you too, is comradery. We were one of the first to be doing what we’re doing back then. The theme market was pretty abysmal and you had already released a number of themes. I was behind you trying to do the same, going, “I just want to learn.” You were a great help to me and a resource as I tried to learn WordPress, web design, HTML, CSS, and put out free themes. When I think back — it’s comradery. Our Gmail chats you’re talking about, it makes me smile thinking about those, because it was just another person going through the same or similar experiences I was. We could just go, “What do you think about this?” “Ah, this is what I think.” “Well, what do you think about this?” Being each other’s sidekicks, I guess, is the way I felt about the early days. Of course, that laid the huge foundation for what would eventually become iThemes and StudioPress. You quit your job before me. I quit my job after you. But I think we started on the same date, if my history, my memory serves me correctly. That was just a fun experience of going … Two kids is how I thought of myself, trying to make business of this. Man, looking back, when you said 10 years it’s like, “Holy cow, it’s been 10 years.” It’s crazy to think back about all of that. It’s been an awesome ride. That was, of course, the foundation for everything I’ve done. The success that I’ve enjoyed at iThemes and WordPress. Lauren Mancke: I think a lot of people have a similar story of when they’re starting out in WordPress. That’s a great thing about the community. They’ve teamed up with these other people and they’ve gotten to know people and have helped them along the way. What about WordPress drew you in, and why were you so willing to back then to hitch your wagon to WordPress? Cory Miller: When I found WordPress — I had originally started out on Blogger. I’m one of those original story people that started out in Blogger then went to WordPress and saw the light. The organization I was working for, we were trying to rebuild our website. We were looking at a bunch of options and one of them was Joomla. I thought, “That looks like a helicopter dashboard. It’s so overwhelming.” Then I installed WordPress and I’m like, “This is just easy to use.” I think it was just easy to use software. I think WordPress as a learning tool was the biggest help for me. WordPress is just awesome. I think it’s still a key foundational tool for learning web design and web development, because it’s an awesome platform. Being so easy to use and simple to use. I can write posts, click publish, and I’m going. The five-minute install back then, being able to quickly install WordPress. It helped me become a web designer. Now, I’m not a web designer today. My team keeps me away from code or anything that’s sensitive. It’s just a great tool for learning. Brian Gardner: It’s funny. People could say now the same thing you said about Joomla, that WordPress in and of itself sometimes feels like a helicopter dashboard. That’s just to speak to the evolution over the last 7, or 8, or 10 years of stuff. It’s had to evolve because of the fact that it became more than just a blogging platform, so I say that somewhat tongue in cheek. But you’re right, WordPress back then was such an easy tool. Obviously you and I both learned our way through it. Hundreds and thousands of other community members — both as users, developers, or designers — they’ve all been able to teach themselves that stuff. Yeah, I love that WordPress came into my life and has obviously changed it. The same thing can be said for you as well, Cory, and Lauren — all of us here. Most of those listening — probably the same thing. It’s safe to say we share the start of our entrepreneurial journey together. We talked about the Gmail chats. And in those chats we got really deep with each other. We shared our revenue numbers. We shared business plans. We were close. In fact, years ago — it’s probably been, gosh, 6 or 7 years since we took that cruise together. Comradery and Co-opetition in the WordPress Community Brian Gardner: In the WordPress space, our relationship was probably one of the first examples of what you call that comradery. In layman’s terms it’s called this co-opetition thing, a term that we now use to describe the beauty of the open source community where members who are competitors help each other work through this thing we call life. Talk to us about that. I wouldn’t call it a brotherhood, but how that co-opetiton back then helped start iThemes. More importantly, why it’s been so important for you to continue that over the years. I’ve seen that from the outside as you and I have gone our own ways to some degree. I can still see from where I’m at that that has been an important thing for you and that you’ve maintained that all this time. Cory Miller: I think entrepreneurship is a lonely, tough job most times. In the beginning — you were a few steps ahead of me, of course. You were so gracious and generous to share what you were doing, what you were learning. That helped me tremendously. I think I took that example of being generous from you, and also the spirit of WordPress and open source software, and continued that. I try to help people as best I can going forward. I get real touchy about … I don’t want to say competition or frenemies or anything like that. In my traditional — probably the way I was either built or whatever — is I think of competition and I want to squash competition. I want to beat them. I don’t like that when I have so many good friends that are technically my competitors. I don’t like thinking about people as my competition. That’s always been this hard thing. I think you set a great example in the beginning to say, “Hey, everybody can do good together.” We shared pretty intimate, detailed stuff about what we were doing in the very beginning. I would say, I don’t get to that degree as far as now — business plans and financial stuff with people. I haven’t shared my revenue number, I don’t think, in a very long time. The principles of what are really good for you and I, being sidekicks even though we had separate businesses — trying to help each other and doing good together. What I’ve gotten the most out of the relationships I’ve had with you and going forward has been just knowing I’m not alone. That we can be technically competitors but there’s enough space for all of us to do good and do well. The comradery — back to that — saying, “Hey, I remember …” I think you’re going to ask me about this at some point, but when I was going through my divorce in 2010 I had a good friend of mine named Grant Griffiths give me a call and go, “Hey man, what’s going on? You just don’t look good.” I shared everything that pretty much five people on the planet knew about at that point. That was just one example of saying that I think the most I’ve gotten out of the friendships I’ve had — who happened to be competitors too — has been the emotional support of knowing there’s people going through the same things I’m going through, the highs and the lows. Brian Gardner: Some of these people, would you consider them friends first and then either competitors or business acquaintances second? Cory Miller: I think I’ve tended to always think of them as friends first. Then sometimes I realize that not everyone values that friendship as much as I do. At some point you realize, “If I’m not in the business, are we going to be talking as much and doing all these things?” It’s a reminder. We had some friends in Oklahoma City in July, about 25 people. I realized it was really special that we were able to have our friends come into town and roll out the red carpet for them. But then the question hit the back of my mind, to be honest with you. It was like, “If I’m not the CEO of iThemes and doing this stuff in WordPress …” Those people are amazing people, like you, Brian. I’m like, “We probably won’t have as much in common if I’m not a part of the WordPress community or iThemes.” I don’t know. That was probably a little refresher. I tend to think friend first because I’m a very loyal person. Then realize, “Okay, this is how we met.” Brian, you introduced me to Jason Schuller 00:12:01 back in the day, I think 2008. I count him as one of my most dear friends in life. He lives in Seattle thousands of miles away and isn’t even in the WordPress community anymore, but I value that friendship. I think there are those that have transcended the business competition, partnership — whatever you want to call it. They’ve become really dear friends that I care about and want to keep in touch with. Brian Gardner: We’re going to take a quick break, but we’ll be right back with StudioPress FM. Jerod Morris: Hey, Jerod Morris here. If you know anything about Rainmaker Digital and Copyblogger, you may know that we produce incredible live events. Well, some would say that we produce incredible live events as an excuse to throw great parties, but that’s another story. We’ve got another one coming up this October in Denver. It’s called Digital Commerce Summit, and it is entirely focused on giving you the smartest ways to create and sell digital products and services. To get all the details and the very best deal on tickets, head over to Rainmaker.FM/Summit. That’s Rainmaker.FM/Summit. What Lies Beneath the Surface of Entrepreneurship Lauren Mancke: Aside from iThemes, you are involved in a number of other projects. You maintain a personal blog at CoryMiller.com. A few years ago you started an organization called The Div, and recently, a business podcast at Leader.Team. Can you share a little bit about each one of those? Cory Miller: I think I’m like Brian, if I don’t continue to do new projects I get bored. I subscribe to those newsletters and this podcast and stuff. That’s what we shared a long time ago. “Hey, here’s a new project I’m doing.” “Okay, that’s awesome. I’m going to do this project too.” It’s always having to have a project in front of you, I think. My personal blog is just to share experiences and expertise that I’ve learned that might not fit our iThemes audience. It’s more focused on entrepreneurship and leadership. The Div is something I’m very proud of. It’s our nonprofit we started five years ago. The mission of The Div is basically to teach kids technology, help kids learn code, light the spark that Brian and I began learning 10 years ago or whatever — that lit our fire. Helping do that for kids earlier on. I’m excited about The Div. I’m glad you asked me about it today, because we just got accepted to be a regional partner for Oklahoma for Code.org. Next week, our Executive Director, McKaylan Danner, and I and my partner Jay will be at the White House learning about next steps at Code.org. We’re super excited about that partnership. It’s just trying to do good for the last couple years and then realizing Code.org has everything that we wanted to do here in Oklahoma to help kids learn technology. The last you asked about, Leader.Team, was essentially — one of my best friends, my sidekick, my COO Matt Danner and I just realized we’ve made a lot of mistakes in eight and a half years. We want to share those experiences and what we learned, and let people take the truth or the things that they need from those stories. Again, I think Brian and I are a lot alike. If we don’t have a project in front of us we get bored. Brian Gardner: You said mistakes. This was not on the agenda, but it made me think of last week when I was in Dallas at Circles Conference. I was on a panel onstage and we were asked, “What were the reasons you may have rebranded your company?” I immediately raised my hand and mentioned that for me it was a cease and desist letter that I had gotten way back in the day. That’s why I rebranded to StudioPress. This idea of entrepreneurs and business and making mistakes is fresh in my mind and you just brought it up. I’m going to ask an impromptu question, if you don’t mind. I’m sure you don’t, because you’re such a transparent guy. Give us a few examples of a few mistakes you’ve made over the years. Ultimately, these are probably things that at the core maybe have bubbled up into some of the stuff that we’re going to talk about a little bit later on with mental health and so on. Cory Miller: Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you asking the question too. I remember that cease and desist letter. I remember that chat. You going, “Hey, we just got hit with this.” I’m like, “Oh my gosh. I’m sorry.” All the emotions around that. I felt that empathetically because you were going through that and we were chatting quite a bit. As far as mistakes goes, I try to stay as positive as I can. Mistakes are always learning lessons for me, or I at least try to make them learning lessons for me. I would say the biggest mistakes or learning lessons have been around people. We’ve had to part ways with team members in the past — with customers too. I think the biggest mistakes are probably just making sure we’re doing right by everybody, but thinking through the learning aspects of, “Okay, how do we do this different so we don’t replicate this?” When we have to let someone go from the team or whatever, that’s a tremendously impactful thing — often negatively, but in the long haul positively for everyone involved. How do we get better as we do that? We’ve made some hiring mistakes, team mistakes over the years. We’ve really tried not to do that as much. We’ve made a number of product and brand mistakes. I don’t know if that’s exactly where you wanted the question to go, Brian, but we pulled WebDesign.com into the iThemes brand and we thought, “Yeah, just turn on the domain name and it would go bezonkers,” and all that kind of stuff. It didn’t. We eventually let that go back. Some of the product mistakes have been obviously huge. I don’t know if you classify those as mistakes. Probably in 2008, 2009, exploring movable type themes — that was interesting and costly. I’m trying to think back some. It’s not that I don’t have a wealth of mistakes, by the way. How Mental Health Can Affect Your Business Brian Gardner: Yeah, right. I hear you. Okay, let’s get into the mental health element of it, because that’s really what this is all about and what I want to pick your brain about. It’s safe to say that we can all agree this is an issue we face as entrepreneurs. You mentioned that at the very beginning that being an entrepreneur can be a very lonely job. It’s something I’ve experienced a multitude of times in a number of different ways over the years. Quite honestly, it’s had a significant impact on how we run our business. It’s hard to separate personal from business or mental health from business, because at some point they’re going to intersect. It happens daily and hourly. For me it’s almost every other hour. “Oh my gosh, should I do this or should I go do that?” It’s always at the top of my mind. It’s something that I’ve struggled with over the years. Something that I’ve allowed to affect the relationship we’ve had over the years. At what point did you encounter the initial wave of it’s not just all peaches and roses ? Cory Miller: Gosh, probably that first year as we had to let people go. The whole thing in the background about WordPress and the GPO controversy that was going on around themes. That was the first wave of, “This isn’t all peaches and cream. It’s a tough job. It’s a tough sport. It’s a tough game to play.” Having played it for eight and a half years, both of us, in the ups and downs, it’s a cold shower to say, “Okay, it’s just not going to be all good. There’s going to be some really trying times for that.” I think that some of the ones along the way over the last eight and a half years — the biggest was when I went through my divorce in 2010. That affected the entire team, the business, and me, obviously, personally. Trying to get through that. That’s when personal life and business life — my personal affected business in a tremendous way. Gosh, looking back, Brian, to when we started themes back 10 years ago. Golly, 10 years. There were few people doing themes or even quality themes. Now today, you look and there are themes and premium theme companies all over the place. Not to mention StudioPress’s long tenure in the space. But also you’ve got ThemeForce, which has gotten substantially better. A lot of offerings there. It kind of commoditized that market in so many ways. The constant competition, which is good, I think. I don’t like to admit that always. But the constant competition within WordPress makes everything better. That means we’ve always got to be a step ahead. We derive about two to three percent of our revenue from themes today. Eight years ago we derived 100 percent of our revenue from themes. How much that has changed in the few short years here and how it’s going to change in the future, too. We don’t know where that necessarily is always going to be taking us. To be ready for that. The constant competition — it’s a resetting thing for me every single day almost. You’ll come in from a weekend and look at yourselves in the mirror and go, “Oh, gosh.” You’ll start feeling bad about yourself. You have a down week or whatever that is. I think it happens to everybody, by the way. There are some that are more open with it and honest about it. We all have the down days. That first day probably that happened in the first year, second year, when you’re like, “Is the server down? Are sales not happening today?” You think the sky is falling. When team members leave — either voluntarily or involuntarily — that’s always a down moment in business. I think preparing myself to be resilient. Each issue I’ve gone through over the last few years — trying to build more and more resilient muscle to myself, knowing that it’s only a matter of time when there’s going to be another dip. Lauren Mancke: Being an entrepreneur is definitely a difficult job. It’s really something you put your whole self into, like you said. It’s only natural for that to spill out into other aspects of your life. Your personal life can spill back into your business life. That can happen when you work remotely. Even if you’re not an entrepreneur, if you work remotely. You said that someone saw you and they said, “What’s going on with you? You don’t look well.” When you work remotely, you don’t have people who can actually see you and see what’s going on with you. What do you think is so difficult for entrepreneurs to deal with, and what major contributions do you see? The Importance of Talking Openly About Mental Health Cory Miller: The way I look at being an entrepreneur is when you guys have been asking me about experiences and stories, the down and the highs, I always think about an iceberg sitting out in the middle of an ocean. That’s the way I think most of us entrepreneurs live our lives. At the top is everything you see. That’s the success. That’s the happiness. That’s the, “Hey everything is awesome, going great.” It’s the Tweets, it’s the Instagram posts with cute kids, and being on exotic vacations, or whatever it is. That’s all that success stuff that most of us only see. The other 70% that you don’t see is the suffering below it. How I’ve been able to look at my life as an entrepreneur and deal with it better is thinking of the iceberg and going, “There’s stuff underneath the surface that I’m not sharing that I’m suffering with, struggling with.” Not every single day do I feel depression or do I have some particular pain that’s just killing me. There’s things under the surface that affects the top of the surface. I think the more we can share those things that are happening with trusted like-minded people, the healthier we’re going to be. I talk a lot about having a professional counselor that I see, on average, four times a year. I put it on my calendar every quarter to make an appointment with Kyle, my counselor, to talk through the issues. Just knowing that I needed some outside perspective, a professional that’s trained and licensed to help me walk through some of the things that I deal with on a day to day basis. Even if I think there are not many things underneath the surface, I still try to do that. Going back and knowing that I was very unhealthy in the early part of our business, consumed with jealousy and envy, anger, frustration — all those things. Now I go, “If I’m going to live a healthy life and continue to do this job for the next 10 years, then I’ve got to be healthy.” And I want to be healthy and happy doing that. I think to your question, Lauren, is why don’t we do that? Why don’t we share the issues? There was about a six month period where I was going through a lot of personal pain and didn’t share it with hardly anyone that actually cared about me, that loved me, that wanted the best for me. I kept that in for about six months. I think the reason why is there’s a healthy sense of pride, a healthy sense of ego, and a healthy sense of fear. I think those things get in our way. We don’t want to ask for help but we know we need it. These things of fear, pride, ego, or whatever, they get in the way to be willing to say, “I’m hurting. I need some help.” It took me being on my face and being dragged across gravel to realize I needed to go reach out for help. The first people I asked help for were my parents, then eventually counselors and other friends that rushed into my life as other people were running out of my life. I’m trying to get down to it because I still do it today, let things get in the way so that I don’t share what I’m really going through. I trace it back to fear. “Am I going to be embarrassed? Are people going to use this against me? Will people really know the real me?” Those things that are obstacles to sharing the stuff underneath the surface are the things that I try to work on. I’m not saying I’m perfect, but I’m trying to work on them so I can be healthier and happier as a result of it. Brian Gardner: Yeah. Leo from Buffer set the trend, at least for me, to do the transparency thing more from a business and numbers standpoint. When I think of it in terms of who out there — and not even just the WordPress space, but the online entrepreneurial space — who has started to set that trend of the personal transparency, obviously you come to mind. In fact, as I was preparing for all this I thought it would be fun to Google “Cory Miller mental health.” I know it’s kind of a funny phrase, but I have the ability to be able to find what I need to on Google. I’m like, “That’s perfectly phrased for what I was looking for.” It’s quite obvious how important this is to you, because I see results all over Google with that search term. There’s articles in Inc. Magazine, a podcast you did on Office Hours with Carrie Dills and Pippin Williamson, and a slew of other results that came in like that. The one that stands out to me the most, though, is the piece you just published not too long ago on your own site titled, “It’s Time to Start Talking Openly about Mental Health.” You had just spoken at WordCamp Denver, and in your words, shared the most “personal, intimate, transparent, open, and perhaps the most impactful” talk you’ve ever given. I followed that up with the one on your site. I wanted to read a little bit of that just for our listeners. Cory says, “It’s not too often that I cry, let alone cry in public, let alone cry on stage, but I did. Sharing some of the most personal stories of my life, many of which I’ve never shared publicly was intense to say the least. Thinking about the people who’ve made a difference in my life, often the life-saving difference, just opened up a part of me I don’t share too often … and I lost it.” In that talk, you shared some intimate things you’ve alluded to a couple of times here already on the show with your divorce, the solitary confinement you put yourself in for six months, and your general insecurities, and as you’ve also said, fear. You have thousands of customers at iThemes, more than that who follow you through social media, and a slew of folks who look up to you — what was the straw that broke the camel’s back? Why did you finally break down and decide to go against the grain and set this trend, and just say, “It’s okay to be real and it’s okay to struggle?” Cory Miller: I remember telling my wife Lindsay — we’ve been married 5 years in July — I said, “Hey I’m submitting this talk.” A lot of things I wanted to share earlier but couldn’t for a number of reasons. I said, “I’m submitting this talk and when I push publish here on this talk, I’m afraid they might actually want me to do it. But once I’m done I’m committed.” Sure enough, they did it. There was probably three talks I submitted. Sure enough, they said, “Yes, we want you to do that.” I was like, “Okay, now I got to do that.” Man, leading up to that week to being able to share the story publicly — that basically I had been through a divorce and all the things that you mentioned above. It was just time, I think. I want to be clear. It wasn’t therapeutic. It wasn’t intended for my own therapy. It was intended to help others. I know as I’ve shared my struggles in the past with depression, struggles with divorce, struggles with being an entrepreneur like we talked about, it’s always resonated with people. It always seems to be the most impactful thing I’ve ever done in my life, to share simply my story and being open and honest about it. It was just time. It had been a couple years since all those things had happened. I had put them to rest in my heart and soul. I thought, “It’s time now to share with other people.” Going through and just sharing this story, being on stage and my emotions coming through me, I said, “It’s time.” I’ve experienced more success than I ever could have dreamed of in my life. That doesn’t necessarily mean financial stuff, just more success in my life than I ever thought possible. I’m so thankful for where my life is now and what it would have been five, six, eight years ago. It’s gotten better even through some adversity. I thought, “There needs to be more honesty and transparency and genuineness in entrepreneurship.” We always put these facades up. This mask of “everything is awesome.” And all that above surface stuff. I thought, “There’s a time for vulnerability to share stories that resonates and helps people.” For one day alone, to help somebody else by sharing my story, to go, “I’m not alone, there’s other people going through the same thing.” Pooling some of the impact and the influence we’ve been able to have through WordPress just saying, “Okay, well if someone that’s been in this business eight years and been in WordPress 10 can share their story, then I can go and get help and seek help.” That’s really what it was. It was time to share the story to help other people. Lauren Mancke: It sounds like that speech in WordCamp Denver was very powerful. What kind of reaction did you get from people? Did they come up to you afterwards? Did they say, “You really touched me with this?” Cory Miller: It’s pretty incredible. Not even expected. I’m sitting up there sharing the story, opening my soul to everybody there. I ended up crying, Brian mentioned this. I’m sitting there, trying to get myself together. My wife is in the audience. Our longest-tenured team member was in the audience. Another awesome team member was in the audience. Sharing all that in front of all them was pretty tough. What happened was I shared the story and I’m sitting there basically going, “I want to go in a hole and cry now.” I got a standing ovation, which I didn’t expect. The thing that I wanted to do is just say, “I don’t care what happens. I just want to get this out.” That was incredible to have people really affirm after you’re sitting up there crying at a WordCamp talking about nothing about really technology. The other thing that was one of the most treasured things I’ll take in my life, was there was a Q&A session. I ended early, but people kept coming to the mic and not asking a question of me, just sharing their story, getting it out there. I thought, “Wow, there’s something magical about just sharing your story.” Doesn’t have to have my name attached to it. I don’t need to get credit for it. When you share your story authentically and genuinely, it opens up this humanness between people. Four or five people got up and weren’t asking me questions at all. They would say, “Thanks for sharing your story, and here’s mine,” in front 150 people, whatever was in that room. That was pretty magical. After that was the realization for me that I’m not going to stop sharing my story. If my story helps somebody else, I’m going to keep doing it bigger and broader and better. That’s what I’ve done since Denver, over a year ago now. Brian Gardner: Another quick impromptu question. Have you ever thought of writing a book that speaks very specifically to this? Not just feeling agnostic general business and entrepreneurial stuff, but an entire book either about your story or the importance of mental health through your story and what not? Cory Miller: You’ve been reading my email again, Brian. I totally do want to do that. But I always give the disclaimer, “I’m not a professional licensed or trained counselor. I’m just an entrepreneur sharing my mental health stories.” I want to do something that says here are not just my stories, but other stories. Brian Gardner’s stories. Your challenges with the highs and lows of business. I want to get a bunch of entrepreneurs and get their stories. Then I want to find a writing partner that could be that professional trained counselor to say, “Here are some things.” I don’t want to give advice. I’m not professionally trained, I’m just sharing my experiences and what helped me most. I’d like to have somebody to do that. I want that to happen. I just need a bigger … I need to kick my own pants here and get it going, because it’s a message that needs to get out there. Brian Gardner: I know you’ve gone through a lot over the years. We’re all sorry to hear that in your story you’ve had to deal with those things. We all have our own stuff to deal with. I’m going to try to get through this question. I don’t know if I’m actually going to be able to. More importantly, I’m sorry for anything — this is sort of impromptu. I don’t know. I’m sorry for anything I did back then that contributed to any part of your story that wasn’t happy. I know we talked about how in the early days the comradery was there, and at some point I think I let the bad side of entrepreneurialism and competition get the best of me. I think it ultimately affected where our friendship went. I knew that when I flew to Oklahoma City to talk to you about that and to apologize for that … Sorry, reality TV right here on the … Oh, gosh. Anyway, I think you know where I’m going with this, that I’m sorry. Cory Miller: Absolutely. Brian Gardner: I’m not a narcissist. I’m not going to take credit for all the pain you went through. But I do know that in your early stages, the fear and the competitive or the “I’m not good enough” stuff may have been derived from stuff that I did — whether it was on purpose or not. Anyway, I want to move through that a little bit and apologize for that. I guess I can say that I went through my own seasons, many seasons of online immaturity. It affected our relationship. Moving through that, what I didn’t truly embrace back then was the idea that one plus one could equal three and how important working alongside our peers can be. I know that at the beginning of our relationship it was that way. It’s better to go with people than trying to outrun them, is something that, looking back in hindsight, I wish I would have — especially with you — embraced more. Back to the idea of co-opetition, where do you see opportunities right now in the WordPress space? Things that aren’t happening, but looking outside — if you could play a marionette and say, “Gosh, I wish this person could go with that person.” Or, “I wish these people would get along better.” Our audience is Genesis-specific but also very WordPress-specific. There’s a lot of general WordPress community people who listen to the show. Where do you see those opportunities? Where do you wish things would be just a little bit different? How to Find Lasting Career Happiness Cory Miller: First and foremost, I got to go back to your comments. Thank you so much for that, Brian. But you and I put those things … Forgive and forget way back, a long time ago. I do appreciate that. I totally accept that, and I hope you’ll do the same for me. It takes two, brother. It takes two. I’m thankful that I get the opportunity to talk to you again and hopefully rekindle those things. Anything that happened — which is private between you and I — is all in the past. I so much appreciate you doing that in this venue, even if I feel like you didn’t have to. I do appreciate it. I know I can always be a better friend, better person, better leader. Okay, back to your question. I think the biggest thing is emotional support and friendship, that comradery like you and I had back in 2007, 2008, and beyond. Maybe we don’t have to share numbers and business plans per say, but just going, “Hey, man, how are things? How are your kids?” Taking that cruise with you every so often. I’d pin you and go, “How’s Z, man?” You had children before I did. Seeing him grow up on Facebook and Instgram is pretty awesome. He’s a great kid — young man, excuse me. I think it’s that emotional support and friendship. Along the way, I think there will be times when we can help each other out. Like, “Hey, Brian, I just saw” — just like we did back in the day — “I saw you did this. Would you mind sharing how you did that?” Being generous with those types of things but not feeling that … I’ve got a great business group here in Oklahoma City. We have different businesses. We don’t have anywhere like competitive-type businesses against each other or anything. It’s awesome to have that emotional friendship-type of support to go, “Hey, we’re going through the same stuff. We have the same problems just different names attached to those.” That’s the same with any entrepreneur, I believe. Same problems, different name, whether it’s cash, people, conflict, communication — whatever it is. Same issues, different names. I think that opportunity in WordPress is pretty special because we get together at WordCamps or different venues online or offline. The opportunity to say, “Let’s just be humans” — we sit behind computers and type all day at a desk. We have the opportunity to also be — with the spirit of open source software and spirit of WordPress — to be human to each other too. I think that is the biggest key for the opportunities that happen in WordPress. Brian Gardner: I’ll take that as a swift kick in the pants to go out there and to seek those opportunities. Not the opportunities to take, but the opportunities to give. Thank you for that. Lauren Mancke: Cory, you’ve shared so many great points with us. I know it’s resonated with me and makes me recall a lot of the struggles I went through starting my business. I think that’s the beauty of what you’re doing. You’re letting people know that they aren’t alone, that you don’t have to be a rock. It’s okay to be open and vulnerable. Do you have any other final thoughts you want to discuss about anything we’ve covered? Any words of wisdom for those who are starting or thinking about starting or actually just in the bottoms of the entrepreneurial journey? Cory Miller: There’s typically always a tomorrow. You hear the typical cliché thing, “this too shall pass.” I think trying to — as I’m going through the bad times, the dark times is — savor that for a moment. To say “I’m valuing what my life is. What I’m going through now helps me really truly understand the value of my experiences,” and all that. To be thankful for every moment in life, because even the bad times have shaped me profoundly into a positive thing. I think that’s the key we miss. Number one like you said, “I’m not alone.” When you go through the bad times, you got to remind yourself, “I’m not alone.” The second is there’s something to learn here. There’s something to learn and grow and do and be better about to make sure your life can go on to bigger greatness, whatever that may be. I think remembering those core things, like reaching out to find somebody else to help, whether that be your spouse, your significant other, a professional counselor, another business colleague. The second, to know that “there’s something I need to learn through this experience.” Make sure you savor that and everything that is part of your life. I think gratefulness has been an antidote for a lot of the tough times that I’ve had in my life. It’s hard to remember, but it’s key to do. Brian Gardner: Well, we appreciate you being willing to open up and to share on the show. There’s so much more to you and your story and all the knowledge that you have outside of what you’ve shared here. We wanted to give people an opportunity to look deeper into that part of your life. Cory’s written a number of books on entrepreneurship and career-focused types of things. These cover topics such as young people trying to get hired all the way to the new rules for what you call entrepreneurship and how to find lasting career happiness, which is I think what we all are looking for. If you’re looking for information about stuff like that, I definitely recommend the stuff that Cory writes. You can visit his website CoryMiller.com/Books to see all that he’s written. If you’re interested in interviewing Cory or having him speak at your workshop, seminar, or conference, he’s always open to that. You can hit him up at CoryMiller.com/Contact, I believe is his contact page. Like I said, we’re very thankful to have your story here on the show. Cory Miller: Appreciate you guys being open to share this. Lauren Mancke: If you like what you heard on today’s show, you can find more episodes of StudioPress FM at, you guessed it, StudioPress.FM. You can also help us hit the main stage by subscribing to the show in iTunes. It’s a great way to never ever miss an episode. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week.

We'll look at what inbound marketing and content marketing are, and some examples of businesses using inbound and content marketing. We'll examine our own track records with content marketing, and look at if it has worked for our own clients or not. If you do any form of online marketing or lead generation, this will be a discussion you don't want to miss. Our panel for this show: Adam Fout of Blue Steele Solutions Bridget Willard of WordImpress! Sallie Goetch of WP Fangirl Jonathan Denwood of WP-Tonic John Locke of Lockedown Design   Show Table of Contents 0:00 Intros 2:50 This week in WordPress stories 2:54 Pippin Williamson of Pippin's Plugins did a huge rundown of different page builders. What were your thoughts? 20:17 There is a theme on ThemeForest selling for $225. Will this be the first of many? Will this have any long-term effects on the theme market? 30:10 The main topic is "Does Content Marketing Really Work?" 31:30 What is content marketing? 33:05 How do you come up with content marketing ideas? 36:51 What happens when you have more ideas than time to publish content? 38:04 Keyword research can be a good way to drive your future content. 39:10 How do you create valuable content that stands out from the sheer volume of information being published? 42:49 Everyone is jumping on the content marketing bandwagon because their ads aren't working anymore. 44:05 How do you publish high-quality content on an aggressive schedule? 44:54 Companies who publish more often get more leads. 45:49 Id there a noticeable difference between companies that embrace content marketing and those who do not? 48:35 Content is king, but the end goal is to build a community or authority. 49:23 What difference does a consistent schedule make in content marketing? 50:43 Content marketing is a long-term game. 51:49 Do well-written case studies make people more likely to do business with you? 55:26 Voice is very important in creating content and resonating with customers. 59:09 Time for the podcast outros.     Get additional bonus content on the WP-Tonic website: https://www.wp-tonic.com/podcast/130-does-content-marketing-really-work   ===========   Other links mentioned during the show:   The Skyscraper technique http://backlinko.com/skyscraper-technique   HubSpot study on effect of publishing more content on website traffic http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/blogging-frequency-benchmarks#sm.0001dcwomtvtyflc117m4a86dytzw   Shane Melaugh http://imimpact.com/   Brian Lee Jackson https://woorkup.com/   Robbie Richards http://www.robbierichards.com/   Give WP https://givewp.com/   Can WordPress Scale its Community Without Mentorship? https://wordimpress.com/can-wordpress-scale-community-without-mentorship/   Jen Miller at Need Someone To Blog https://needsomeonetoblog.com/   Rob

In this episode of Post Status Draft, I talk to Pippin Williamson, and we discuss the renewed effort he and his team have made to rejuvenate Restrict Content Pro. Restrict Content Pro was initially sold without even a dedicated landing page, was successful on Code Canyon for a time, then he let it sputter as he and his team concentrated on Easy Digital Downloads and AffiliateWP. But Pippin knew that Restrict Content Pro still had more life in it, and he wanted to see it become the kind of product he knew it had the potential to be. So when John Parris -- at the time primarily working with Easy Digital Downloads -- said he was interested in helping make RCP a proper membership plugin, Pippin jumped on the opportunity. They have had a good bit of success early on in the attempt to rejuvenate this product: Our goal was to double or triple the monthly revenue within six months. In March, 2016, RCP brought in $7,700. Last month, July 2016, it brought in $11,400. August, 2016, is estimated to bring in a little over $12,000. We’re at the five month mark and have increased monthly revenue by about 1.5. That’s not double yet, but it’s getting close. Within another few months, I expect we’ve surpass $15,000 in monthly sales. Even with just an increase of 1.5, we’re still looking at more than $100,000 in annual revenue, and the monthly revenue is higher than it ever was in the past, so we’re succeeding. Our conversation picked up where the blog post left off. We talked about the pain points they encountered during this effort, some of the additional rewards they've had, and how he structures the business more generally to have the same team work on multiple products. If you are a business owner, or aspire to be one -- or if you are curious about managing multiple lines of business at once -- then I think you'll really enjoy this episode. And, if you're a Post Status Club member, Pippin and I recorded a bonus segment, where we discuss hosted WordPress eCommerce, and Pippin shares his opinions on the concept, and whether or not it's something they are considering for Restrict Content Pro and/or Easy Digital Downloads. Sponsor: Design Palette Pro makes customizing Genesis websites simple. The Design Palette Pro team has integrated with every Genesis child theme, and it’s the perfect place to send folks who need custom design, without a custom budget. Go to GenesisDesignPro.com for more information, and thanks to Design Palette Pro for being a Post Status partner. Original photo credit: Marc Benzakein at WCSD

Welcome to Episode 23 of Mastermind.fm! We're doing something a little different today as Jean and James interview Pippin Williamson, author of Easy Digital Downloads, Affiliate WP, and Restrict Content Pro. He's a man that's made the WordPress space a little more awesome for all of us, and a sharp mind to listen to for advice. You can find the questions we're hitting him with from both ourselves and Mastermind listeners below, but tune it to the full episode to hear what he has to say! Mastermind Questions for Pippin 1) How did you get into PHP programming and then into WordPress? 2) What was the first product that you actually sold as you moved away from freelance work? What inspired you to make the product and make the move away from freelance? 3) How much did you sell your first product for? Where did you market it? Did it sell well in the beginning? 4) When did it hit you that "Hey, I can make a living doing this!"? How long did it take you to decide that this was going to be a full time pursuit? 5) How important were mentors along the way? How important were these people in influencing you to go full time? 6) How many people are you working with at the moment? What does your team look like? 7) What does support look like for you? How do you onboard and what kind of resources do you devote to it? 8) Is there a point where you will "release" a customer? i.e. are there certain situations where you realize a customer just can't be supported anymore? What factors play into a decision like that? 9) You've become successful with a number of different plugins. How do you manage your time and effort between these and where do you draw the line and say 'enough is enough'? 10) How do you divide your team among the different projects and products that you have? 11) What is the most important piece of advice you'd give to someone starting or wanting to start their own business? 12) If you had it to do all over again (starting a business), what one thing would you change? 13) What would you say is the most challenging thing in your business today? 14) What is the most exciting thing going on in your business right now? Featured On The Show: WP Ninjas WP Mayor WP RSS Aggregator Easy Digital Downloads Affiliate WP Restrict Content Pro Pro Blog Design Easy Content Types

Welcome to Episode 19 of Mastermind.fm! This week our resident masterminds Jean and James will be talking about Wordpress.org. Specifically, the challenges and benefits of listing your plugin on WordPress.org, and some alternatives to it. Sit back and listen with us for a while while they parse the pros and cons! Show notes are below, but tune in for the full conversation! Mastermind.fm is proudly sponsored by & Publishing Plugins on WordPress.org Benefits 1) Feedback You can get great feedback on your work from users. With both a support forum and a review section, you can hear what your target audience feels about your product, and get a sense of where else you can go with it- share with a greater community and see how it gets used! It’s great material for considering premium features and testing the market. 2) Motivation There’s nothing quite like watching your plugin grow. The first notification that your repo is available, committing the first release and seeing your plugin go live - it’s exhilarating. The WordPress community is great, and getting involved in the positive feedback loop of the community can really drive you to do your best. Pain Points 1) Support When you have multiple plugins listed on the repo, it can be very difficult to manage support through the .org support forums. Also, even when you’re just posting something for fun or as a side project, support expectations from users can be very demanding in the forums. 2) Reviews There is no accountability for the rating system in the repo. Users can leave very poor reviews with no substantiation and there is no way to challenge that type of review. The moderators do an outstanding job of moderating and read every single review, but there is not a system in place to deal with unfair or flippant reviews. 3) Search Results There are known problems with the keyword search functionality in the repo. For example, searching for keywords related to RSS Aggregator or Ninja Forms such as “RSS” or “Forms” does not bring the most relevant results related to either product. This is an issue that is being addressed but still currently impacts the searchability of products. There is also very little rhyme or reason to the ranking of returned search results. 4) Measurables Active install data is very poor for giving you a picture of how many active installs you actually have. The reported intervals are too broad for accurate assessments, and there is no other data such as version number or type of installed sites available. An almost complete lack of measurable statistics in the repo means a 3rd party system is necessary for actionable data. Alternatives to WordPress.org Repo 1) For a paid product, Code Canyon is an excellent option. Pippin Williamson’s first products, for example, were released through CodeCanyon. They have a huge audience and it is a great place to test your market. 2) Another product's marketplace. For example, Easy Digital Downloads and Ninja Forms both offer marketplaces for premium add-ons to their products. With this option you don’t have to worry about coming up with your own ecommerce solution. 3) Managewp.org/plugins - same type of setup as the .org repo, but displayed in a visual manner with better search parameters. Also features new and trending plugins. 4) The Periodic Table of WordPress Plugins (plugintable.com) features the top 100 most popular WordPress plugins. This is something that you have to break into over time as opposed to listing yourself on initially, but is fantastic to have around when you get there. Featured On The Show: WP Mayor WP RSS Aggregator Ninja Forms Freemius Wordpress.org Ninja Pages Nike plus Tag Search WP Codecanyon.net Easy Digital Downloads Managewp.org/plugins Plugintable.com Wpscoop.com Proplugindirectory.com

Welcome to Episode 15 of Mastermind.fm! Today our resident masterminds Jean and James tackle the topic of having a successful WordPress plugin: from zero to success. Join them today and take a tour through the major attributes that a plugin business needs to become successful, from a pair of entrepreneurs who know the drill firsthand. We’ll outline them below, but tune in for the full story! Nobody wants to use your plugin. They use it to solve a problem! Attributes of a successful plugin business: Solve a problem Ooze quality in the way your plugin is built and coded Timing Team Get the word out Reviews & Relationships Extensibility Point 1 and 2: Solve a problem, but make it as pleasurable of an experience for the user as you can. Nobody wakes up in the morning excited to build a form for their website, but they shouldn’t dread having to do it either! Style your plugin so that it is tasteful and comfortable within WordPress. It doesn’t have to be a WordPress UI clone though- sometimes you have to think outside the box to solve your users' problems. Point 3: Is there a need to fill, and is there anyone filling the need in the way you are intending on doing it? A saturated market is a proven market with a clear need, so don’t be afraid to wade in with other large, successful competitors. The fact that the market is saturated indicates a clear need, just find your niche and fill it in an awesome and unique way. Point 4: Don’t be afraid to strategically add people to your team to help you grow and mature. Point 5: People have to know you’re there. The WordPress repo is a great tool for this. Build relationships whenever possible also. Point 6: The vote of confidence of other users and high profile community members is huge for growth. The role of Pippin Williamson in supporting Ninja Forms early on was enormous for the growth of Ninja Forms, for example. His vote of confidence added a lot of fuel to the business. You don’t necessarily want the biggest names (though Pippin is a pretty huge name in WordPress), but just well respected, honest members of the community Point 7: Build for potential growth. Build better and bigger will follow. Make your plugin extensible and easy to add to for collaborating developers. Featured On The Show: Ninja Forms WP RSS Aggregator WP Mayor Easy Digital Downloads Pippins Plugins Restrict Content PRO Affiliate WP Tom McFarlin PostStatus WP Tavern iThemes Exchange WooCommerce WP eCommerce Jigoshop Give Cris Lema Fatcat Apps WP Explorer

Welcome to Episode 14 of the WordPress business podcast Mastermind.fm! Today Jean and James will be discussing total plugin rewrites. It’s an area they both have a degree of experience in, as both are either involved in or researching this strategy for their own plugins. Here’s a quick teaser of what they dig into on the topic. Tune in for more! Total Plugin Rewrites! Jean is currently discussing with his team whether they will be rewriting their plugin, WP RSS Aggregator. James and his team have been in the process of a complete rewrite of their plugin, Ninja Forms, for around a year now. The first thing to ask yourself before you begin: When should a rewrite be undertaken? Some things to consider: Can you still iterate on your current architecture? Is there new technology or new developments coming in that changes the landscape of your market? Recurring user problems Want to open the plugin to 3rd party developers (if not initially built to be extensible) Driving forces behind rewriting Ninja Forms: Mechanism by which we built the plugin simply didn’t allow for any other way of doing things. It was inflexible and the UI was starting to get cluttered. We wanted a new UI and new functionalities for our customers and users. Ninja Forms has handled the transition from the old plugin (2.9.x) to the new plugin (3.0) using a slow transition phase-in to select groups of users. The most current version of the 2.9.x has the new 3.0 code base, but it only unlocks under certain conditions. Certain checks are in place to make sure that a user with non-compatible extensions isn’t able to roll forward before they’re ready. There are also multiple channels for user testing and reporting without actually having dedicated beta testers. Reflections on the Ninja Forms Three process: Work as much behind the scenes as you can until you are ready to market Don’t put out timelines Don’t make promises too early Plan your marketing early but don’t start too early Particular challenges in the process Settings name changes and changing how they’re stored Addons need the same changes that core does, multiplying the work and adding challenges to upgrade routines used in core Handling customization in functions.php without breaking post-upgrade Handling user analytics in the transition from old to new Parting thoughts from James: Think about your user base, think about your code base, think about your team. What’s best for everyone involved? Consider all the different pieces, all the moving parts, everything involved. Don’t come to the decision lightly. Ultimately, do what is best for your users. There’s much more in the audio from marketing to support, so sit back, grab your favorite frosty beverage, and lend us an ear! After you're finished, check out the latest post on Pippin Williamson's blog. He discusses monsters and databases: The monster that is a poor database schema. It's very much related and we bet you'll love it!

In this show we welcome Donnacha McGloinn, one of the most prolific commenters across WordPress blogs. He has contributed to many discussions along the years and also helped WordPress product owners refine their marketing and products. In this particular episode we delve into the GPL, a topic which always stirs a lot of controversy and opposing views whenever it is discussed. We not only define what the GPL stands for but also go into some practical issues surrounding it and what prospective WordPress product owners/developers should be aware of. For example, people like Pippin Williamson have taken advantage of the GPL to encourage 3rd party contributions and improvements by putting all premium addons of his plugin AffiliateWP up on GitHub. Others have probably been impacted in a negative way by the GPL, such as the e-commerce plugin Jigoshop, although that case can be debated either way. We also talk about our own plugins, Ninja Forms and WP RSS Aggregator, and our own experiences with people forking our plugins or reselling them, and how this has affected our businesses. Featured On The Show: Is the WordPress GPL Being Abused? WPMUDev AffiliateWP Ninja Forms WP RSS Aggregator WooCommerce Jigoshop

Welcome to Episode 8 of Mastermind.fm! This week James and Jean begin tackling different business models in WordPress. Right out of the gates, our resident masterminds are quick to point out an important distinction in the way we think about WordPress product models in general: the difference between a development model and a business model. Let’s unpack that a little bit before we jump into the heart of the conversation. The development model refers to the concept of a core product with core functionality in which addons are developed to extend the functionality of the base product in a modular fashion. This model offers a core product that is lean and extensible, allows users to choose the functionality they need, and is easier to troubleshoot and support by isolating specific aspects of the product. A perfect example of this concept in action is the modular AffiliateWP by Pippin Williamson. On the flipside are plugins like Jetpack: a behemoth plugin that attempts to do all the things. Conceptual distinction aside, we turn to the focus of this (and next) week’s podcast: WordPress business models. There are a few different strategies that fall under this umbrella that we’ll speak on: Free Premium Freemium It’s going to take a couple episodes to unpack all three. This week we’ll speak to the Free and Premium models, and next week we’ll open the Freemium can o’ worms. Free as a business model can result from a few different approaches. You can be offering your plugin purely as a labor of love for the community, as a catalyst or channel into a paid service, or as a means of brand or reputation building within the community. Yoast SEO by Joost de Valk is a perfect example of the latter two approaches. The Yoast SEO plugin is, of course, completely free in the WordPress repo. This free offering, however, has set Mr. de Valk up over the years as an expert in his field and has given his company inroads to the inner circles of millions of different websites. The Premium business model by contrast relies only on the proceeds of a paid product(s). Buyer beware: the word premium itself can be misleading; it implies quality but a consumer should not assume quality purely based on price tag.There are different ways for the Premium strategy to be approached. It can be a tiered model in which the customer pays based on the number of installs they need. It could also be presented as a tiered system in which the user pays for the features they need in the form of addons. It can also simply be a straightforward all in one product. How this model can thrive in the absence of a common marketplace like the WordPress repo wraps up the talk, and James and Jean look to successful ventures like WP Rocket and Surge WP, and alternate marketplaces like ThemeForest and Codecanyon. Featured On The Show: WP Ninjas WP Mayor WP RSS Aggregator Affiliate WP JetPack Gravity Forms WooCommerce BuddyPress bbPress Automattic Yoast SEO Contact Form 7 qTranslate X Polylang FeedWordPress ThemeIsle Zerif theme CyberChimps WaitButWhy BackupBuddy iThemes.com WP Rocket WordPress.org Envato Codecanyon SearchWP JeanGalea.com JamesLaws.com

Continuing on this season’s theme of growing your business skills, we’re spending this episode talking the importance of taking care of yourself. Maybe that sounds touchy-feely, or like it doesn’t have any place in a business discussion, but I can personally attest that taking care of yourself is one of the best investments you can ever make in your business. In this episode I’m chatting with Cory Miller and Pippin Williamson, creators of iThemes and Easy Digital Downloads, respectively. Both Cory and Pippin have publicly written and spoken about the important role mental health has played in their businesses. I consider these guys pillars of success in the WordPress community and it’s absolutely refreshing to hear them acknowledge how critical personal wellness is to running your business. Join us for a fun and frank conversation on what it means to take care of yourself so that you’re able to take care of your business.

Pippin Williamson is our guest on on episode 052 with the WP-Tonic panel. He is the expert on devloping WordPress plugins. PRESS THIS LINK TO SEE THE YOUTUBE VERSION   ====================     WP-Tonic is not only a WordPress maintenance and support service, but we publish a twice weekly WordPress business podcast where we talk with some of the brightest minds in WordPress development and online marketing.

Jonathan Williamson is the co-founder and COO of CGCookie, a membership website that provides as an educational resource for computer graphics and modeling. CGCookie has been around since 2008, and today is a network of five websites, has thousands of paying members, a team of six full time employees plus a number of contractors. CGCookie is built completely on WordPress and has a built in membership component. Some astute readers may recognize both the site and Jonathan's name; Jonathan is Pippin Williamson's identical twin brother, and Pippin has worked with Jonathan on CGCookie many times. So, in this interview, you're not listening to me talk to Pippin -- though it sounds like it -- but I'm talking to Jonathan Williamson. Jonathan is as passionate about CG, modeling, 3D printing, and the software that surrounds these disciplines as Pippin is about WordPress and programming. It was a pleasure to talk to Jonathan about what it's like to run a membership site that runs on WordPress. I think this interview will be beneficial for those that want to run a membership site, and also those that work with clients who make their living off of their website. How CGCookie evolved CGCookie started as a blog with news, tutorials, and resources for CG enthusiasts. The first form of its monetization was by selling the source files for the various tutorials. Within about two years, Jonathan and co-founder Wes Burke decided to add a membership component that ended up working far better than they anticipated. Jonathan has been working full-time on CGCookie since around the summer of 2009. They originally launched on aMember, before eventually migrating to Pippin's Restrict Content Pro plugin, along with Easy Digital Downloads. Today, CGCookie has more than 120,000 free users, and they have around 4,700 paid members. Since 2008, CGCookie have managed to not have a full time web developer until February of 2014, when they hired Nick Haskins. You may recognize Nick as the founder of Aesop Stories as well. Nick manages front-end development for the site, and they still don't have a backend developer -- though a backend developer and designer are on their roadmap. How CGCookie's eCommerce setup runs Considering Jonathan is using his brother's own plugins in the real world, it makes for a great avenue for feedback and insight for Pippin to improve those products. CGCookie is using Restrict Content Pro for memberships themselves, and EDD for their store. We talked about whether EDD could be used for both, or if there is room for improvement in the marriage between the two systems, and he believes there is and that it's a goal for the two plugins. For instance, currently, reporting and user management and a number of other features are independent between each plugin even though often times the users that utilize the system may overlap. I asked Jonathan about scaling WordPress and eCommerce for their large user base. He says that scaling for eCommerce has not been difficult, but with over a hundred thousand users, some default WordPress functionality has not scaled well; for instance, some admin areas create dropdowns for all users, which does not work well. Fortunately, there are some trac tickets in place currently to help solve some of these problems. Prioritizing goals for a membership site When discussing challenges running a membership site, Jonathan highlights the internal battles: balancing new features versus iterative improvements. Based on my short experience managing this membership site, I completely agree. For an example, Jonathan told me about a potential question and answer system to help his members get answers for specific technical topics that may be beyond the scope of a specific course. They believe a Stack Exchange style setup that allows them to refer their courses to specific questions would allow them to better serve their customers with the same content they already have. How do you get people to find your content that answers their question, but you don't have a way of just explicitly saying that these are the questions this course answers? They're considering a method of post to post relationships that direct courses as question answers and vice versa. For this feature and others, they try to do things with a short return on investment, but they also don't want to be a slave to it. They sometimes do things "that are important to the quality of CGCookie, that never make a dime." They removed ads last year under that very premise, to make CGCookie a better learning experience. Not the only place to learn Jonathan knows CGCookie isn't the only place to learn, so they focus on creating an excellent community and learning experience for their customers. Realizing that our sites aren't the only way to get certain information is an important thing to know to be able to better focus what we create for our users and why we create it. Pricing for CGCookie CGCookie has pricing for monthly, quarterly, or yearly pricing; all plans renew automatically unless explicitly cancelled. This is a feature they actively A/B test to see what's working and what's not. Behavior of customers varies between the three levels. Jonathan says that the users are more invested in their purchases (and getting more out of it) when they sign up for longer. Quarterly members have 10% longer lifetime memberships and spend three times longer on the site. However, they do have "a fair bit" of what I called "download and dash" members that sign up for a month, download a bunch of assets and cancel. Monthly memberships are also the most popular plan. They've considered locking down downloads for monthly signups but it's not something they want to do unless it becomes a bigger problem; however they do lose money on those customers that download gigabytes of files and videos but only stay subscribed for one month. Testing During A/B tests, they have found that people will be just as likely to sign up for quarterly as monthly if monthly isn't available, and quarterly members are more engaged. One thing they noted is that once people stick around for a few months, the average tenure of a user skyrockets; they have some users that have been a paying member as long as the site has been running. One of my big takeaways talking to Jonathan was about how significant testing can be. Their tests help them decide on the optimal pricing and payment plans to maximize a lifetime value. For testing, insights, and statistics they use both Optimizely, Mixpanel, and Google Analytics. Mixpanel allows you to create custom events in your software, and does require some code knowledge, but it can deliver valuable insights if you use it correctly. Jonathan notes, "It's basically as comprehensive as you make it." They can also mesh tools. They can track which A/B test from Optimizely a customer signed up with, and then use Mixpanel to track what they did and how they did it. They can get login metrics, renewal numbers, and more for each plan and signup flow. Mixpanel requires PHP and JavaScript knowledge to utilize, but Optimizely has an extensive visual interface that doesn't require code knowledge to utilize. What encourages membership signups "It varies day to day, week to week, month to month," in regard to how their signups work. A bad month in the economy can make their signups go down. Sometimes quarterly users will spike while monthly users are steady. Their biggest thing that affects signup rates is customer support. Some presale, but also support for new members to help answer questions and get people engaged. [pullquote align="right"]When they can help someone answer the question, "Where do I go next?", they are able to keep them for a long time.[/pullquote] They have one or two courses that drive a ton of traffic to their site, and it is therefore their largest onboarding channel for new members. However, they don't have a silver bullet for what it takes to get new users. They are always trying new things. On competing and the industry Jonathan doesn't see themselves as a part of a singular industry. While many think of CG as a part of the film industry, it's one of dozens of potential applications, and they don't want to narrow themselves to a particular one. They also poll users to get a feel for who they are and what industry actual users come from. Based on around a thousand responses, they had no real pattern at all. The results were all over the board. So they don't want to compete with a film tutorials site or any other industry site. They want to focus on the tool itself. They want to teach people how to use Blender and show them how it can be applied to various industries their users are a part of. Advice for those running membership sites "Build your community would be the main one. It's one thing to offer a really good product. It's one thing to build a really good website. But if you don't have the community behind you that's going to be willing to trust in you with their wallet ... it's not going to go anywhere long term, sustainably." Jonathan says it's about building the community as well as the sense of trust within that community. He believes that customers will want to know that not only the content will be worth it, but that it will continue to be worth it -- and that the communication and support from the team behind the site will be consistent as well. He believes that subscriptions and products are very different. With a subscription, the interaction is just as or far more important than specific content itself. When he refers to community, he doesn't mean it has to be strictly through something like a forum. He considers it a broad term, and for them it evolved out of their Blender community user base. At the time we recorded this, they didn't have forums, a dedicated chat system, or an actual community integration part. But the community exists and thrives within comments and their gallery functionality. Wrapping up Jonathan is full of great advice and I could listen to him talk about membership sites for a long time. I have no experience with CG but at the end of this interview he had me wanted to go build something with Blender. You can (and should) keep up with Jonathan on Twitter, or perhaps you'll see him at a conference near you -- but you'll probably think it's Pippin at first. Also be sure to checkout CGCookie's website; it's really great.

  Pippin Williamson is the man behind the fantastic plugins Restrict Content Pro, Easy Digital Downloads and Affiliate WP as well as teaching others in his plugin development courses at pippinsplugins.com and co-opting the Apply Filters podcast with Brad Touesnard - and he's only 25! The post Episode #46 Pippin Williamson from Pippin’s Plugins appeared first on WP Elevation.

Chris Coyier is not a stranger to most of us web workers. He’s a designer at CodePen, a writer at CSS-Tricks, and a podcaster at ShopTalk. He uses WordPress on all three of his primary projects. For years, Chris has been a consistent advocate for the platform. He develops his own websites with WordPress, but his day-to-day interactions are as a user. Chris brings a unique perspective, I believe. He did some client work early in his career, but he’s been more involved in SaaS projects and membership websites; his current membership websites are on WordPress (CSS-Tricks) and Ruby on Rails (CodePen). I asked Chris about his projects, his perspective on various aspects of WordPress, and the community around it. I enjoyed learning from him, and I hope you do too: http://s3.amazonaws.com/PostStatus/DraftPodcast/chris-coyier-post-status-draft.mp3 Direct Download What have you learned from working on membership websites?  It’s just a good dang business idea. Chris was sold on the idea of membership websites from his tenure at Wufoo and SurveyMonkey (where he worked once they acquired Wufoo). He uses Pippin Williamson’s Restrict Content Pro for managing The Lodge on CSS-Tricks. At CodePen, they spend time thinking about pricing, churn, and other membership metrics. They talk about some of these things (and much more) on the CodePen Radio podcast — an awesome podcast for anyone interested in SaaS, not just CodePen. Delivering value Another aspect Chris noted about membership websites is how it makes you want to continually deliver value for customers. He always wants to make people feel like they’re getting excellent features and value for the price of their membership. Another thing he and the CodePen team are learning is prioritizing feature requests. When you are building for members, you want to build features members want; and sometimes that goes against other fixes that are less glamorous. So they are consistently trying to balance time spent on customer-facing features versus behind the scenes development. Build the feature, get the reward Chris talked about how important it is for him to build something, then be rewarded for the work he does, versus selling something and then having to build the feature for it. He experience this with his big Kickstarter project for a CSS-Tricks redesign a couple of years ago, and said that mentality was really difficult for him. What do you appreciate more now about WordPress, after using other software? WordPress comes with a lot of built-in features that many of us (I do at least) may take for granted. Need a user system? Check. Need comments? Check. Need categorization? Check. Building CodePen, Chris is able to appreciate (even more than before) just how powerful WordPress is and how much thought goes into every feature. We dove into something seemingly simple as an example: tags. It turns out that something even that simple takes a lot of thought, consideration, and user experience considerations. What it ends up as, is something you’ll have to iterate on for years to get anywhere close to how good the WordPress one works already. And that’s like the tiniest thing we could think about. Think about the login system, or something else. So his advice was to focus on simplicity and decisions when building features, because required effort grows rapidly as a feature gets more complicated. How would you compare the WordPress community to other web communities? Chris has exposure to a much broader web community than I do. I’m pretty locked into the WordPress bubble. He sees the Ruby on Rails world, the more generic web world, and attends and speaks at a slew of non-WordPress conferences every year. Even though he says he’s mostly in a WordPress bubble himself (he’s not exactly attending Drupal conferences, he notes), he thinks that the WordPress community is pretty top-notch, and hasn’t seen other communities that are “better” than the WordPress community. There’s definitely no other CMS that I’m jealous of that community. What questions about WordPress are you always seeing on the ShopTalk Podcast Chris and his co-host Dave Rupert (seriously, follow Dave and gain laughs and knowledge in life) get a lot of questions about WordPress on the ShopTalk Podcast. Some of these questions are repeated pretty frequently, and they see trends of common issues. Working locally and syncing remotely For WordPress, the most common questions tend to come around syncing the local development environment with the live environment. They’ve been recommending WP Migrate DB Pro for people trying to get around that, though Chris says he doesn’t think it’s perfect for huge websites like CSS-Tricks. I think, to a degree, the common confusion is logical. WordPress development is really centered around three different layers of “stuff”: the content (posts, pages, etc), the files in the directory, and the site management database options. I think there is plenty of room for confusion when it’s not easy to decouple website management with website content, from a database perspective. Learning more about WordPress through the lens of a different audience I used this segment to talk about other confusing aspects of WordPress. We talked about database management, the degree of PHP knowledge required for WordPress theming, using pre-processors in distributed versus custom themes, responsive images, and the asset-itis of many WordPress websites that utilize plugins that each load their own scripts and styles. Regardless of the specific issues people are having, I find tremendous value listening to ShopTalk — which is not as hardcore of a WordPress audience as I have here — where the trends of people’s struggles help reveal real struggles that perhaps we could build better tools for in WordPress. It’s also worth noting that some of the “struggles” we talked about are very modern struggles, and WordPress has been around for over eleven years. WordPress iterates pretty quickly and does a great job of supporting modern web features, but it’s rarely immediate, especially in terms of core support. But plugin support and the shear number of people innovating on top of WordPress is significant and awesome. Just build websites! So many people want to be told what to do and what to learn next. That’s for sure the #1 question on ShopTalk. In the face of lots of new and changing technology, Chris is often asked about what to do first, or what to do next. He and Dave have a core mantra at ShopTalk to encourage people to “just build websites!” The things that you learn will happen as a result of building those websites and things for other people. The degree of paralysis by analysis they see is significant, and Chris and Dave hope that people will let their experiences guide them versus a to-do list of things they must learn today. You’re desirable Another note is that pretty much everyone has something they can do to provide value to others. People surely know something from a tooling perspective that’s worthwhile; even sans-modern tools, basic knowledge of HTML and CSS — the building blocks of the web — could be a great asset to lots of business. Even more important than tooling though, is the ability to solve problems. Chris used an example of a business that sells wrenches. If you can help a business that sells wrenches to sell more wrenches, then you are able to provide that business a lot of value; so focus on helping businesses do what they do better. Learn by sharing I admire Chris’ degree of sharing what he’s learning, through ShopTalk, CodePen Radio, and for years on CSS-Tricks. He doesn’t do anything special to write about what he learns. He keeps his drafts right there in WordPress. He doesn’t take special notes. He just writes, and he often writes about what he’s learning. Over time he’s been able to refine his writing and learn what to expect, as far as feedback goes. But at the core he just writes, and through that writing he’s been able to grow his own audience and get better at everything else he’s doing professionally. Staying consistent and avoiding burnout I was curious what Chris has done to stay so consistent online and avoid burnout. It seems to me that a lot of people get temporarily motivated and quickly disenchanted. I’ve learned in my own experience with the web that any measure of success takes lots and lots of consistent effort. Chris hasn’t done a lot to think about avoiding burnout, but figures there are some things he subconsciously does to stay motivated. That may be taking extended breaks from the web and disconnecting for a trip to the woods, or shorter breaks just in the day like stopping and playing the banjo for a few minutes. Stay in touch with Chris At the end of every episode of ShopTalk, Chris and Dave give guests an opportunity to plug whatever they want. Chris’ plug for our interview was to advise folks to take some time off from building their own product and instead go into their issues list and clean up after themselves and their project — which is what Chris and team are doing at CodePen right now. He also noted that nothing would make him happier than folks going Pro on CodePen. If you teach, interact with others, or want a way to store private pens, you should definitely check it out. And it’s affordable too, at only $75 for the year. While he didn’t take the opportunity to plug much of his own stuff, you should definitely still check out his various projects. I’ve learned a ton from Chris since I started my own journey on the web. If my learning journey on the web were a university, I’ve definitely taken multiple classes from CSS-Tricks and the ShopTalk Show. Chris’ business is built on a three-legged stool right now. Check them out: CodePen – a playground for the front-end side of the web. ShopTalk Show – a podcast about front-end web design (and sound effects). CSS-Tricks – where the whole internet learns CSS. Also check out Chris’ fun about page with his life’s timeline and follow him on Twitter. I’d like to thank Chris for the time he spent with me, and I hope that if you enjoyed this interview and write-up, that you’ll share it!

  In Episode 11 of the WP Elevation podcast I spoke with Brad Touesnard from Delicious Brains, home of WP Migrate DB. Brad has been through the experience of launching the WP App Store, which included investment from Adii Pienaar at WooThemes and Carl Hancock at Gravity Forms. The WP App Store ultimately failed and Brad has lived to tell the tale. Brad presented recently at the Boston WordPress MeetUp about the evolution of his business and why his pricing model is the way it is. Brad has teamed up with Pippin Williamson and launched a podcast called Apply Filters which is aimed at WordPress developers. I tried to find a screenshot of Flippa.com from 2008 but the way back machine kept redirecting so I gave up. However you can see the screenshots on Brad’s blog. Brad is currently reading Judas Unchained: The Commonwealth Saga by Peter F Hamilton. You can reach out and thank Brad on his blog or on Twitter. Brad suggested I interview Jason Schuller who’s fame includes Press75 and more recently Dropplets and Leeflets. Keep your eyes on your inbox Jason. Hint: to enter the competition, leave a comment below telling us the #1 feature you’d like to see in WP Migrate DB Pro. The post Episode #11 – Brad Touesnard appeared first on WP Elevation.

Panel Pippin Williamson (twitter github Pippins Plugins) Curtis McHale (twitter github blog) Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:28 - Pippin Williamson Introduction Pippins Plugins Easy Digital Downloads Restrict Content Pro 01:53 - Making Money Making Plugins Product Development Custom Development 02:57 - GPLv2 Licensing ThemeForest Support Disabling Features 11:45 - Building a business around open-source Audience 12:48 - Transitioning from freelance to product work Graduality 072 – Saying NO Doing products during spare time Brian Casel The Bootstrapped Web Podcast 19:10 - Starting with products vs consulting 22:38 - Occasional Consulting 23:41 - Marketing Products Personal Brand Word-of-Mouth Referrals 25:42 - Customer Support 27:17 - Advice for people getting into commercial development Go the extra mile for your first customers 28:01 - Deciding what products to build Building what you need Best Practices 31:30 - Pippin's Plugins CodeCanyon Easy Digital Downloads 34:26 - Pippin's Support Team 36:45 - Tools to Run the Business Github WordPress Skype WordPress-GitHub-Plugin-Updater HALL Ronin Twitter Picks 1Keyboard (Curtis) Radium (Curtis) Episode 148 | Online Marketing Trends with Special Guest Clay Collins (Eric) The Online Marketing Makeover Training Course (Chuck) Bloons Tower Defence 5 (Chuck) SearchWP (Pippin) FacetWP (Pippin) Next Week Our Stories Transcript [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net.] [You're fantastic at coding, but do you have an action plan to take it to the next level? The upcoming book, Next Level Freelance, will help you optimize your freelance business for happiness. The book is packed with actionable steps to make more money, case studies, tips to find more clients, and exercises for you to establish your desired lifestyle. Extras include: 9 interviews with freelancers who make great money while enjoying great work-life balance, videos on strategies to find quality subcontractors, and videos on making more free time by outsourcing your daily tasks. Check it out today at nextlevelfreelance.com!] [This episode is sponsored by Planscope. Planscope is a project management and collaboration net built for freelancers in the way they work with clients. It makes it easy to price out new estimates and once you're underway and help answer the question, these get done on time and under budget. I've been using Planscope to do my estimates and manage my projects and I really, really like it. It makes it really easy to keep things in order, and understand when things will get done. You can go check it out at Planscope.io.] CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 79 of The Freelancers' Show! This week on our panel, we have Curtis McHale. CURTIS: Hello! CHUCK: Eric Davis. ERIC: Hi! CHUCK: I'm Charles Max Wood from DevChat.tv. We also have a special guest, and that is Pippin Williamson. PIPPIN: Hi everybody! CHUCK: Since you haven't been on the show before, do you want to introduce yourself? PIPPIN: Sure! As he said, my name is Pippin Williamson. I'm a WordPress plugin developer. I spend my days writing plugins, supporting plugins, and generally running a business around commercial plugins. I have a couple of large plugins out there. One called “Easy Digital Downloads” and another one called “Restrict Content Pro” that I've considered my main ones. That's pretty much what I do day-to-day. CHUCK: I'm a little curious, generally, when you're making money writing plugins for WordPress, are you writing the kind that people pay for and then they download the code and stick it in the WordPress installation? Or, are you doing custom development for people? Or, both? How does that work?

Panel Pippin Williamson (twitter github Pippins Plugins) Curtis McHale (twitter github blog) Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:28 - Pippin Williamson Introduction Pippins Plugins Easy Digital Downloads Restrict Content Pro 01:53 - Making Money Making Plugins Product Development Custom Development 02:57 - GPLv2 Licensing ThemeForest Support Disabling Features 11:45 - Building a business around open-source Audience 12:48 - Transitioning from freelance to product work Graduality 072 – Saying NO Doing products during spare time Brian Casel The Bootstrapped Web Podcast 19:10 - Starting with products vs consulting 22:38 - Occasional Consulting 23:41 - Marketing Products Personal Brand Word-of-Mouth Referrals 25:42 - Customer Support 27:17 - Advice for people getting into commercial development Go the extra mile for your first customers 28:01 - Deciding what products to build Building what you need Best Practices 31:30 - Pippin’s Plugins CodeCanyon Easy Digital Downloads 34:26 - Pippin’s Support Team 36:45 - Tools to Run the Business Github WordPress Skype WordPress-GitHub-Plugin-Updater HALL Ronin Twitter Picks 1Keyboard (Curtis) Radium (Curtis) Episode 148 | Online Marketing Trends with Special Guest Clay Collins (Eric) The Online Marketing Makeover Training Course (Chuck) Bloons Tower Defence 5 (Chuck) SearchWP (Pippin) FacetWP (Pippin) Next Week Our Stories Transcript [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net.] [You're fantastic at coding, but do you have an action plan to take it to the next level? The upcoming book, Next Level Freelance, will help you optimize your freelance business for happiness. The book is packed with actionable steps to make more money, case studies, tips to find more clients, and exercises for you to establish your desired lifestyle. Extras include: 9 interviews with freelancers who make great money while enjoying great work-life balance, videos on strategies to find quality subcontractors, and videos on making more free time by outsourcing your daily tasks. Check it out today at nextlevelfreelance.com!] [This episode is sponsored by Planscope. Planscope is a project management and collaboration net built for freelancers in the way they work with clients. It makes it easy to price out new estimates and once you’re underway and help answer the question, these get done on time and under budget. I’ve been using Planscope to do my estimates and manage my projects and I really, really like it. It makes it really easy to keep things in order, and understand when things will get done. You can go check it out at Planscope.io.] CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 79 of The Freelancers' Show! This week on our panel, we have Curtis McHale. CURTIS: Hello! CHUCK: Eric Davis. ERIC: Hi! CHUCK: I’m Charles Max Wood from DevChat.tv. We also have a special guest, and that is Pippin Williamson. PIPPIN: Hi everybody! CHUCK: Since you haven’t been on the show before, do you want to introduce yourself? PIPPIN: Sure! As he said, my name is Pippin Williamson. I’m a WordPress plugin developer. I spend my days writing plugins, supporting plugins, and generally running a business around commercial plugins. I have a couple of large plugins out there. One called “Easy Digital Downloads” and another one called “Restrict Content Pro” that I’ve considered my main ones. That’s pretty much what I do day-to-day. CHUCK: I’m a little curious, generally, when you’re making money writing plugins for WordPress, are you writing the kind that people pay for and then they download the code and stick it in the WordPress installation? Or, are you doing custom development for people? Or, both? How does that work?

The Matt Report is all about learning from other WordPress entrepreneurs and their respective business. We’re not just listening to the journey of designers and developers — but also marketers, author’s, and today’s guest a marketplace founder. If you’re thinking of starting your own marketplace or just about to start selling your first plugin, you want to tune into Pippin Williamson. (more…)

The Matt Report is all about learning from other WordPress entrepreneurs and their respective business. We're not just listening to the journey of designers and developers — but also marketers, author's, and today's guest a marketplace founder. If you're thinking of starting your own marketplace or just about to start selling your first plugin, you want to tune into Pippin Williamson. Pippin Williamson of Pippin's Plugins Watch on YouTube Listen to the audio version Matt Report - A WordPress podcast for digital business owners How to start your own WordPress marketplace Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / Subscribe Share RSS Feed Share Link Embed Download file | Play in new window Starting a marketplace What comes first? The chicken or the egg? That's the age old question of starting a marketplace. So how did Pippin start his WordPress plugin business? For starters he created well crafted plugins that were needed in the WordPress market. Second, he backed up his promise with amazing customer service. If you're a developer looking to start your business, pay close attention to the value of customer support. If you're someone shopping for a WordPress plugin, evaluate who you're purchasing from and their commitment to supporting clients. Pippin brings us through an amazing journey. From starting out as a freelancer to becoming a well known WordPress plugin developer and a leading plugin marketplace site. It's not all rainbows The passive income world can play tricks on us. Some folks lead us to believe that we just upload our digital product and the customers will come. Never mind the startup media covering startup's landing millions in investment for the most simplistic of ideas. Running a business that scales is hard work. In the interview we talk about scaling a support team, bringing on more staff, compensation, and reinvesting into new product. You don't want to miss all the juicy details in this episode. Side note I was feeling quite sick when I recorded this episode, so I apologize for all the sniffling. I still hope you enjoy it! Hey even if I was sick, this was great stuff right? Please share this with your friends and jump on the VIP mailing list http:http://mattreport.com//subscribe Photo source ★ Support this podcast ★

HOLY MOLY! I really should have video recorded myself doing this first podcast... it would have provided some comic relief for you to say the least. I lost count with how many times I started then deleted just the introduction! Forget the few times I recorded up to about 10 minutes then scrapped the whole thing.  Here's the crazy thing... IT WAS TOTALLY FUN! I really had a ball recording my first episode and am already looking forward to the next one. I had already planned out what I was going to do, but I think I need to do the show notes prior to recording- as in full show notes, not just an outline. Who knows... I can tell you I won't be reading from a script... ever. Here's my full 'arsenal' of plugins from Episode 1 of the WordPress Chick Podcast. 1) Akismet: If you've done a WordPress Install, you're familiar with Akismet. This is the built-in spam filter that comes with WordPress (so the plugin itself is free). You do need to register for an API key  (once you activate the plugin it will ask you for your API key). 2) Author hReview: There is both a free and premium version of this plugin (I'm using the free version). Author hReview creates a review box in your post where you can list the name, author, version number (if applicable), rating and brief summary. I've adjusted this plugin so it shows at the bottom of my post as opposed to the default top right of the post (it was too crowded with my featured image). You can view the premium version and the free version to see what's right for you.  3) Blubrry PowerPress: Blubrry PowerPress is an all in once podcasting plugin. There are a handful of podcasting plugins available, but I chose this one because it was recommended by The Podcast Answer Man (Cliff Ravenscraft) and is also the plugin my business partner, Steve O'Sullivan uses. I've recorded screenshots and am doing a step-by-step set up guide for the plugin (it's pretty involved). This plugin (FREE) comes with everything you need for podcasting, including iTunes specifications & submission. 4) Complete Gallery Manager: I've done a full post with video on the Complete Gallery Manager, so you can check that out if you want more details, but this is a great responsive photo and video gallery plugin. This is a premium plugin through CodeCanyon, but it's truly worth every penny. Here's my post and video on the Complete Gallery Manager. 5) Custom Social Profiles: this is my free plugin that allows you to upload custom social icons (both regular and hover icons) that link to your social profiles (these are not sharing icons where people can share your content) so people can connect with you on social networks. You can subscribe on the site for a free copy (top right sidebar of this page). 6) Easy Digital Downloads:  Like I mentioned in the podcast, this is one of my favorite new plugins! And yep, its free! It was created by Pippin Williamson. The plugin works great as is, right out of the box. There are free and premium extensions available to add additional functionality and options. Youll be hearing much more about this plugin in upcoming months from me, but for now I recommend you download it and test it out (yep, just the free version will get you going). Keep in mind this is for digital products only. Get Easy Digital Downloads here. 7) Easy Digital Downoads - Amazon S3 Extension: If you have an Amazon S3 account and want to store you digital downloads for use with Easy Digital Downloads, then this is for you! I love my S3 account and any time I can use it without having to login to Amazon I'm all for it. This is a premium extension, but remember the plugin is free! (can't beat that!) Get the Amazon S3 Extension here 8) Easy Digital Downloads - Aweber Extension: Want to add your customers to your list when they purchase from you through Easy Digital Downloads?  Don't worry, they still have to confirm their optin (and you set up a little checkbox for them to...