Podcasts about woothemes

34: Novedades Apple, noticias contra Google y marketing con Influencers virtualesMuy buenas y bienvenido al podcast “Noticias Marketing”, soy Borja Girón y cada lunes te traigo y analizo las noticias que más pueden impactar en tu negocio para generar más ingresos. Si eres emprendedor es el momento de hacer crecer tu negocio y dejar de emprender solo. Únete a la Comunidad Emprendedores Triunfers desde: https://borjagiron.com/comunidad y podrás acceder a las sesiones de Mastermind cada lunes conmigo y el resto de emprendedores, al podcast secreto, a los retos y las categorías con todo lo necesario para hacer crecer tu negocio.Hoy es lunes 18 de septiembre de 2023, ¿Estás preparado? ¿Estás preparada? ¡Comenzamos!- **TikTok inicia la migración de los datos de usuarios europeos a su centro de Dublín**- **Twitter, la red social más utilizada por las grandes farmacéuticas**²: - **Meta planea lanzar una versión de pago de Facebook e Instagram**- **Las marcas con más éxito de TikTok: La Liga y KFC**⁴: - **Warner Music ficha a la primera artista digital creada por la IA generativa**: Noonoouri se convierte en la primera influencer digital en firmar un contrato discográfico con Warner Music por su canción "Dominoes". - **Barbie elige el deporte femenino como la profesión del año para su nueva colección**: - **Los principales aprendizajes sobre marketing digital en esta nueva edición de INBOUND23**: - **Procter & Gamble (P&G) repite como el anunciante con mayor presión publicitaria en televisión en agosto**:- **McDonald's presenta una ingeniosa campaña donde puedes «pescar» una hamburguesa**- **Pinterest anuncia una tecnología para aumentar la representación corporal en la plataforma**: - **Amazon se posiciona como la plataforma publicitaria favorita entre los consumidores**: Un estudio realizado por la consultora Kantar ha revelado que Amazon es la plataforma publicitaria que más confianza genera entre los consumidores, seguida de Google y Facebook. El informe también muestra que el 71% de los usuarios considera que la publicidad online es más relevante y personalizada que hace tres años. - **Metaverso, NFTs, la realidad virtual y la realidad aumentada, las tendencias que marcarán el 2023**NOTICIAS RÁPIDASSe presenta el iPhone 15 y Apple Watch 8. iPhone 12 lanzará actualización para solucionar el problema detectado de radiación Juicio contra Google por monopolioActualización importante en Google Helpful Content.Llegan los Canales a WhatsApp con buscador.Novedades

In this episode, we're continuing our chat with Adii Pienaar, who has established successful companies like WooThemes and WooCommerce, and is presently involved in a new enterprise called Cogsy. In addition to his business ventures, Adii is the author of Life Profitably and the host of the Life Profitably podcast, and his unique perspective on Shopify is undoubtedly unmatched. Listen in as we continue to dive into the world of eCommerce and discuss the benefits of using WooCommerce versus Shopify, as well as what it was like building a shopping cart from scratch. Adii also shares how Cogsy is helping merchants and solving a major pain point for eCommerce owners, and we wrap up the episode with a lightning round of questions. You can find show notes and more information by clicking here: https://bit.ly/3zRAFQp 

How can you achieve a successful exit in your business without selling your soul or burning out until you're barely more than a burnt crisp? I'm excited to chat with Adii Pienaar, a successful entrepreneur who has founded multiple companies, including WooThemes and WooCommerce, and is currently working on a new venture called Cogsy. He's also the author of the Life Profitably book and hosts the Life Profitably podcast, and through the rollercoaster ride of his entrepreneurial journey, he has learned some valuable lessons that he shares today. Listen in as Adii shares his approach to balancing life and business, his experiences of burnout, and the ups and downs of his entrepreneurial journey, including leaving WooCommerce. We also discuss finding balance as a tightrope act—where you invest deeply in your business while also investing in other areas of your life—and Adii shares his motivation for continuing despite the fear of failure. You can find show notes and more information by clicking here: https://bit.ly/40wCPAE Interested in our Private Community for 7-Figure Store Owners?  Learn more here.   Want to hear about new episodes and eCommerce news round-ups?  Subscribe via email.

Learn about living an enriched life and building a successful business with Adii Pienaar’s life profitability perspective in this LMScast hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. Adii is the founder of WooThemes and author of the book Life Profitability: The New Measure of Entrepreneurial Success, and he now works on a startup called Cogsy. Adii attributes a large part of his entrepreneurial nature to his ambition, drive, and love of a challenge, along with a thirst for learning. Many failures in business happen when we get stuck in cliches around what an entrepreneur does or should be. We end up … Living an Enriched life and Building a Successful Business with Adii Pienaar’s Life Profitability Perspective Read More » The post Living an Enriched life and Building a Successful Business with Adii Pienaar’s Life Profitability Perspective appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

Today's guest, Adii Pienaar, is not a fan of labels, but he's a true life-first entrepreneur and avid writer. He also co-founded WooThemes in 2007, founded Conversio in 2014. His latest book, Life Profitability: The New Measure of Entrepreneurial Success distills a new perspective for becoming self-aware, recognising your values, and understanding your impact. I found it really impactful, so I couldn't wait to bring Adii on to the show.Listen to this conversation as we take a step back and review how to live an enriched life AND run a successful business. We discuss the power of language, journaling, what ‘harmony' means to Adii – and cultivating ‘breadcrumbs' of writing. Talking Points Being a seeker The pros and cons of ambition Why we shouldn't strive for ‘work-life balance Measuring qualitative goals How to maintain and sustain your life profitability How journaling has helped Adii Breaking old patterns Quote"Seek the newer versions of your truths."Helpful Links ‘Life Profitability' by Adii Pienaar  ‘Motion' by Adii Pienaar  The Toxicity of Relentless Ambition ‘When Breath Becomes Air' by Paul Kalanithi Episode 226: How to Build a Company of One with Paul Jarvis ‘Siddhartha' by Hermann Hesse ‘The Values Factor' by Dr. John DeMartini 13 Questions with Dr John Demartini Adii.me Want to discover some of the books mentioned on the podcast? Check out Scribd, my reading app of choice.If you enjoyed the episode, please leave a rating and/or review wherever you listened to the episode. Also don't forget to check out all of our podcast sponsors found on our podcast sponsors page.If you enjoyed the episode, please leave a rating and/or review wherever you listened to the episode. And if you want to have easy access to the archives of the show and ensure you don't miss the new episodes to come then subscribe to the podcast in the app you're using – or you can do so on a variety of podcast platforms by clicking here.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's guest, Adii Pienaar, is not a fan of labels, but he's a true life-first entrepreneur and avid writer. He also co-founded WooThemes in 2007, founded Conversio in 2014. His latest book, Life Profitability: The New Measure of Entrepreneurial Success distills a new perspective for becoming self-aware, recognising your values, and understanding your impact. I found it really impactful, so I couldn't wait to bring Adii on to the show. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers you access to your own licensed professional therapist – all from the comfort of wherever you are. You can arrange weekly video chats or phone calls, text with your carefully curated counsellor, and do so at an affordable price. And anything you share is confidential. I've been using BetterHelp for a while and I am highly impressed. It's been a huge help for me and I know it can be the same for you. Start living a happier life today with BetterHelp. As a listener, you'll get 10% off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com/timecrafting. Give BetterHelp a try today. This episode is sponsored by Sit Down, Startup, a new weekly podcast from Zendesk. Getting your business off the ground is hard. Find out why customer experience is at the heart of success. The startup's team chats with Zendesk leaders, founders, and CEOs in a coffee-shop style conversation about starting up when the world is upside down. Catch weekly fresh new episodes on Apple, Google, and Spotify. Head over to Sit Down, Startup here. Listen to this conversation as we take a step back and review how to live an enriched life AND run a successful business. We discuss the power of language, journaling, what ‘harmony' means to Adii – and cultivating ‘breadcrumbs' of writing.  Talking Points Being a seeker (01:28) The pros and cons of ambition (05:26) Why we shouldn't strive for ‘work-life balance' (08:35) Measuring qualitative goals (12:17) How to maintain and sustain your life profitability (16:50) How journaling has helped Adii (28:46) Breaking old patterns (33:38) Quote "Seek the newer versions of your truths." Helpful Links ‘Life Profitability' by Adii Pienaar  ‘Motion' by Adii Pienaar  The Toxicity of Relentless Ambition ‘When Breath Becomes Air' by Paul Kalanithi Episode 226: How to Build a Company of One with Paul Jarvis ‘Siddhartha' by Hermann Hesse ‘The Values Factor' by Dr. John DeMartini 13 Questions with Dr John Demartini Adii.me Want to discover some of the books mentioned on the podcast? Check out Scribd, my reading app of choice. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave a rating and/or review wherever you listened to the episode. And if you want to have easy access to the archives of the show and ensure you don't miss the new episodes to come then subscribe to the podcast in the app you're using – or you can do so on a variety of podcast platforms by clicking here.

Premium Members, click here to access this interview in the premium area. Adii Pienaar of www.adii.me is a serial entrepreneur in every sense of the term. He is a former founder of WooThemes, sold reportedly for over 30 million dollars and more recently sold his latest startup for more millions of dollars. He's also a [...] The post 409: Adii Pienaar – How to build a photography business to supports your lifestyle appeared first on Photography Business Xposed - Photography Podcast - how to build and market your portrait and wedding photography business.

Adii Pienaar believes there's a new measure of entrepreneurial success. After more than 12 years of chasing success, Adii is reflecting on his journey as a 3x founder and CEO, and introduces his new perspective of "success" as a startup founder.Adii's entrepreneurial journey started with building custom Wordpress themes, eventually leading to founding WooThemes in 2008. After WooThemes was acquired by Woocommerce in 2015, Adii has parlayed his wins into multiple e-commerce technology ventures- mostly recently as the founder of Cogsy.In this episode, Bart and Adii host a conversation about the importance of founders separating themselves from the successes & failures of business. Adii dives deep into reflection on his experience launching products, growing teams and funding ventures- sharing what he would do differently as a first-time founder.Adii recently launched his book, Life Profitability: The New Measure of Entrepreneurial Success. In Life Profitability, Adii provides you with a new perspective for becoming self-aware, recognizing your values, and understanding your impact. An enriched life and a successful business are not mutually exclusive. In fact, this book will provide you with the first steps in building a business that is more sustainable, with increased options for you, your employees, and your community. Learn how to give yourself some space, measure meaningful output, and live with intention so that you can maximize profit that truly counts.Adii Pienaar, Founder of Cogsy :: Twitter + LinkedInBart Macdonald, Managing Partner of Bloom Venture Partners :: Twitter + LinkedIn

in 2007 three guys, two from South Africa and one from Norway got together when an idea to start a theme shop called WooThemes. Well, one thing led to another.

in 2007 three guys, two from South Africa and one from Norway got together when an idea to start a theme shop called WooThemes. Well, one thing led to another.

Mark Forrester is one of SA's tech icons who built WooThemes and WooCommerce, two platforms which were eventually sold to Wordpress.com due to their international popularity. Mark is a phenomenal entrepreneur with a calm approach to business and in this episode he shares the journey with us. Enjoy!

Is it possible to build a successful company while putting your life and family (and that of your employees) first? Adii Pienaar believed so, and that’s what he did with his second business, Conversio. Did it being a fully remote operation play a part? You bet! Welcome to the DistantJob Podcast, a show where we interview the most successful remote leaders, picking their brains on how to build and lead remote teams who win.Adii Pienaar is the founder of  Conversio  and lives in Cape Town, South Africa. Prior to Conversio, Adii was the co-founder of WooThemes /  WooCommerce . Today Adii is a family man (which is why Conversio is a life- and family-first company) who enjoys running, reading and wine.In this episode, we talk about the philosophy of leading from first principles. We explore how to act in order to prevent your employees from burning out (more common than you think in highly motivated remote teams) and how a leader can be consistent while still striving to learn and being open (even eager!) to change his or her opinion. And for the people who want to up their hiring game, we discuss the questions and tests that enable Adii to hire for culture and value.————————Want to continue the conversation with Adii? LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/adiipienaar/Twitter: @adii (https://twitter.com/adii )Blog: https://adii.meMeet Him At Running Remote: https://runningremote.com/?utm_source=distantjob (use code distantjob on checkout for a 20% discount) The Books We Discuss:Siddhartha: https://amzn.to/2MhholcThe Prophet: https://amzn.to/2MkXp54 Adii’s Recommended Tool:reMarkable: https://remarkable.com————————As always, if you enjoy the podcast, we humbly ask that you leave a review on iTunes or your podcast syndication service of choice – and if you could share it, that would be even better!Need that one incredible employee to bolster your team?  Get in touch at https://distantjob.com/contact/  and we’ll find you who you need.

A huge thank you to Adii Pienaar for being on the show!Want to hear more from Adii? You can find Adii on Instagram and at his website adii.me.Links mentioned throughout the show: WooThemes, Adii's first startup (and exit) Conversio, Adii's current startup My first conversation with Adii on the Process podcast Reality Is Broken by Jane McGonigal Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur If you enjoyed this episode, hop on over to iTunes to give me a ★★★★★ review, which will help others like you find and enjoy the show, as well.Special thanks to Mario Callejas for providing the music for the Kin show! Check out his music on Spotify.

The start of the year signals two things: looking back at the past and preparing for this year. And for entrepreneurs such as you and me, it’s reflection and planning for our business while taking note of its “roller-coaster-like” nature. Because let’s face it, building your own business is like riding a roller coaster. One moment you’ve done really well for yourself, you feel like nothing could go wrong and you savor the moments that you’re on top of your game. And then the next thing you know, you’ve failed at achieving your goals for your business. You’re struggling. You’ve done everything you could but nothing seems to go right for your brand. You’re experiencing the dreaded “downs” in the ride. Sometimes, you can’t help but experience the challenges. After all, macro-economic outlook looks a little unclear. Many public markets around the world had a rough 2018. And if I told you to “buckle up and enjoy the ride!”, you just can’t relate to it, right? I mean, no one really enjoys the pain, the obstacles, the difficulties and the rough times. So forget that advice. Let’s talk about why you are in business instead. After all, figuring out my personal “why” encouraged me to persevere and motivated me to stick with my entrepreneurial journey. Hey, it worked for 12 years and counting, so I must be doing something right, don’t you think? Honestly, due to the success of WooThemes, a company that I previously co-founded, I had this idea in my head that I was a “one-hit wonder” so I wanted to prove to the world – and to myself – that I was not. After working on Conversio for 2 years and realizing that even though it wasn’t as big as WooThemes, it was still a “safe” business that was growing nicely. Finally, I thought, I created a business from scratch and it was doing well. This realization made me consider two things: one, I’ve lost the desire to work on Conversio because I finally see it being developed into a nice business; and two, perhaps it’s time for me to move on to the next new thing. Why was it so? Because my “why” for Conversio was just a short-term thing. Why did I build Conversio? I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t a one-hit wonder. And so when I finally proved this, I lost the drive – the desire to continue. It was a superficial reason. And I lost focus on the real reasons – the true “why’s” – the things that I ultimately value which encouraged me to be in business… My family, having financial independence, freedom to work on what I want, when I want, and in the way I want, and fulfillment. These things grounded me in reality. They made me look deeper within myself and find a deeper reason – “why” did I want to continue my path as an entrepreneur? “Why” should I push through even though the entrepreneurial journey has challenges? “Why” do I need to continue working on Conversio even though my short-term goal was already achieved? I look at my deeper “why’s” and I find the answer to my questions easily. Because you see, in today’s modern world, it’s pretty easy to start a business. You have the Internet to thank for that. But in the same world where about 50% of small businesses fail within the first 4 years, starting a business for sort-of-okay-but-not-really-meaningful reasons just wouldn’t help you make the cut. What inspired you to get into business? Why are you promoting that specific product? Or what urged you to offer your specific services? Figure out the reason why. If it’s too short-term or superficial, you’re better off doing something different. Look for a journey that’ll align with your personal values, whatever these may be. It doesn’t matter if you’re struggling, if you’re feeling down in the dumps, or if you’re having difficulty getting things done… As long as your why is strong enough, as long as your reason for being in this business is to help you take charge of the things that are the most important to you, then you’re all set. Buckle up, figure out your greatest “why”, stick with it and make the ride worth your while. Bonus points for you if you include your “why” in your company’s About page! This way, you can connect on a deeper level with your audience, too. People buy feelings, not things, remember? What’s your personal “why”? What drives you to pursue your business? Let me know in the comments below. Talk to you next week! Cheers.

Do you hear that? That’s the hundreds of thousands of dollars invested by several business in both Google and Facebook advertising just to make sure their brands stand out. And yes, for every $1 spent on Google ads, an average of $2 in revenue is made. That’s right, users spend 33% of their time online on their social media platforms, so you can reach them when you invest in effective digital marketing campaigns. But the advertising market has already adapted phenomenally since everyone has taken to digital marketing to boost their brand’s identity. Advertising rates are more competitive, ad costs have increased, cost-per-click has gone up — and like ripped jeans and the ever-present hype for Apple products, this trend isn’t going to go away anytime soon. In the next couple of years, the best businesses that will survive will also have the best brands. Will you focus on building a brand that builds a long-term relationship with your customers? Or are you content with simply gaining a few Facebook likes every now and then? Before you answer that, consider this. When we built WooThemes back in the day, our products were open-sourced. Meaning, all the code for all our software products (yes!) were available to anyone. Everyone with an access could simply take the code, repackage it and resell it! So how was WooThemes able to grow into an eight-figure business? One of the biggest reasons was our strong brand loyalty. Since we had a long-term relationship with our customers, WooThemes developed into a brand that they wanted to interact with and buy from — over, and over, and over again. That’s how powerful a solid brand is. That’s why you also need to get concerned about building it. And in today’s post, we’re going to zero in on the most underrated brand-building asset that most Ecommerce stores often neglect: your About Page. Simply put, an About Page tells your customers what your business is all about. At first glance, it may seem insignificant. But if you take a look at your website statistics, you may find that the About Page is one of the most visited pages! Here at Conversio, it’s the fourth most visited page — seen by both potential customers & team members. It’s like online dating. If they like your profile, they’ll make an effort to get to know you more. Likewise, if your About Page is relatable to your target audience, they’ll intentionally decide to connect with you and do business with you over time. Just make sure your online picture looks like you in real life, okay? Learn with our FREE Ecommerce Academy: Conversio Academy Facebook Twitter Instagram Music featured in this episode was "Celery Man" by Birocratic and can be found at www.soundcloud.com/birocratic. This podcast was produced by comealivecreative.com.

Patrick Rauland is obsessed with eCommerce. He's built sites for clients, he was on the WooThemes support team, he was on the WooCommerce development team, and then he was Product Manager for WooCommerce and lead three releases. Now he creates online courses for LinkedIn Learning & writes books telling people how they can rock the world with eCommerce & WooCommerce

How do you know that your new product is going to find customers? Different validation techniques are there to help. Today our guest is Brian Casel — a founder, author, and a fellow podcaster. We talk about his extensive multi-step validation process with Audience Ops, and break down the process (and possible mistakes) for each single step. Podcast feed: subscribe to http://simplecast.fm/podcasts/1441/rss in your favorite podcast app, and follow us on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play Music. Show Notes Audience Ops — Brian's productized service Ops Calendar — Brian's SaaS product we're talking about Bootstrapped Web — Brian's podcast with Jordan Gal iThemes, Press75, WooThemes — pioneers in the world of WordPress themes Big Snow Tiny Conf — Brian's conference with Brad Touesnard Restaurant Engine — Brian's previous productized service (now acquired) Productize — Brian's course on productized consulting Zero to Validating a SaaS: A Step-by-Step Recap — Brian's article we're talking about Episode 64: Making Freemium Work with Bridget Harris Tiny Reminder — Jane's SaaS product Episode 37: Customer Support Done Right with Alex Yumashev — an episode where Alex recommends to start with a popular product niche (e.g. a helpdesk) Stair-Stepping From Productized Consulting to SaaS with Jane Portman — Jane's recent interview at Brian's podcast Brian's website Follow Brian on Twitter: @casjam Mention UIBREAKFAST to get 30% off your first 3 months of Ops Calendar Today's Sponsor This episode is brought to you by Balsamiq. They just came up with a new web app called Balsamiq Cloud. It's the best tool for fast, approachable, collaborative wireframing. You can capture ideas, collaborate on designs, and get everyone on board. Check it out for yourself — try it free for 30 days at balsamiq.cloud Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more here. Leave a Review Reviews are hugely important because they help new people discover this podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, please leave a review on iTunes. Here's how.

We’re talking to Magnus Jepson, founder of WooThemes and WooCommerce – a platform that powers 40% of all the worlds e-commerce sites. In this episode you’ll hear more about his remote journey, 1) starting a remote company with total strangers, 2) creating the worlds most sought after e-commerce plugin, and 3) how it’s like being … Continue reading "4 – How to Woo your way to remoteness w/ Magnus Jepson"

Adii Pienaar is a serial entrepreneur best known for founding the successful and multi-million dollar company WooThemes in 2008 which he also built from his home country South Africa. Since WooThemes, Adii has started a few new businesses, most recently Conversio (previously Receiptful), a SaaS business for all-in-one ecommerce marketing including features like email receipts, cart abandonment, follow ups, recommendations, product reviews, search, and feedback. Starting out  When Adii started out in business, he just wanted to be an entrepreneur and work for himself. He got into Wordpress out of necessity because he needed money for school. So he started doing some consulting for clients and he got to a point where he was building free Wordpress themes as a way to gain traction and find customers. That's how he started WooThemes.  That was before the ecosystem around Wordpress products even existed and there were only 2 to 3 other entrepreneurs who were selling premium Wordpress themes. Back then, one could only offer free opensource stuff or consulting services. Today, there is a vibrant community of different kinds of products, services and business models around Wordpress. Adii never thought Wordpress would become so big and that WooThemes would grow sustainably as far as it has.  On 2nd November 2007, he launched the first theme, The Original Premium News Theme, that eventually became WooThemes. The theme sold widely. He had started working on themes a year before that and he used to sell them through his blog.  Themes  Adii says that Wordpress has become a tougher place to build and sustain a business.   Tip: If there is a way to productize and some way extend some kind of service that you are doing, especially cost efficiently, then you will always have a market  Core revenue streams  He says with Conversio, they apply a Saas (Software as a Service) business model. That's unlike what he did with Woo Commerce/Woo Themes which only offered one-off downloadable content.  Conversio  In 2013, he was hoping to try his hand at building a new business. So, he stepped out of the Woo Themes operations and took a non-executive position. He then started working on a new product, Public Data, which was an online developments and learning community for entrepreneurs. While working on that, he was also negotiating his exit from WooThemes which concluded at the end of 2013.  He eventually shut down Public Data as a product. In early 2014, he came across a blog post about Email Receipts and when he read it, he became very interested in the idea. The first version of the idea before it became Conversio was called Receiptful, and it allowed people to include some form of marketing in their email receipts, this became very successful. From there, they slowly evolved into building complimentary tools including email marketing tools (now includes email newsletters and widgets).  Adii believes that anyone who read the blog post that inspired him could have just as easily started the same business he did. He says that what helped him was the fact that he had more understanding and experience in terms of building solutions specifically for people who were building ecommerce stores.  Building up on the idea  The first thing he did was Google to find out who else was doing something similar. His idea was slightly different from the existing ones. Addi identified Stripe (a payment platform) which was going through a massive growth phase as a potential business partner. People could build apps on top of the Stripe gateway exclusively and get a lot of success.   Adii outsourced the development of Receiptful's first version which was an app that would work with Stripe. It was geared towards other SaaS companies instead of ecommerce ones. He didn't want to target ecommerce customers because he wanted to initially build Receiptful as an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) as it would be easier. Once it was built, he had a few

Adii Pienaar is the Founder of Conversio, an all-in one marketing dashboard. Adii is based in Cape Town, South Africa and previously co-founded WooThemes - an e-commerce platform for Wordpress - which bootstrapped their way to over 150,000 customers. Today, Adii is continuing to help e-commerce entrepreneurs worldwide build stronger businesses through his latest startup Conversio, an all-in one marketing dashboard that helps you sell more. Adii joins us to share his story, how he started his career in entrepreneurship, what it was like transitioning wordpress templates into a full e-commerce platform, what it was like bootstrapping a company, how he’s approached building his latest company Conversio, and much more!

Watch the video of this podcast here. Back in 2009, Eric Hamm got his start with a theme called Frugal. As he continued to teach himself code, he continued to build - first Frugal, then Catalyst Theme, then Dynamik. Eventually, he moved everything over to Genesis. Since his start, he’s witnessed a lot of big changes and embraced challenges like the demand for responsive design a few years ago, as well as the advent of parent and child themes, among others. In the last year, however, he has witnessed an explosion in page builder plugins. Personally, he's developed the Beaver extender plugin for Beaver Builder; Eric says it's so popular because of its compatibility and it’s huge supportive community. He has also noticed people wanting to do more drag and drop for their websites, and more features are going from backend to front end. Those changes are affecting how themes are coded and how UIs are presented, among other things.   I also asked him how he balances his work time with his family time, especially now with four young sons under the age of 8! Eric explains that with each child, you go through the baby stage - a year or so when you're not getting sleep. As a result, he takes naps on his office floor a lot! He will do some intense coding for a few hours and then he’ll conk out on the floor for 45 minutes. While it may sound crazy to nap on the office floor, Eric appreciates the freedom online work provides him. Rather than having to build his family’s day around his office schedule, he can build his office schedule around his family. Eric is grateful for that freedom and flexibility. Changing gears, we dig into the nitty-gritty of his business and discuss how he supports his licensed customers versus the people in his community who are simply are gathering information. To share what he does today, he explains what has been done in the past. Initially, when he started, there were two things everyone had: your product and your support via a forum. But over time people began shifting to email support and phasing out their forums for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons is that there is more control over the conversation via email rather than a forum thread. Another reason is the customers' login information is often needed to provide support, so the person in the forum has to email it anyway. If communication starts via email, it saves some time and hassle. One of the most impactful decisions he made a few years ago was to move to Help Scout, a popular email support program. Eric says his community was okay with it, but they still wanted a forum to connect with each other -  so he reopened the forum. However, he made it clear it was not a space for support but mainly a space for the members to help each other out. It's worked out well, and everyone has the best of both worlds: they get the support they need directly from Eric’s team, and they get the camaraderie and connection with each other. On today’s show, I also asked him how often he reviews customer licensing fees and whether he has had push back from the community. He talks about what happened to WooThemes and what he learned from the pushback they received. We also discuss: how he has changed his processes and workflows over time; the three things he wished he knew when he started; and what's next for Cobalt. Listen in for that and more on today’s edition of WP Elevation with Eric Hamm!

My perception is that most people know me due to my two successes: WooThemes and now Conversio. I also suspect that most people don't know about all of my failures: Maiden League Records, Akkerliefies, The Cellar, Radiiate V1, Lunchbox, Radiiate V2, CFOh!, Radiiate V3 and PublicBeta. This list doesn't even include all of the ideas that were only ever ideas. Or the acquisitions I've explored in the past. The reason people don't know this, is because we don't know what's happening behind the scenes of others' lives and businesses. We have extreme survivorship bias, where we generally only see the good stuff and we aren't aware of all the other things that another individual or company is experiencing as part of their journeys. We don't know about all of the near-misses, challenges, threats. Yet we always compare ourselves to our perception of others' journeys. Read this article I referenced in this episode: "We’ve Made 10 Layoffs. How We Got Here, the Financial Details and How We’re Moving Forward" Cover artwork by Francis Taylor. Intro & outro music is "Warm Sunny Day" by sunchannelmusic.

This week, we have the very distinct pleasure of talking to a gentleman who is not only a talented member of the WordPress community … but the one responsible for it. 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! Matt Mullenweg is the founding developer of WordPress, which currently powers over 26% of sites on the web. The WordPress website says it s “a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform.” More importantly, WordPress is a part of who Matt is. In this episode Brian Gardner, Lauren Mancke, and Matt Mullenweg discuss: Matt s start with WordPress Founding Automattic in 2005 The difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org Analysis of the premium theme market Generating revenue in the WordPress Ecosystem The spirit of GPL in Open Source Adding paid themes to WordPress.com Making a profit with premium plugins The future of WordPress Listen to StudioPress FM below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes The Show Notes Follow Matt on Twitter Visit Matt’s Website Read Matt’s Blog WordPress.com WordPress.org Automattic The Transcript How (and Why It’s Ok) to Make Money with WordPress, with Matt Mullenweg 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 Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic, to discuss how (and why it’s okay) to make money with WordPress. Brian Gardner: Hey, everyone. Welcome to StudioPress FM. I am your host, Brian Gardner, and I’m joined as usual by my co-host, the vice president of StudioPress, Lauren Mancke. Lauren Mancke: Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us this week. We are continuing our series on talking to members of the WordPress community. Brian Gardner: Now, today we have the very distinct pleasure of talking not just to a member of the WordPress community, but one of the people responsible for it. Matt Mullenweg is the founding developer of WordPress, which, as it stands to date, powers over 26 percent of the web. Probably more even at that point. The WordPress website says it’s a “state of the art semantic personal publishing platform,” but more importantly to Matt, WordPress is a part of who he is. Matt, it’s a huge pleasure to have you on the show StudioPress FM, welcome. Matt Mullenweg: Awesome. I’m very excited to be here. Brian Gardner: There is a huge back story to all of this. For those of you who have been following StudioPress and me over the years, you know that I got started in WordPress in 2006, 2007. I can’t believe it’s been that long. We were just talking about that. I wanted to start at the beginning of your journey. I know in 2005 you founded Automattic and that is the secret force behind WordPress, Akismet, Gravatar, VaultPress, IntenseDebate, and a number of other smaller entities. This story for you goes further back though. Before Automattic formed, you and Mike Little forked this little blogging platform called b2. Run through us the early years of WordPress and what it was back then you were hoping to achieve. Matt’s Start with WordPress Matt Mullenweg: Oh, our goals were very modest. I would say that back then we were just looking to have some good software for ourselves. To have something that we could use and continue. B2 had a pretty good community around it. There were some forums we would participate in. It had a pretty cool active little thing going on, and it just seemed a shame that it was slowing down. Mike and I had already interacted on the forums a lot. We followed each other’s blogs. He was releasing code and I was releasing code. He’s also a super nice guy, so it just seemed very natural to work together. It’s funny though, that we didn’t actually get to meet in person until many years later. Brian Gardner: Yeah. I find that to be — Lauren and I are good examples of that. We met probably three or four years ago in person, but had known each other five or six years even before that. It’s funny how we can, in our Internet lives, finally get to that point where you get to do that ‘in real life’ thing with people who you’ve met, or known, or entrusted with a business, or even just become really good friends. To not really get to meet them in person for years down the road … Quick question though with Mike. You met on the forums. At what point did you think to yourselves, “We need to fork the software,” and then just take it and do your own thing with it? Matt Mullenweg: At the point when it was no longer being developed and it didn’t appear like there was a way forward. In some ways, for a period of time there, b2 was abandoned. When proprietary software gets abandoned you’re just out of luck. If open source gets abandoned, you can pick it up and run with it. So there was a fumble, we picked the ball, and we tried to take it to the end zone. And that is the extent of my sports metaphors I have the knowledge to make. Brian Gardner: Especially in San Francisco, right? We won’t talk about the 49ers right now. Matt Mullenweg: It’s funny you talked about meeting people though. We actually have a tool inside Automattic that tracks who you’ve met in person. So you have a percentage and everything. Right now, because we just had our grand meet up, I’m at 81%, which is pretty high. That means I’ve met 404 of the 501 total Automatticians. Brian Gardner: I just saw the picture of you guys. You guys were on Whistler, right? Matt Mullenweg: We were, Whistler, British Columbia. Brian Gardner: I just saw the picture and I was thinking to myself, “That is a lot of people.” Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, I agree. Brian Gardner: Did you think that back then when you and Mike forked this piece of software, that 10, 12 years later, however long it’s been, you would be in charge of a company with 400 or 500 people? Matt Mullenweg: Never in a million years. If I had had a big ambition at that time it was maybe to be a really good webmaster or have a little hosting company with 500 clients or something. It was very modest. I think the big business plan idea was I could get 500 people paying me $20 a month. That was it. I was like, “Then I can just retire.” Lauren Mancke: Some people get confused with WordPress initially because there’s WordPress.com and WordPress.org and they might not know the difference. For our listeners, can you give us a little explanation about which one is for who? The Difference Between WordPress.com and WordPress.org Matt Mullenweg: It’s all WordPress in that WordPress.com runs the WordPress software. I would say WordPress.com is a good place to go if you just want to dip your toes in. As you’re first getting started, it’s a great place to start. It’s got our great community features built in. It’s got built-in live chat support, so if you ever get stuck there’s someone there to help you. And it’s pretty difficult to break it, so there’s nothing you can do there that can’t be fixed pretty easily. It also showcases some of the latest interface work around what we call Calypso, which is essentially a next-generation interface for WordPress. So WordPress.com is a very good place to start. An advantage is that if you ever outgrow it — which many people never do — that it’s very easy to move to a web host where, if you wanted to run specific plug-ins or modify the code on your theme, you could do so. That’s what in the community we call WordPress.org. This idea that you went to website WordPress.org, downloaded the software and installed it yourself. The terminology is a little confusing, and I hope someday we come up with something that makes a little more sense. But you can think of it as, if you want to modify code you’ll want to run the software someplace other than WordPress.com. If you’re not planning to modify the code, WordPress.com’s probably the best place. Brian Gardner: Yeah. I’ve been on the outside looking in on WordPress.com stuff, primarily because when I first got started with blogging I was playing around with Blogger, which really was a competitor and still is — not so much anymore. Then I jumped right over WordPress.com and went right into the self-hosted version which is WordPress.org where you can download the software and install it. It’s been interesting to not really have that experience with WordPress.com but be able to watch you guys develop that over the years, knowing that it is the precursor to what’s coming into the .org side of things. This is maybe a bad diagnosis, but in my eyes I’ve always seen WordPress.com as the place where Automattic makes money and WordPress.org is where the community makes its money. I realize there are opportunities on both for us all to make money, but is that a fairly safe generalization to make, that WordPress.com is the focal point from a revenue standpoint for Automattic, whereas the community side is left to WordPress.org? Matt Mullenweg: Yeah. It’s not a perfect characterization, both because Automattic has a diversified business which makes money in several different places and several different ways — including WordPress.org — and that the community utilizing WordPress software and the freedoms of the GPL can make money from WordPress.com, and does quite a bit, but also can leverage it in many other ways, some of which don’t even look like WordPress on the surface. Lauren Mancke: Let’s jump back to 2007. As you know, Brian launched a commercial theme called Revolution. What were your initial thoughts on this, the fact that someone chose to commoditize something you created? At this time WordPress was seen as less of a CMS and more for blogging. A lot of the themes were free. Was this something you expected to see? The Spirit of GPL in Open Source Matt Mullenweg: The first freedom of the GPL is the freedom to use the software for any purpose. You can modify it, you can see how it works, and you can distribute those modifications. There’s absolutely nothing, and has never been anything wrong with selling things on top of WordPress. Yeah, I think it was a very natural conclusion, especially because themes value in scarcity. Versus plug-ins or core, which has value in abundance. Brian Gardner: For me though, I don’t know. It’s safe to say at the beginning with this whole Revolution thing it was unclear. To me it was unclear whether or not selling themes was legal, primarily because, if anything, that was an ignorance to what the GPL actually is and what it stands for. There was a lot of discussion going around back then. In my eyes all that confusion was rooted in that licensing issue. I know that it got to a point where I flew to San Francisco to talk to you and Tony about that. What it really means, what we’re allowed to do, and all of that. I take full blame for a lot of that initial confusion and some of the business models that may or may not have been in line with “the spirit of the GPL.” The question I have for you is this — it’s more a comment than anything, but I’m glad that we’re through that period, because that’s was kind of a roller coaster thing. I think that, more than anything, it’s just a community trying to figure out what it is and isn’t allowed to do. Would you agree that it’s nice to be out of that period and into a different period where things are on the table and everybody knows what’s good, what’s not good, that type of thing? Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, and I know there was some confusion around licensing at the time and what license was Revolution under versus the GPL. Was the GPL compatible? Did it violate WordPress’s license? Those sorts of things are pretty natural for this idea that WordPress had grown beyond just the early open source adopters, and folks coming in wanting to build businesses — including yourself — who might not have been as deeply rooted in the philosophy of open source naturally had a fear. I’m not saying this to you in particular, but we still see this today where people say, “Wait, if it’s free and open and users have these rights associated with it, how will I ever build a business? How will I ever make money?” That’s scary for folks, initially. Especially then because there were no examples. Now we have the better part of eight or nine years of not just some money being made, but tens or hundreds of millions of dollars being made on 100 percent GPL, completely free code. You can no longer say, “Can I build a business on open source?” That question’s been resolved for even the biggest skeptics. Brian Gardner: I would agree with that. 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. Lauren Mancke: I think one of the biggest stamp of approvals the community has gotten over the years was when you guys decided to list commercial themes on the WordPress.org website. Can you tell us a little bit about that decision to incorporate those and the impact it’s made on both WordPress and those developing themes for it? Matt Mullenweg: Sure. Something I’ve always been a big proponent of through the years is sometimes, especially on the community side … You could look at the theme of your team or different areas around this today — we can be a little disciplinarian where we want to say, “This is wrong,” or punish people who do things wrong. I think it is even more powerful — this old southern idea that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar — to highlight good behavior versus trying to punish the bad behavior. The commercial themes list was just a way for us to highlight the good behavior, the people who were doing the right thing in the right way. It’s a carrot more than a stick that we could put out there for good people. Yet another reason to do the right thing besides it just being the right thing. Brian Gardner: I think I bit pretty hard on that carrot. One example of rewarding that good behavior — and to this day I wonder where my life would be if I actually never saw this comment from you. On a blog post from Ian Stewart on ThemeShaper way back in the day, this was after we had released some themes that were against the spirit of GPL and proprietary and all that, I saw a comment that said something to the effect of, “I will gladly promote any theme shop that goes completely GPL.” It was at that point when I saw that comment I almost immediately emailed you and that’s what instigated the trip to San Francisco, the idea that you would reward and put in front of the hundreds and thousands back then — not to know that in the future it would have turned into millions of people — using WordPress. That was an opportunity to — I wouldn’t say come to the light side, because I wasn’t necessarily on the dark side — I just realized that that was an opportunity to come alongside the bigger fish rather than swim against it. An example from you was exactly that, your willingness to promote and help people who were doing things that were in line with the licensing of WordPress. That is a decision I absolutely will never regret. Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, and that’s very much in line with … There’s WordPress the software that you download and run. There’s WordPress.org which is a website, a community hub for everyone working on WordPress and interested in WordPress. It’s an editorial product. The things that we choose to highlight and promote there are showing a point of view. Something I’ve always been big on since the site first started was being thoughtful and deliberate about what we choose to link to from there, highlight from there, promote from there. Because it is an endorsement, and you’re defined by what you endorse in many ways. Adding Paid Themes to WordPress.com Brian Gardner: As well as those who you do endorse are defined by who’s endorsing you. Aside from listing themes on WordPress.org that we had just talked about, you also opened up that same capability to a smaller degree on WordPress.com. You invited some premium theme developers back then and gave them a way to make money with a very big distribution pool, the user base of WordPress.com. That was a sign that I realized, as I alluded to earlier, that WordPress.com is what I would always in my head call “Matt’s baby.” I always felt that that was something that you govern and protected more than the .org site. Not that at any point did you — I don’t think it was favoritism. But I always knew that was the focal point, at least, for Automattic. So opening that door to allowing people to sell themes on WordPress.com was a huge declaration of that willingness to expose and open up the possibilities of making money with WordPress more on the .com side here. It’s also something I know you guys at Automattic have joined as well, because I know you have some themes there and are participating in that. I’m curious, how is that going? It’s been probably what, four, five years maybe, since WordPress.com has opened up the ability for folks to purchase premium themes and all that. Is that going well and continuing to go well for both the users and the developers? Matt Mullenweg: There’s a couple of things there. It’d be good to dive into history and then also talk about the present. On the history, my memory’s kind of fuzzy here, but part of what caused some of the premium theme stuff was we had actually announced that program and then didn’t follow through on it. And hadn’t you developed a theme and you’re like, “Okay, I’m just going to release this because it’s not going to be for sale on WordPress.com.” Or was that later? Brian Gardner: It may have been later. I do know we were one of the three initial groups, but that does sound vaguely familiar, that there was a little bit of that happening back then. Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, I think it was probably early 2007, or maybe even 2006. It seemed like a cool idea to have a marketplace. We reached out to folks, I don’t remember exactly what happened, but there was something where we didn’t launch it. But I had announced it in WordCamp Argentina, which was the first international WordCamp, and talked about it on stage. And then, I think because of the GPL issue, we put it off. We couldn’t decide how to make the code available while also preventing people from it being available. Then people just started to release them themselves — including the Revolution team — which we thought was really good. Yeah, of course. I think it was you, might have been Chris Pearson — Brian Gardner: You want to open that box? Matt Mullenweg: — that were the first ones that we reached out to because y’all had some of the best and coolest free themes. Today it’s been interesting. In the beginning, everyone was worried about GPL affecting their business. The reality is that business is just hard, full-stop. Even if you’re not open source, it’s really tough. Even if you’re not open source, people can copy your features. We have Wix and Squarespace. They don’t use any of WordPress’s code, but they’ve copied a lot of our features and are good competitors. Analysis of the Premium Theme Market Matt Mullenweg: The thing that’s happened with the success of premium themes more broadly is that a lot of people have gone into the market, so even though the pie has grown, it gets sliced thinner and thinner and thinner for each individual theme shop. I think overall, themes have grown. Sites like ThemeForest have really driven a commodification so that individual theme shops that maybe used to make six figures a month, they’re now making five figures a month or less. That has been a trend. But it’s also a natural thing that you can expect with a successful market. People, including yourself, Brian, who talked about how successful it was — that draws people in. On WordPress.com we’ve seen a little less of that, partially because we don’t allow everyone in, so there’s less commodification of the general size of it. Also, a lot of our theme authors — we’ve been trying to switch everyone towards subscriptions and away from one-time purchases. As you might be familiar, with our WordPress.com business plan you can have access to any premium theme, all of them, and you can switch them 10 times. You don’t have to buy them individually. What we do is we take a portion of that business subscription and we pay it back to the theme author. That recurs every year, versus being a one-time sale. You get that over and over and over as long as that person is a WordPress.com customer, which creates a much more stable and sustainable business. I think it’d be cool as well to have this in our premium plan, which has a lot more subscribers than our business plan, which is $300 a year. We can facilitate people to profit from a subscription model. I think that that helps create more stable businesses that are less boom and bust, particularly in the theme space. As you know, people can only run one theme at a time. Brian Gardner: Yeah. I wish I would’ve had that advice years ago when StudioPress started and I made the decision to do that as a transactional thing. There was never a point where I personally, up until the merger at Copyblogger, did I ever want to make the switch over to a recurring plan — even though there were other folks who were starting to move in that direction. For whatever reason I just thought to myself, “I don’t know if I can make that move.” And, of course, StudioPress merged into Copyblogger. We are still transactional at StudioPress, but we have the benefit of having other products and software and services around WordPress that are on a recurring basis so that we’ve never really had to make that change. That’s interesting. Matt Mullenweg: It’s the best. If you can do it, it works really well. Something that was really obvious to me early on is that you buy a theme and you get support forever. I was like, “Support costs money, so if I’m giving you money once and then I’m costing you money indefinitely, forever into the future, at some point that might actually cross over.” Brian Gardner: Yeah, WooThemes was an example. I think they were transactional at one point and then they transparently talked about why they made that decision, because of the fact that they just couldn’t scale the support and that “unlimited support” for them in the way that they were handling their business just wasn’t doable anymore. So they made a switch at one point then to go recurring. Matt Mullenweg: They did, and that I think was pretty controversial for them. Brian Gardner: Yeah, they got a lot of backlash. Matt Mullenweg: It was before the acquisition that we did, so I wasn’t 100 percent privy to it. But definitely saw some of that from afar and didn’t envy their position. They were essentially saying, “Hey, this thing that used to be included is now no longer included,” which is tough to do. Lauren Mancke: I think the recurring payments is something I brought up when I first came on board at StudioPress because I saw some other companies doing it. But it is definitely tricky with the backlash. We’ve talked about themes, and that’s an obvious way for members of the WordPress community to make money, but there’s so many other ways for an individual or company to generate a profit using WordPress. Can you share with us a little bit of the other ways you’ve seen the community generate revenue? Generating Revenue in the WordPress Ecosystem Matt Mullenweg: Oh, I was actually coming on this podcast to say you’re not allowed to make money with WordPress under any circumstances. Sorry. Was there a miscommunication beforehand? Brian Gardner: I guess we’ll scrap the episode. Matt Mullenweg: Cool. Yeah, I mean y’all have seen it. Where to start? Anything that creates value for someone who is getting from point A to point B. No one wakes up in the morning — well some of us do, but most people don’t wake up in the morning and say, “I want to use WordPress today.” They’re probably saying, “I want more customers in my restaurant,” or “I want to sell more of my widget,” or “I want an audience for my blog that someday I want to turn into a book or leverage into speaking opportunities or something.” They have some goals. WordPress is a means to an end. As WordPress reaches a larger and larger number of people — because it does a really good job doing most of what people want — even the very niche users like, “I want to use WordPress to sell houses,” become valuable niches. If you can help people do that and you generate a lot of value for them, they will be willing to pay you back some of that. Open their wallet in some regard, whether that’s buying something directly from you, whether that’s coming to your events, whether that’s reading your site and clicking on the ads — whatever it is. There are a lot of opportunities there. As many different ways as there are to be in business in general, there’s ways to make money with WordPress, because making money with WordPress is no different from making money in the world. It’s just that you’re getting the benefit of this huge open source platform and community as a distribution mechanism. And you’re part of a community that is a bit more conscious and awake about, “How do we keep this sustainable going forward? How do we give back and make sure that 10 years from now WordPress is just as vibrant?” But other than that it’s pretty much the same as any other business you do. Brian Gardner: Yeah, I would say over the 10 years I’ve been doing stuff with WordPress, I’ve covered a lot of the different ways to make money. Even before selling themes I was selling my services on customizing themes. So there would be money for hire on a freelance level. Then, of course, I started selling themes, so there was the commodity or transactional version of making money through WordPress. And then we took StudioPress and merged it into Copyblogger where we, like you say, sell some of the training or the assistance. Helping people who are either on it or trying to use it themselves. We obviously have a small hosting division. And then we have Rainmaker, so there’s a software as a service. I feel like I’ve had a really broad experience, and I’m sure there are even … Matt Mullenweg: You’ve done them all. Brian Gardner: Yeah, exactly. Well, I’m sure there are even other ways. Plug-ins became a big thing after the premium theme market. Folks like Gravity Forms and WooCommerce are two huge examples — Pippin with Easy Digital Downloads. So plug-ins — there’s a huge market for that. Where do you see holes though in the WordPress community in terms of that opportunity to make money? Is there anything or are there any areas that you think yourself, “Man, I wish somebody would go out and go do X?” Matt Mullenweg: You know, having a company in the space, when I think that, we usually do it. Brian Gardner: Yeah, I walked right into that one. But there’s got to be smaller stuff. Things that aren’t important enough for you guys to cover. You would think, “Hey, it’d be great if a little company just came alongside and did this.” Matt Mullenweg: I would say to follow my blog and follow my Twitter. Because I put out — it is true that I probably have 10 or 100 times more ideas than we’ll ever be able to get to. My philosophy is to always just put them out there, and if they happen that’s great. Brian Gardner: Yeah, I’ve been asked, probably on a number of different occasions on different podcasts, “Why doesn’t Genesis do X,” or “Why aren’t you guys going after this particular market?” Like you, I say, “You know what? We’ve only got so many developers and designers and people in-house. We’re just not going to spend our time going there.” But I always throw it up as a layup. I say, “Hey, this is a great opportunity for someone to come alongside, wink wink, and take over and take that opportunity.” I think I’ve seen it a few times where someone’s taken that bait and then gone and done it. We, like you, try to reward people and our community who do good work and try to expose them and help promote their stuff too. That’s a good idea though, to leave a breadcrumb trail of ideas and things that might be of interest or have value or potential for monetization that we can’t get to. At least you’re leaving that open for others to see. Matt Mullenweg: Totally, and also it’s just good to share. Making a Profit with Premium Plug-ins Lauren Mancke: Let’s jump back. You mentioned some premium plug-ins. Let’s jump back to those. Matt, can you give us an example of plug-ins that are being sold right now that you think are a great and solid solution for WordPress users? Matt Mullenweg: The obvious ones I don’t want to unfairly advantage, because there’s a lot of really good ones. I don’t want to mention one and not another, so I’m just going to mention ours. Brian Gardner: Safely. Matt Mullenweg: The things that Automattic sells — we have some service plug-ins available generally through Jetpack, but you can get VaultPress or Akismet, which are backup and security services and anti-spam services. These are essentially lightweight plug-ins. What they do is they connect you to an external service that, in the case of a Akismet, uses the intelligence of seeing hundreds of millions of things a day to help keep spam off your sites. VaultPress takes a copy of your blog and stores it literally in 12 places. So even if a meteor hits 11 of them, we would still have a copy of your blog that would be safe and available to restore. Those are the lightweight things. We also have plug-ins largely that came in through the WooThemes acquisition, including WooCommerce — there’s over 300 extensions for WooCommerce — and smaller things like WordPress Job Manager or Sensei that are essentially like little miniature applications that you can put on top of WordPress that transform it. In the case of Sensei, it turns it into a learning management system, something if you wanted to run classes online and help people it’s all there. Brian Gardner: Let’s talk about the acquisition of Woo for a little bit. I think in the big picture of the WordPress community that was the big, “Oh my gosh. Did you hear?” type of thing. I know when I read it there was … Adii and I, back in the day, started things out side-by-side and were really big competitors back when WooThemes got started and all of that. You run this race with people and when you see something like this, “Automattic acquires WooThemes and WooCommerce,” and you start hearing figures of seven and eight figures, my instinct was to instantly get jealous and think, “Oh, that sucks. Why can’t that happen to me?” But then you realize that … Matt Mullenweg: Well, you got to reach out. Brian Gardner: Is that how it works? Lauren Mancke: Yeah. We’ll talk after the podcast. Brian Gardner: We’ll have a follow-up phone call. No, in all honesty though, it made sense for WordPress as a platform to try to go after the e-commerce thing. So yes, you have to realize that there was a lot of wisdom in that acquisition. Is that the type of thing that you guys look for specifically? I know there’s a lot of people making money all over the place, but I’m sure there’s lots of things like that on your radar where you say, “We want to go after a certain type of market or a certain type of user. These folks or that business already has built a solid piece of that and it’s a good idea for us to then go pursue.” Is that what happened, just the movement towards e-commerce through WordPress and the acquisition of Woo and WooCommerce? Matt Mullenweg: Yeah. It was really driven, first and foremost, by e-commerce as a category. From Automattic’s point of view, we were hearing for a really long time the demand from our users on WordPress.com that they wanted e-commerce. The demand from our partners, places like Web hosts, that sometimes as many as half their customers signing up were saying they wanted to sell things online and the solutions there were not good. We really did look holistically at all the WordPress add-ons, including Woo, Easy Digital Downloads, WP commerce — there’s probably even more. All the services: Shopify, Ecwid, BigCommerce, PresstaShop — everything out there. And the big guys: eBay, Amazon, Etsy, the more centralized approaches. And began to really map it out and explore different options, including talking to folks like Shopify a lot. I think Shopify has a really great user experience and has built a pretty interesting business there. What they built at Woo was super impressive — the team that was putting it together and the breadth of its adoption and the ecosystem around it. I had been trying to signal for several years that Automattic was going to move into e-commerce. We’re a big elephant in the room, so I don’t like for there to be surprises for people. In fact, prior to the acquisition I reached out to the other folks and said, “Hey, just so you know, this is going to happen and be announced next week or next month,” or whenever it was. Just because I feel like that’s the polite thing to do. But probably what drove the decision there was that e-commerce for WordPress needs to be a platform, meaning that the core software that drives the commerce engine needs to be available as widely as possible, really robust. It needs to be something that scales from a small store selling just a handful of T-shirts to really huge stores with 60, 70,000 skews doing tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. We wanted that to be something that lots of other businesses could be built on, and Woo was the best fit that we identified at the time. That was just about a year ago, and a lot has happened over the past year. We joined these two different companies into one. Woo had a lot of similarities to Automattic, so that made it a bit easier both in how they were distributed and how they ran the company, everything. But we then started to look at, How can we grow this?” We’ve increased the size of the Woo team by over 40 percent and that’s still growing. The developers on the core software and the core areas have gone up by 5x, so a lot more people working on the software. We’re looking at it from a very long-term view. Automattic has a very strong business already. What can we subsidize or invest in or support to make Woo a platform that, just like WordPress, is one that’s a commerce engine for the next decade? Brian Gardner: Well, just like you, we’ve been asked by our users all the time also, “When are you going to have e-commerce themes?” and things like that. Back before the acquisition it was always like, “We can’t design for WooCommerce because they’re technically a competitor.” I got all weirded out about all of that. But when the acquisition took place I started thinking to myself, “Okay, there’s a bigger vision here for all of us here, and it goes beyond just trying to compete or not compete against other people.” I wouldn’t call this an announcement, because I have alluded to it a little bit here on social media in the same way you sometimes do, but we’re very excited that we are focusing our themes — I’m literally designing one as we speak that will be WooCommerce compatible. Matt Mullenweg: Oh, cool. That is news to me, so thank you. Brian Gardner: The writing, for sure, is on the wall, and we’re now at a point where we can focus and dedicate some of our time. This may take a little bit of time, but my hope is to take all of our existing themes on StudioPress and work in the WooCommerce component. At the very least to make WooCommerce out of the box look good. Our emphasis, then, will be on continuing to design and develop themes for the Genesis framework and all of that, but as a side note to that, all of them will be styled at a basic level for anyone who wants to use a theme and start selling stuff. So WooCommerce and e-commerce for us is definitely on the radar and the roadmap. That’s very fun for me to — I wouldn’t call it announce, because it’s not a big announcement yet. But it’s been on my mind for six months to a year for sure, as Lauren knows. We’ve had conversations. Matt Mullenweg: Cool. Lauren Mancke: Yes. It’s been on my mind for a couple years now. Brian Gardner: I’m like, “I’m going to do it. This makes sense to me.” That will be coming — the first theme — probably in the next couple weeks, so I’m excited about that. Matt Mullenweg: I think that’s something I’ve always tried to do with Automattic as well, is that we can compete and cooperate at the same time, especially if you think long-term. If we said there were 10 WordPress sites in the world and you and I were going to duke it out for getting them to use your theme or one of the themes that Automattic sells, sure, that’s zero sum. The reality is there are 10 sites today and I’m working on taking that to being 100 sites so we can both get a ton and work together. Automattic works with all the web hosts. We also compete with them with WordPress.com. I just try to think of it from the point of view of what is the best long-term thing for WordPress as a whole. Never let what our particular business might be there …. For example, I love working with other e-commerce platforms besides WooCommerce. There are reasons for people to use something instead of Woo. We could pretend they don’t exist, like Google or Facebook do, or we could just say “Hey, how can we help everyone here with what we’re learning and maybe services we can provide — whether that’s hosting or something else — to make this pretty awesome for whatever people want to choose?” Brian Gardner: That’s a good way to look at it. Lauren Mancke: Matt, you said earlier that you don’t like to have surprises from Automattic. Is there anything you want to hint at for the future? Matt Mullenweg: That’s a good question. Nothing I’m ready to say today. I appreciate the swing at the bat there. Lauren Mancke: It was a try. Brian Gardner: Nice try, Lauren. Lauren Mancke: Yeah. Brian Gardner: Back in the day, I know you weren’t a fan of how the whole licensing and theme things went down and we’ve moved well beyond that. Are there any areas right now within WordPress — within the community, that is — where you see things that you wish would be going a little bit differently? Not that you can control it or anything like that. But is there anything out there that we should just be aware of that maybe there’s room for improvement, or a better way to do a business model, or something like that? Matt Mullenweg: I think the area that — there’s a ton of stuff in core and some really great things that Helen’s working on for Four Seven. Thinking beyond that even, I’d say broader, the thing that I feel like we have the most room for improvement is probably in our directories, both the plug-in and theme directory. When you think of the directories as essentially an interface for users, I think they could be pretty frustrating in terms of how search works. How you discover things. How you get support for it after you’ve used it. And how you know whether things are compatible or not, including having a different approach. With plug-ins, we accept everything and then worry about quality through reviews and reports. With themes, we try to look at everything beforehand. For, honestly a few years, we’ve been pretty behind. You might submit a theme to WordPress and it could take — the WordPress Theme Directory, and it could take months before it goes up. And then we’re still not requiring things like it to be responsive, which is kind of wild in a day when cell phones are a big deal. Maybe even smart phones in the future. There’s good reasons for this, but I think sometimes you can get pretty far down a path by just putting one foot in front of another and not think, “Am I heading in the right direction?” One of the things I’m looking forward to — there’s some good conversations going on in the weekly meetings on Slack. I’ve been talking to a lot of folks and seeing how can we iterate there — both in the design and presentation of the directories, which we’ve done some work for, especially on the plug-in directory. But also in our processes and how we approach them. Lauren Mancke: Matt, is there anything you regret with WordPress? Have there been any decisions made, whether by you or others, that you wish hadn’t happened? Matt Mullenweg: I don’t live with a lot of regrets, so I don’t know if I’d resonate with that particular word. But there are certainly things that in hindsight, if I were doing them today, I would do differently. The theme licensing stuff, especially in 2007 through 2010, has come up a few times. I think part of why that was such trouble was I was less mature as a leader and I thought the best way to hash these issues out was to talk about it and correct everyone in blog comments and do blog posts. Lauren Mancke: And go on Mixergy. Matt Mullenweg: Go on Mixergy. Just prove everyone wrong. We got from point A to point B, but maybe I should’ve done more of what you did, Brian, which is get on a plane and talk to people. Perhaps we could’ve avoided a lot of the back-and-forth and drama that we had. Because we were on the same side of things. You wanted to build a business with WordPress and sell themes, and I wanted more people using WordPress. Those are highly complementary goals. I think now, as a leader — and this has also been something I’ve learned through many of the great people I have the good fortune to work with every day at Automattic — you can approach that differently and really look at talking things through. If one medium of communication — be it email, or Slack, or text, or twitter, or blog post comments hurled across the interwebs — isn’t working, switch to another one. Brian Gardner: I have a question that I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time now. I hope that you don’t take this in a narcissistic way, because I’m not at all looking for the answer that some people might think. Do you think that the whole premium theme movement has had some degree of impact on the growth and the use of WordPress as we talk about it now, 25% of the Internet and all that kind of stuff? Do you think that without that — I guess that in a natural evolution would’ve always happened at some point, but do you think … ? I was thinking to myself like, “Wow, I was part of the big area of growth within WordPress.” Because I think premium themes proved that. Of course, there’s lots of people involved. This is not at all me trying to take credit for anything. But I always think in the back of my mind that at least I was a part of a movement that helped open WordPress up to a significant amount of users who may not have ever thought of it as anything more than just a little blog platform. Matt Mullenweg: That’s a interesting question. It’s actually one I’ve thought about a lot. Because, if the answer is yes, then what we should be doing is trying to have everything be premium, right? If the answer is no, then we should try to eliminate premium themes. Or maybe it’s someplace in the middle. Based on the data, it’s someplace in the middle. Here’s what I mean by that. In absolute terms, it’s undeniable. You can look at your numbers and say, “I have sold X tens of thousands,” or, for some folks, into the hundreds of thousands of copies of this theme. I’m sure everyone has heard from customers — especially because many premium theme sellers are really good at marketing. I would say better than WordPress.org and better than Automattic in some cases. They say, “I wasn’t going to use WordPress, but I found this theme and I decided to use it.” Have you heard that before? Yeah, so that’s undeniable on an absolute sense. The relative sense, meaning, “Does it change the growth curve of WordPress?” The numbers — because we’re able to track through the update system how many of every theme is run. If you added up all the premium themes, or let’s say all themes not in the directory, which is a good proxy for premium themes — although, as you know, there are some that have up-sells or pro versions of things — it comes to be cumulatively 10 percent, 12 percent. It’s had an impact, but still the vast majority of the overall growth is driven by some of the default themes and the many free ones out there. I think that if you think about this, it makes sense a little bit. Although some people start with WordPress from our premium theme, it might be more likely that when they’re comparing things they’re probably comparing WordPress … They’re either getting it from their web host, and I would say that web hosts have been a big driver of WordPress adoption and growth because it’s one click and they get started there — or they’re comparing it to other solutions like Squarespace, Weebly, etc. They start with WordPress. They’re probably going to start with a free theme because they’re not sure whether it’s going to work for them or not. Then, once they figure it out and they say “Hey, okay this is something I can use to solve my problems,” then they go to premium themes. That’s for everyday users. The other thing that drives this market a lot is developers. It’s folks who know WordPress and they’re being hired to build WordPress sites for people. They have a theme that they love because it enables them to make great-looking client sites really quickly. It’s got the functionality and they know it as a platform on top of WordPress. It’s their go-to. So they’ll buy a copy for every single one of their customers as they build it out. Do they have to? No. But do they want to support you so you’ll make more themes? Of course. Brian Gardner: Yeah, I think the definition of premium, back in the day — I think we at one point even had conversations of calling them paid themes versus premium, because premium’s kind of a subjective term. I’ve seen themes that are free that are probably better coded and better designed than some of the ones I’ve seen being sold. Matt Mullenweg: I think that’s what we call them on WordPress.org too. I think we call them paid themes. Brian Gardner: Paid themes, yeah. Okay, let’s talk about the future of WordPress. Matt Mullenweg: Wait, does that answer makes sense to you? Brian Gardner: It totally does. I realized that when I take myself out of the equation that WordPress is huge. There’s just — like you alluded to, even the hosting. That seems like within the last few years, especially with movements like Go Daddy doing one-click installs, and Bluehost and so on, that the hosting companies could say the very same thing. Saying, “Well, from 2010 on we really had a big role in the growth of WordPress,” and all of that. I’ve just always thought about that one back in the day. It was like, “What would’ve happened if … ?” type of thing. If it wasn’t me, it would’ve been someone else, so it certainly wasn’t my intuition. Matt Mullenweg: It’s also something to keep an eye on. Maybe that percentage of what’s driving changes over time. And also looking at new users, not just total users. I’ll keep an eye on it. I love data. The Future of WordPress Brian Gardner: All right. Let’s talk just about the future of WordPress. We alluded to it a little bit earlier with e-commerce and stuff like that. Not necessarily how folks can make money from it, but where do you see WordPress going and what are the things that maybe stand as the biggest hurdles in terms of growth for Automattic and WordPress and all of that? Matt Mullenweg: I think that what’s cool about WordPress as a platform is that it can do a lot at once, meaning that I believe that WordPress is going to grow hugely as a blogging platform. Some people might think that blogging is dead, but I see the next six billion people coming online and blogging being an interesting thing for a lot of them. It’s growing as an e-commerce platform. It’s growing as a site creator. It’s growing as a platform that people build things — maybe even just using the API, whether that’s a REST API or a PHP APIs, to make applications. Whether they’re using WordPress as a development platform to do things that don’t look like a blog at all. The challenges and threats is that, in every single one of those areas that we’re in, there are some purpose-built tools. And, in fact, an entire company is dedicated to that small area, which are in some cases doing a really good job. If I’m starting a store today, I’m going to compare how easy it is to get started with Woo to how easy it is to get started with Shopify. And today that comparison looks pretty good for Shopify because they’re quite good at providing the hosted service that really on-boards you in a slick way. The same thing in the CMS space and small business space. We’re getting some very good competition from Weebly, Squarespace, and Wix. Wix in particular, has really used marketing to leverage some breakout growth there. We have to keep in mind that they are spending $40 million dollars a quarter, so $160 million dollars this year, which is a big number, in advertising to drive people signing up for Wix. In certain markets now — you can go and the barista at the coffee shop might ask you about Wix. They might see your WordPress shirt and ask you about Wix. If they’re able to create a flywheel effect of that advertising driving brand awareness, driving people asking for Wix, that’s going to start to drive developers away as well, which could be very bad for WordPress. These are the things that we have to keep in mind and also do some coordination across the community. One thing that I’m sure about WordPress is that if we all run our own directions and just try to localize or maximize our own profit and everything, we’ll be outgunned by these other companies. The truth is that Wix’s $300 million dollars in revenue is bigger than any company I am aware of in the WordPress space individually, but it’s much smaller than we are collectively. The question becomes, “How can we work together? How can we team up? And how do we get the right philosophies and the right ways of doing business and everything out there? The best practices so that as we do our own things in our own places, we’re heading in the same direction in a way that, honestly, no company could ever compete with?” Just like the Encyclopedia Britannica could never compete with Wikipedia. Brian Gardner: Yeah, it’s that crowd-sourced approach, whether it be intentional or unintentional. I guess what you’re saying is that you guys at Automattic necessarily can’t, by yourselves, go out and compete against Squarespace or X. But through the enlistment of other, bigger, smaller companies that would themselves go after and cater to the types of people who would be using Squarespace — that is the bigger army. The WordPress as a whole army versus Automattic as the one company behind it. The more companies that are out there trying to build their own things off of WordPress, but to a user that might be interested in using Weebly or Wix or Squarespace, that that’s also a bigger win for you guys or just all of us as a whole. To think we are the ones that are out in the field trying to do the things, so the more we can do for ourselves, ultimately, goes up to the top. Matt Mullenweg: Yeah. It’s all about being long-term. If you think truly long-term about this, that’s how we can win. That’s how we’ve won in the past against competitors like Six Apart that had more people and were better funded, and it’s how we’re going to win against all the ones down the road. We kind of have to. You have a lot of business owners listening to this. Think about what makes this business relevant? What makes the WordPress ecosystem relevant in 10 years. Are you orienting your business to make that a reality? Are you going towards it or away from it? Brian Gardner: Well, I think those are great words for us to close by. I really do want to be sensitive to your time, because I know that you have a lot of things to do, a lot of responsibilities. First of all, before we go though, I do want to personally thank you for WordPress. Without a question, I’m not sitting in the house that I’m in if WordPress wasn’t around. I know that on behalf of all of our users and developers and designers — people who build off of Genesis, which was really built off of WordPress — you have created an ecosystem and an environment which, as you alluded to at the beginning of this call, you probably didn’t even forecast or even think of. It was just a matter of trying to build something for yourself that you could use to do something X. Little did you know, 10 years from now you will have companies making 8 figures a year in revenue and enabling — our company has 60 people. We have 60 people whose families are fed by way of, ultimately, what WordPress has enabled us to do. The stuff like that. I want to thank you. I should text you every once in a while or just shoot you an email and remind you, and say “thank you” and all that. I was a byproduct of your vision. You have put me on WordPress.org before to showcase some good work and stuff like that, so I just didn’t want that going unsaid. As much as I appreciate you being on the show, I also more importantly appreciate for what you’ve allowed me in my life and my family to experience because of the stuff that you did back in the day. Matt Mullenweg: Thank you. I wish I could take credit, but the reality is you’re part of that too. We all are. So let’s all give ourselves a round of applause there, because what we’ve created is pretty impressive and I hope that you can have 10 more houses in the future. Brian Gardner: My wife would like that too. No. Lauren Mancke: Matt, thank you for coming on the show. Everyone, if you like what you heard on today’s show you can find more episodes of StudioPress FM at StudioPress.FM. You can also help Brian and I 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.

When I left WooThemes, one of my goals was that I wanted to create a SaaS company, because I wanted to have the challenge of hacking the recurring revenue growth curve. Inspired very much by "the startup way of thinking", growth hacking the shit out of a business just held such great attraction to me. Until I got to the point where I was trying to hack growth. And I struggled to do that. Which made me feel like shit and sometimes even made me feel ashamed that I couldn't report better metrics to Receiptful shareholders. So I typed up a 2000-word rant about growth hacking, shared it with a friend for feedback and as I listened to his suggested tweaks, I realised that I didn't feel as strongly about the article anymore. Plus I had no desire to actually publish it. It didn't however spark a realisation months later when I started learning about this idea of having a soft focus in my meditation. This idea that to find one's natural flow in the universe, we can't be too rigid in our focus. Since then Receiptful has continued to grow, but in a way more random way. Sometimes faster than expected and sometimes slower. And mostly we can't even pinpoint where that growth has come from. Having a softer focus on all of this though, has helped me avoid that sensation where it feels like I'm pushing a rock up the hill every day. ;) Cover artwork by Francis Taylor. Intro & outro music is "Warm Sunny Day" by sunchannelmusic.

Show Notes: empfohlenes Hosting: www.all-inkl.com    Germanized Pro: Themeforest (WooCommerce Premium Themes): WooCommerce Plugins direkt über den Marktplatz von WooCommerce:  Kostenlose Plugins von WooThemes, also von den Entwicklern von WooCommerce:  Webentwickler gesucht? Andreas Schweizer findest Du unter: www.schweizersolutions.com Facebook  Finde auch Du die perfekten Möglichkeiten die uns die New Economy bietet. Ich würde mich freuen wenn wir uns in der Facebook Gruppe austauschen könnten. Hast du Fragen zum Thema New Economy und wie sie dich unterstützen könnte als Unternehmer weiter zu wachsen? Dann hier zur: Facebook Gruppe oder besuche http://meinbusinessclub.de 

Today's question comes from Matt, who is in the process of starting a new podcast. Getting started is expensive; which are the parts that he must spend money on? I recommend the following tools and services: Bluehost (http://askpat.com/bluehost); Buzzsprout (http://buzzsprout.com) or Libsyn (http://libsyn.com); My podcasting tutorial (http://www.podcastingtutorial.com); AudioTechnica ATR 2100 microphone; Audacity (http://www.audacityteam.org/); Studiopress (http://www.studiopress.com/); Themeforest (http://themeforest.net/); Woothemes (https://www.woothemes.com/); Audiojungle (http://audiojungle.net/); Fiverr (http://fiverr.com/). Do you have a question about starting a podcast? Record it at http://www.askpat.com/.

Smart marketers know that the first sale is the only beginning of a relationship with a customer. If your marketing stops after the first sale, you are leaving money on the table. Moreover, while there're lots of ways to extend that the lifetime value of a customer, there's one thing you should be doing first. Upgrade your order confirmation emails! And today we're talking with Adii Pienaar of Receiptful. Adii is a serial entrepreneur "learning through making (new) mistakes." He previously co-founded WooThemes (exited 2013) and is currently working on Receiptful. He's also a husband, dad, complete wine snob, and occasionally suffers imposter syndrome. Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast on iTunes! Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast on Stitcher! Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast via RSS! Learn: The stats on receipts Why we love receipts What specifically to do with receipts Which calls to action to include And how to tackle imposter syndrome Links: http://adii.me/ https://receiptful.com/ https://twitter.com/adii Free Guide! I want to send you a sample chapter of Ecommerce Bootcamp, absolutely free. Tell me where to send your sample at ecommerce-bootcamp.com

On this episode of WPwatercooler we're going to be discussing how to pick a non-custom premium WordPress theme.Show airs Feb 15 at 11am PT / 2pm ET / 7PM UTCMobius – Responsive Multi-Purpose WordPress Theme – WordPress 00:07Cleaning Out Your Naked Shortcodes – Matt Cromwell 00:11Ad Optimized Magazine with Powerful Advertisement System – Shockmag – WordPress 00:10Salient – Responsive Multi-Purpose Theme – WordPress 00:11DesktopServer – ServerPress 00:14Michigan Website Design and SEO | Web Savvy Marketing 00:22Genesis Child Themes | Premium WordPress Themes 00:23Premium WordPress Themes – StudioPress 00:24GitHub – 320press/wordpress-bootstrap: Bootstrap in WordPress theme form – Bootstrap 3.3.1 00:27Elegant Themes 00:28Bueno – WooThemes 00:29[LISTATTENDEES event_identifier=”ep175-how-to-pick-a-non-custom-premium-wordpress-theme-5-56c127c1c3938″ show_gravatar=”true”] See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In today’s episode we explore all things Woo, well, WooThemes that is, including a brief overview of all the plugins and extensions.

My guest on this episode is Adii Pienaar, founder of Receiptful and WooThemes. This conversation happened across the globe, from my desk in Nicaragua to Adii's in South Africa. The result is a raw, honest, and insightful talk about life, both personal and professional.

There are three prevailing views on bitcoin and the blockchain: 1) that it's a scam, 2) it's one of the most fascinating technological developments of the decade, and 3) it's just another tech fad that's not worth trying to grasp, nevermind fussing over. View number three is probably held by the vast majority of people on the continent. This week, Tefo Mohapi and I (Andile Masuku) will try and establish whether the hype around bitcoin and the various useful applications of the blockchain (which Africa has so far tentatively embraced) is justified. Despite Wall Street's gradual warming to bitcoin, and companies like Kenya's BitPesa building clever service offerings on the back of the bitcoin blockchain, it remains to be seen whether bitcoin will go on to be widely accepted worldwide as a trusted measure of value, and whether the blockchain will be used to platform future technological innovation. We've decided to make featuring listeners' comments a permanent part of the show, and so this week we share comments made in response to last week's debate: "Open Source vs. Proprietary Software: What is Best For Africa?" As always, you can also expect all the week’s most important tech, digital and innovation news: -- Discover why there's an outcry over South Africa's recently-announced aerial drone laws, -- Get details on Automattic's acquisition of WooThemes, -- Learn more about the MTN South Africa workers' strike that saw 2,000 people down tools, and -- Find out which African country Kenya's BitPesa is expanding into. Music Credits: All Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

This week, we discuss the addition of tweets to Google's mobile search results, Automattic's acquisition of WooThemes, Pinterest's new cinematic pins and enhanced ad tools, HootSuite's new automated Facebook ad tool and Google's overhaul of Webmaster Tools. Plus, Blasty, a way to remove illegal search results from Google with just one click.

This week on WPwatercooler we'll be discussing building a band or music website using WordPress. From gig listings to embedded audio and video there is a lot that can go into a bands website.Show airs May 18 at 11am PDT / 2pm EDT / 7PM UTCAudio / Video StreamingAudio — Support — WordPress.comSoundCloud – Hear the world’s soundsBandcampJetpack supports bandcamp Shortcode Embeds — Jetpack for WordPressMusic for everyone – SpotifyEmbeds « WordPress Codex#Music – YouTubeAudio PodcastWELCOME TO NIGHT VALEWelcome to Night Vale – YouTubeeCommerceUnsigned – Woothemes#1 Free E-commerce Shopping Cart & Online Store Solution – Try Ecwid!Easy Digital Downloads – Sell Digital Downloads with WordPressGigPressGigsLocal Concerts and Live Music Recommendations from BandsintownSongkick – Concerts, tour dates, & ticketsWordPress Tour Dates Plugin – BandsintownWordPress › Tour Dates « WordPress PluginsWordPress ThemesAudioTheme — Premium WordPress Music ThemesEmail Capture & Mailing ListGravity FormsSend Better Email | MailChimp[LISTATTENDEES event_identifier=”ep136-building-a-music-website-using-wordpress-5-555a0cc90ce5e” show_gravatar=”true”] See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode "Product Validation at WooThemes", Patrick Rauland (WooCommerce Product Manager) shares how the WooThemes team validates product ideas.

PRESS ON THIS LINK TO SEE THE VIDOE OF THE MAKING OF THIS EPISODE   WordPress Frameworks Unfinished Business. WooThemes: Canvas  version 6 is coming out in the next six months of 2015 only about 6 of the present themes are fully responsive. How to upgrade from Canvas 5 to 6 is still binging worked out by WooThemes. However it might not be possible to upgrade from older themes.   iThemes: Builder Framework. https://ithemes.com/purchase/builder-theme/ Facts    1) 90 themes not all of them are responsive.   2) a visual builder    3) Builder seems to be a theme/plugin/ hybrid.   Prices    Foundation series 5 theme fully responsive pack for $80.   All 90 themes however many of these themes are not responsive    Elegant Themes: http://www.elegantthemes.com/   Divi 2.0 Theme/Framework hybrid    This is a new version of Divi 2.0 and has an visual editor inbuilt into the theme.   Price you can get Divi and 87 other older type themes for $69.     

PRESS THIS LINK TO WATCH THE MAKEING OF THE PODCAST   PRESS THIS LINK TO WATCH CRUSOE   We cover four frameworks for WordPress but first.... 1)      Genesis Framework: Genesis Framework from StudioPress http://www.studiopress.com is one of the most popular of all the WordPress frameworks its very developer focused and need quite a bit of development experience to get the best from it. Prices: Genesis Framework on its own $59.95 with all the Studio commercial themes $399 One of the ways to use Genesis if you are not an experience developer is to use this third party plugin tool Dynamik Website Builder for $59.  Pros a) very well document. b) Well coded. c) Big library of child themes. Cons a) complicated if you are not an experience WordPress developer. b) the chid themes do tend to look very similar in design. c) Not all the child themes are fully responsive. 2)     Headway Framework Headway:  from HeadwayThemes http://headwaythemes.com/  is an other very popular WordPress framework its very different to StudioPress Genesis it has it own inbuilt drag & drop page building functionality. Prices: 1 site $59 with one template or you get the developer license for $199 and you get all of Headway themes included at the present moment they have a Christmas sale on and get everything reduced by 35% discount. Pros a) easy to use if you are not an experience developer  b) very well documented. c) well and very attractive child themes. Cons a) the code can be a bit blotted which can leads to slow loading themes b) you really are locked into the Headway Framework of doing things.  c) if you really go down the fully custom route with this Framework you will have to keep in mind that the designs will need quite a bit of testing   3)     Canvas Framework from WooThemes http://www.woothemes.com/products/canvas/ This is very popular framework from the people who develop and support Woocommerce. Price: $119 unlimited domains or $399 which includes a number of nice looking themes.  Pros a) well coded. b) Great documentation. c) Should work with Woocommence. Cons a) is not setup to work with child themes. b) limited selection of themes compared to StudioPress. c) some of the themes are not responsive. Thesis Framework 4)       Thesis frameworks http://diythemes.com/ is one of the oldest WordPress frameworks This framework uses a very, very custom way of developing WordPress website to the extent you could say it a real highbred of system that is going its own semi different route to the rest of the WordPress development community. Price: $87 for one domain license or you could buy the profession level for $199 which give you unlimited live time support and the abili

Hoy hablamos del nuevo No Captcha ReCaptcha de Google, de la red de display de Google, de MailPoet, y de StoreFront, el nuevo theme gratuito de WooThemes.

Spencer wants to make his website visual—what can he do to enhance the visual experience for his users? Spencer’s site is http://sanctifiedmarriage.com/. I recommend finding a good theme from a marketplace like WooThemes (http://www.woothemes.com/) or Themeforest (http://themeforest.com/). The sites Spencer mentioned are Canva (http://canva.com/) and PicMonkey (http://www.picmonkey.com/). The stock photo sites I mention are Dollar Photo Club (http://www.dollarphotoclub.com/) and Deposit Photos (http://depositphotos.com/). Finally, I also mentioned getting a great deal from Deposit Photos on AppSumo (http://www.appsumo.com/) and finding good design tips on SlideShare (http://www.slideshare.net/). Do you have a question about the way your site should look? Record it at http://www.askpat.com/. Thanks to our sponsor, Lynda.com. Try out all of Lynda.com's courses for free for seven days. Go http://lynda.com/AskPat to get started.

http://passonsatable.com/1 pour retrouver les infos liées à cet épisode. Dans ce premier épisode de Passons à table, le développeur WordPress Rémi Corson partage avec nous son parcours et son activité chez la boutique WooThemes. Son blog : http://www.remicorson.com/

Matt Cohen of Woothemes in an interview by Kathy Hahn shares about the popular Woocommerce product, he defines Woothemes as a Wordpress product company, they provide solutions for clients using Wordpress as a platform, and Woocommerce and QuickBooks can now integrate for a great Wordpress Ecommerce Solution.

Do you have to train your clients on using WordPress after a site launch? In today's episode I get to sit down with someone I have a ton of respect for, Bob Dunn. Bob runs a site called BobWP.com where he educates newbie WordPress users on using themes, plugins, and general blogging practices. As advanced users, sometimes training can be daunting for us. Why don't they get it? This is so easy! Bob preaches about patience as a virtue and how that resonates with his clients. This creates a customer base that really fall in love with Bob and his process, which keeps the referral engine going. Interview with Bob Dunn of BobWP.com Subscribe via iTunes Upfront and personal In a world of passive income and six-figure theme sales, Bob has a lot to teach us about creating personal relationships with our customers. It's not much different than building an audience and that's what I love about what he has going on. He openly admits that he operates under a different “style.” A style that is more hands on, longer duration tutorials, and thorough discovery of client needs. This attracts a demographic of non-technical WP users which commonly need a recurring amount of help. At the end of the day, he's building up a loyal following of repeat customers that have no trouble referring him to others. Finding focus Thousands of themes and thousands of plugins. Bob has set a core focus on producing tutorials for Genesis and WooThemes. While he get's a lot of requests to cover other themes and plugins, he's realized that setting a vertical early on is a must. This opens up the stage for digging into the “data” of WP products. Common questions and repeat frustrations can be a tremendous asset to product developers. I think this is where Bob and many of us training users can find leverage with our businesses. What are your WP training tips? I'd like you to share your stories and tips for training the clients you work with. Let us know in the comments below! ★ Support this podcast ★

Adii, founder of WooThemes and Public Beta talked with us about launching a completely new venture from scratch and some of the controversial techniques he used when validating his idea. He also opened up with us about creating a more sustainable work/lif Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I had the pleasure to interview Drew Strojny, founder of The Theme Foundry, about their work at The Theme Foundry, their philosophies about themes, and their latest theme release, Oxford. http://s3.amazonaws.com/PostStatus/DraftPodcast/Post-Status-Draft-3-Drew-Strojny-ThemeFoundry.mp3 Direct Download Drew is a former Duke football player that spent a few years in the NFL before he started a small business doing general marketing. Over time, his clients started asking for websites, so he discovered WordPress. His work with web projects led him to start designing WordPress themes, and he ended up being an early player in the commercial theme market in 2008. Competition with themes over time In 2008, there weren’t many people selling themes. Chris Pearson was selling Thesis, Brian Gardner was selling Revolution, pre-Genesis. WooThemes was just underway. But the demand was enormous. Well, I thought we’d just throw our hat into the ring and try a design and see how it goes, and we got a really huge response. It was really great timing on our part. It was one of the best times to get into the theme market. The WordPress theme space really exploded for a few years. Drew notes that they haven’t seen the explosive growth in the past couple years compared to the first two The market is maturing and there are a lot more companies in the space, and a lot more options. Setting themselves apart I asked Drew how The Theme Foundry sets themselves apart from the competition, considering just how many theme providers there are now. They like to tout their “world class design and clean code” when they market their themes. They do most of their design in house, but they also commission some designs to get outside the bubble of the “WordPress theme” concept, and those commissioned themes help them expand their work. John Hicks designed Shelf. Ryan Essmaker designed the Anthem theme, Dave Ruiz designed the Avid theme, and most recently Veerle Pieters designed the Collections theme. The Theme Foundry notably doesn’t use any form of framework and attempts to limit theme options as much as possible. When they sell a theme to a customer, they want it to “just work” and be reliable over time. The impact of selling themes on WordPress.com The Theme Foundry was one of the first providers invited to sell commercial themes on WordPress.com. They released the Shelf theme in early 2011, and today nearly their entire collection is available. However, WordPress.com wants as many great themes in the marketplace as possible, so over time the overall impact WordPress.com plays on The Theme Foundry’s business has been reduced, but it’s still an important part of what they do. Making big splashes with themes The Theme Foundry has made a number of big splashes in the theme market. Shelf, at the time, was an innovative theme, making use of post formats and responsive design when hardly anyone was doing it. Collections has a single page app (SPA) feel, using Backbone for loading pages, and Basis has a drag and drop builder that made a lot of waves. Drew says that they don’t like to just put out themes, but prefer to create themes that target a specific concept, and then build the theme to fit well into that concept, without bloating the theme with unnecessary functionality. Oxford theme and Typekit integration Their latest theme is another that’s ready to make a splash. To date, no theme company has automated Typekit integration; as in, if a theme customer currently wants to use Typekit fonts, they need a separate account for it. With Oxford ( demo), The Theme Foundry is including Typekit support, without a Typekit account, as part of the yearly licensing deal. What this means, is that Oxford offers the theme plus the Typekit font integration, for $79. And the yearly renewal fee is reduced to $39 for support, updates, and a continued Typekit font license. The Typekit integration is the first of its kind in the WordPress theme landscape. To date, it’s a world limited by Google web fonts for hosted custom font integrations. There’s nothing wrong with Google web fonts, but Typekit is certainly a level up, and I’m excited to see this happen. All of The Theme Foundry’s themes will be integrated with Typekit over the coming weeks. You can read more on their announcement post. The Theme Foundry, Post Status, and what’s next Drew and I had a fifty minute convesation discussing the topics above and much more. We also spent some time talking about advertising, content marketing, and The Theme Foundry’s partnership with Post Status. If you’re interested in our relationship and Drew’s motivation for supporting what I do, I hope you’ll give this interview a listen. It was a pleasure to talk to Drew, and I look forward to seeing what The Theme Foundry has coming next. You can follow Drew on Twitter, The Theme Foundry on Twitter, and check out their website.

  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.

What goes up must come down or in our case, what went down came back up?! You be the judge in my latest interview with Brad Touesnard of Delicious Brains and WP Migrate Pro plugin. Before Brad was helping you migrate WordPress databases, he had visions of bringing an app store like experience to WordPress. It's what he described as a failure to which has brought him new sucess. Perhaps the idea was too early for it's time? You be the judge in Episode 46! Interview with Brad Touesnard of WP Migrate Pro Listen to the audio & subscribe on iTunes Matt Report - A WordPress podcast for digital business owners Episode 46: The benefits of failure 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 The journey of success and failure Sound familiar? That's right, it's the intro of the podcast. Brad knows this all too well, but it's something that has brought him on to new roads in the WordPress marketplace. Without the failure of his first product, he wouldn't have made the pivot to his new widely popular product WP Migrate Pro. Something new to my cache of interviewees? The angel funding and advisory role Carl Hancock of Gravity Forms along with Adii Pienaar of WooThemes play to the success of Delicious Brains. We chat about how they got invovled and how that experience has shaped Brad's role from developer to entrepreneur. Methodical success Our favorite part of the show is when we get into the nitty gritty and how-to of launching the product. Brad shares his secrets for capturing leads, marketing and determining price. If you follow WordPress news, you know there's a healthy debate going on about sustainable WordPress businesses and we'll chat about that with our hero today. Random fact, Brad spent hours on crafting an e-mail that was no longer than a couple of tweets put together. Learn why he did that and if it was worth it in this episode. Outro music: http://www.jamendo.com/en/track/1120/jaoranary ★ Support this podcast ★

With so many WordCamps and new WordPress meetups cropping up it's hard to decide where to spend your frequent flyer miles. But, what if you don't have to leave your couch? By day Scott Basgaard serves happiness at WooThemes — by night he's bringing the entire world together in a 24 hour marathon of WordPress sessions on WordSesh.org. Pretty darn amazing if you ask me. Let's dive in! Scott Basgaard interview about finding a WordPress career and WordSesh Watch on YouTube Listen to the audio version Matt Report - A WordPress podcast for digital business owners Episode 36: Connecting the WordPress world via WordSesh 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 Learn more than just what happens to the body on no sleep Poor Scott didn't sleep for like 72 hours with anticipation and preparation of WordSesh. But that's not the only thing we're going to learn about. Scott's a bit of a WordPress career globetrotter. He's going to share his story about finding that first gig, to working at one of the largest growing WordPress companies — two of them. “If you feel like everyday, you don't enjoy what you're doing, you need to make a change.” — Scott Basgaard Something I didn't know going into the interview, Scott also worked for a large media site in the corporate world. It paid well and he learned a lot, but it wasn't making him happy. If you're just starting out, it's important you know what you're capable of and the value you bring to the table. A worldwide entrepreneur I think Scott's goal is tremendous. He's putting together a global audience in a format we've never seen before. Producing something like this on such a scale and have it launch for the first time with very little blunder is an accomplishment on it's own. Overtime, WordSesh will be one of the WordPress events to attend. What do you think? Did you like this interview? Help me out by spreading the word and subscribing to the e-mail newsletter! ★ Support this podcast ★

With so many WordCamps and new WordPress meetups cropping up it’s hard to decide where to spend your frequent flyer miles. But, what if you don’t have to leave your couch? By day Scott Basgaard serves happiness at WooThemes — by night he’s bringing the entire world together in a 24 hour marathon of WordPress sessions on WordSesh.org. Pretty darn amazing if you ask me. Let’s dive in! (more…)

This weekend discussion is about methods of providing support to your customers, or as a customer how do you want to be supported?Live stream starts today (Monday) at 11:00am PST / 2:00pm EST.A year ago (about there), WooThemes, StudioPress and even Yoast managed questions and support via a discussion forum (WooThemes & StudioPress on their own sites, Yoast on WP). But recently, we've seen WooThemes & StudioPress shift to email-based tickets and Yoast announce the same. The upside is better ticket management. The downside is lower visibility, less community resource, lower interaction of users helping users.How do you support your customers? How much is public? How much is Private? What do you think about these shifts? Support? Disagree?[LISTATTENDEES event_identifier=”ep35-customer-support-public-forum-or-private-email-may-20-2013-5-5199b033d” show_gravatar=”true”] See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Dude; this is one weird podcast episode. At least it is if you're not listening to it shortly after it was released. If you're a latecomer, you'll be wondering what all this talk is about a new Web site and podcast. But whether you're a current listener or not, you'll still learn why it took so long to go live with the new Web site. You'll learn what is involved in producing these podcasts and you'll get a taste of what it's like to move from a free web host like Wordpress.com to a self-hosted one. Other links briefly mentioned are HostGator, Hover.com, my lame YouTube channel, a wicked-cool app called TextExpander, and WooThemes. I also mention the Free Stuff page on AboutTruckDriving.com. In the feedback section, I discuss e-logs with an angry dude who calls himself angrytrucker and a reader named Charles, who I point to my blog post called, E-logs: Do They Really Increase Driving Time? Got a second to Rate and/or Review the podcast? Download the intro/outro songs for free! courtesy of Walking On Einstein Mystery Feedback Song - Only a cheater would click this before listening to the podcast! You aren't a cheater, are you?

This week's we will be discussing WordPress Theme Frameworks.Dave Jesch – http://www.davejesch.comPatrick Rauland – http://www.speakinginbytes.comSé Reed – http://www.sereedmedia.comSteve Zehngut – http://www.zeek.comGregg Franklin – http://www.greggfranklin.com/Jason Tucker – http://www.tucker.proChris brings up WPMU reviews, Chris Lema’s site, chrislema.com, and Clifford Paulick has two in depth articles regarding frameworks.Jason asks for Chris's favorite frameworks. Chris mentions which frameworks he likes: Catalyst, WooFrameworkSe mentions which framework she likes, & her views.Steve mentions his thoughts on frameworks.Chris mentions the importance of frameworks.Genesis robust and mentions the results.Chris delivers thoughts about working with frameworks and becoming a tool.Patrick shares his thoughts on the value of frameworks.Steve mentions the value of a freelancer.Chris mentions the value of some other frameworks.Jason mentions Headway and a mention of Genesis, he likes it.Steve speaks about Headway.Chris mentions what drives the use of a framework.Chris mentions the popularity of Woothemes control panel for the end user.Se mentions main concerns about dependency.Patrick asks Se about her workflow.Se mentions what she uses.Steve mentions what he uses.Gregg uses a lot of everything.  Looking to simplify, going modular, he uses “Office”Dave mentions Thesis, Thematic, & Genesis; the pros & cons._s “underscores” by Automattic mentioned.  Use what is appropriate for task at hand.Steve plugs Genesis, and gives his two cents.Dave sees Genesis as a way to hook in with what’s already there.Steve goes into cons of Genesis.Gregg Franklin mentions a theme he’s working with AppThemes, Vantage; seconds the challenge of ‘undoing’ the hooks for what you want is a challenge.Chris mentions the benefit of being able to unhook. ProFramework some themes that should be plugins become part of a theme.Dave agrees that there’s a difference between what belongs in a theme vs. a plugin, presentation vs. functionality.Theme developers installing a theme with plugins is a more complicated install for nondevelopers, Steve counters.Gregg mentions his experience with AJ at ThemeForest, about putting all as plugins.Chris brings up how functionality is embedded in theme and the pain it causes. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In today's podcast, I am spending a lot of time answering one of the most common questions I receive: “Ray, what online business tools or software do you use to run your Internet based business?” I'll go into detail about what online business tools I use, why I chose them, and also be very candid about whether I would make the same choice if I were starting over again today. Specifically, in this episode we will cover the following: I will share my new favorite iPad app, which is a notetaking app with a twist. In Spiritual Foundations, will discuss God's will to heal in all areas of your life. I will go in-depth on the subject of online business tools. I'll get specific, and name names. Stu McLaren shares exactly how frustrations can be the source of million-dollar business ideas. And I will share a few special announcements. Tip Of The Week Some of my own Paper doodles. This week's tip is for another iPad app. This one is called simply Paper. What makes it different from the app I reviewed last week? Paper is more than a notetaking app. It is really intended for artists. It works and feels like, well… paper. Hence the name. Check it out. Spiritual Foundations God's nature is to heal you in every way: “…God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, who went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him.” Acts 10:38 Don't fall for the lie that says God made you sick to “teach you something”. That's not who He is! The Best Online Business Tools In the course of running an online business, there are many tools and applications to choose from. I use a lot of different tools in my own business, and I am frequently asked for recommendations about what the best tools to use might be. I am going to supply some very specific answers, and share some of the tools that I use most in my own business. Before I do, however, I want to make a couple of things very clear. First of all, it is rarely the case that the lack of a tool creates the lack of success. In my experience, successful people are successful despite not having the “right tools”. This may sound counter-intuitive. I am not saying that it's wrong to have the best tools available to get the job done. That would be ridiculous. What I am saying is this: if you are using your search for the “perfect tools” as an excuse not to act, you will almost certainly encounter disappointment. Perhaps outright failure. There is no such thing as a “perfect tool”. It's better to start with what you have, from where you are, and do the best job possible. That is what being an entrepreneur is all about. Creating value out of the available resources. The second thing you should be aware of is that I do receive a commission for recommending most of the tools listed here. If that bothers you, feel free to disregard my advice. However, I will say this: I do not recommend any tool that I have not used myself, or that I do not feel will help you. Here is my list of recommended tools, software, and websites. These have helped me build a successful online business, and I believe they can help you do the same. What I'm Using Now… And Most WordPress.org – This is what I recommend almost everyone use to build their website. It's about more than just “blogging”, it is a rocksolid architecture for constructing any website. There is a reason why so many Fortune 500 companies choose to build their website on the WordPress framework. Plus, because of the ability to apply different “themes” to your WordPress site, you can change the look and feel of your website with the touch of a button (or, in this case, the click of a mouse). Just make sure you are running the self hosted version of WordPress, which will be found that WordPress.org. You don't want to build your website on WordPress.com, because you lose a certain amount of control, and also it just looks less professional. DIYthemes.com – This is the company that sells the thesis WordPress theme. Devotees of thesis are almost fanatical in their enthusiasm for this very solid, lightning fast, SEO optimized WordPress theme. While it is very powerful, and very sophisticated, it also comes with a bit of a steeper learning curve than other WordPress themes. But if you are looking for a rock solid framework for your website, this is the place for you. StudioPress.com – The folks at StudioPress are producing some of the most elegant and beautiful WordPress themes available today. They all work with the Genesis framework, which means your WordPress site will be running on a solid foundation that is optimized to get you search engine love. This is a great option for short-cutting the design phase of your website-these things look great right out of the box. InfusionSoft.com – We just switched! This is a very robust and powerful CRM (or customer relationship management) software system, including email followup, direct mail, shopping cart functionality, and more. Infusion allows you to do some very sophisticated marketing, using behavior-based rules, analytics, and automation sequences. If you have a business that is doing $1 million or more in revenue per year, you might well want to consider using this system. It is not cheap, and there is a learning curve to get the most out of it, but it is well worth both of these costs. PayPal – This is the easiest and best way to start taking payments online. PayPal is an established, trusted payment processor, thanks mostly to their very close association with eBay. It's easy to set up an account, and you have direct access to the money as soon as someone pays you. This is where I recommend you start when you're ready to start taking payments online. iPowerPay.com -At some point, you're going to need a real, honest to goodness merchant account. This is an account that lets you take credit cards directly as a means of payment for your products and services. The customer pays using their credit card, and the money is automatically deposited in your bank account a couple days later. The problem is, it's not exactly easy to get a true merchant account for online business. Especially if you're just starting out. This company is the company I use for my own merchant account. It's very inexpensive to get started, and they have a 98% approval rate for all applications (sometimes it feels like other companies have a 98% rejection rate!). These folks truly understand the business of Internet marketing, so you'll never have to feel like you're forced to explain your business to someone who just doesn't “get it”. Highly recommended. BlueHost – This is the place to start when you initially build your website. You will not outgrow this quickly in all likelihood. Even if you experience huge success with your new website, blue host can accommodate your growth a long way down the road. Their prices are excellent (starting at about 7 bucks a month), and their service is just as good. This is where I recommend all beginners start for their web hosting-and more than a few “seasoned veterans” should be able to do quite well with an account at blue host. Opt-in Skin – This is a WordPress plug-in that allows you to design beautiful and response-enhancing opt-in forms for your WordPress powered site. It has many built-in features, including the ability to split test different designs see which will get the most registrations. I've been using it for a while now, and the only criticism I have is that it runs a little slowly when you're trying to design and generate a new form. That, however, is a small price to pay for what this plug-in will do. Scribe Content – This plug-in helps me optimize my blog posts and site content for better placement in the search engines. This is really the only SEO work that I do on my site. Evernote – My absolute favorite app that defies description – but I’ll try: your new omnipresent, universal, non-corporeal notebook. Yep, can’t describe it. Try it. You’ll understand. LastPass  – The last password you will ever need. Remember a single password, and access all of your accounts and sites. DropBox – This vital service allows me to synchronize the folder on my computer with an identical folder in the cloud. What this means is, I can have access to my files anywhere I can access the Internet. I can also share with others. Indispensable tool! Backblaze – This automated backup service makes a complete up-to-the-minute backup of my computer “in the cloud”. That means even if my computer catches on fire and burns to ashes, I can still duplicate it at the click of a button later. Screenflow – I use this tool to make a screen cast recordings that are responsible for so much of my revenue. For instance, when I make sales videos for my own products, I knew Screenflow. When I create the products themselves, I used Screenflow to create the content. And when I am paid to create sales videos for clients, this is the tool that I use. ByWord – A simple, distraction free writing environment that I love. I learned about this gem from Michael Hyatt. Word – I wish it were not so, but sometimes you just have to have Microsoft Word to get the job done. Usually, the “have to” part is because someone else is using it and thus I am forced to use it also. Pages – In my opinion, a much better word processing and page layout program than Microsoft Word. Lean, sleek, and easy-to-use, everyone should just switch now. So I can stop using that other program altogether. OmniFocus – Hands-down the best implementation of GTD I've ever seen in software. I use this every single day. Synthesis – I'm not currently using synthesis WordPress hosting, but I'm very close to making the move. It's mostly a matter of time for me. Their hosting is designed and optimized for WordPress sites. Meaning you get better security, fewer crashes and other problems, and speed. All very important. GetNoticed! WordPress Theme – I am looking forward to testing Michael Hyatt's upcoming WordPress theme. Based on the design of his own popular website, this team is optimized for experts, authors, thought leaders, life coaches, and others who wish to build an online platform for themselves. The theme has not yet been released, but you can sign up to get notified when it is by clicking here. WishlistMember – Plugin that turns WordPress sites into recurring revenue! Online Business Tools I Don't Use, But Do Recommend Here are a few recommendations for services that I don't currently use in my business, but that I have tested and believed to be very useful. In some cases, I am using these tools and services on behalf of clients. In all cases, I believe these to be of the utmost quality and worth your consideration. SquareSpace.com – Until very recently the only platform are recommended for building a website was WordPress. That was until I gave square space a try. While there are many website building services available these days, this is the only one that I would recommend as a way to build your platform website. Their hosting is incredibly sophisticated, and you will probably never outgrow it. It's virtually impossible for you to generate enough traffic to bring one of their websites down. Their built-in design templates will make your site look like a million bucks. Their drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to design your website yourself. If using WordPress intimidates you, and if you don't need to build sophisticated paid membership site, this is worth considering. Not to mention it is very reasonably priced. BigCommerce.com – If I were starting my business again from scratch today, it is very likely that this is the shopping cart system that I would use. But this service is much more than merely a shopping cart, as they offer help with all phases of building a profitable website. If you take full advantage of everything they have to offer, you will end up spending more than a few dollars, but they do very good work. Highly recommended. AWeber – There are many options to choose from for building your e-mail list, delivering messages to them, and tracking the results of your e-mail marketing. This is my top recommendation for anyone just getting started out. These guys take all the hard stuff and do it for you, in the background. They make sure you stay off the spam lists, and they make sure your e-mail gets delivered. They're also relatively inexpensive. You can get started for about 20 bucks a month. 1 ShoppingCart – This is the shopping cart system that I have used for taking online orders and automating product delivery since about 2004. Not only is it a shopping cart, it also features integrated e-mail marketing functions, handles shipping, taxes, and a lot more. This system is relied on by many online marketers, and the folks who own it have worked hard to keep updating it with the features we need to run our businesses. Highly recommended. Woothemes.com – WordPress themes that are stunning to look at, attractive to search engines, and completely easy-to-use. I've worked with a lot of websites that are built using themes from this company, and this is my number one recommendation for you if you are just starting out. I also highly recommend these themes to you even if you're a seasoned pro. MarketSamurai – For doing market research, and finding those profitable keywords for your website to focus on, this is the software you need. It runs on all computers (Mac, PC, and even Linux) and while it is simple to use, it is also very powerful. The Lifestyle Business Segment Stu McLaren returns as our “lifestyle business correspondent”, and this week Stu is sharing his thoughts on how frustration can be the source of million-dollar product ideas. Special Announcements I will be making an appearance onstage at James Malinchak's “Big Money Speaker Bootcamp” December 6-9 in LA. I'm super-excited about this event! I don't know if you saw ABC's hit TV show, “Secret Millionaire”…  James was featured on the show. At the Boot Camp, he shares his strategies and tips on how to become a Big Money Speaker. I'm attending the Platform Conference in Nashville. If you do business online, you MUST attend this conference that helps you “get noticed in a noisy world.” It's being put on by Michael Hyatt and Ken Davis. My friends Stu McLaren and Carrie Owensby Wilkerson are speaking. I'm also looking forward to meeting  Jeff Goins, Cliff Ravenscraft, Pat Flynn, Ken Davis, John Saddington, Michele Cushatt, and Andrew Buckman. Unlike most conferences, there's not a single speaker I'm not excited to hear and to meet. Get a ticket while you can! Would you like to have me speak at your event? Click here to visit my speaking page and get details on my availability. Your Feedback Do you have an idea for a podcast you would like to hear? Do you have a question that you like to ask me? Please send me an email. And if you enjoy the podcast, I would consider it a great favor if you subscribe (and leave a review) in iTunes. This helps new people discover the podcast. You can find the podcast on Stitcher by clicking the logo: Call in your questions or comments to our new, fancy “request line” at (509) 713-2679 Question: What online business tools could you not live without in your business? Leave your tips in the comments below.  

This is Episode 2 of our WPwatercooler show.* Twenty Twelve theme released to the repo – mixed feelings from all of the panel.* WordPress 3.5 beta 1* Overhaul of the media library* XMLRPC enabled – They did this to allow their mobile apps to work with WordPress installation without users having to enable it.* Comparing the changes to the new changes in the Facebook Images* We feel this is not finished yet, which is isn't.* Links “blogroll” functionality removed.* Privacy settings moved* Press This* Jetpack Mobile Theme* Problems with Jetpack conflicting* Quality Control – webapp for WordPress* Customizing can be a pain with most webapps which makes it harder for the developer to recommend them to clients.* AppSumo – Great place to get deals for WordPress related stuff* InfiniteWP is the new hotness* A few of us host it on a webserver* Security questions regarding it* Jason had issues with Deny ALL, Allow specific IP* Most of us charge our clients to do maint agreements by leveraging InfiniteWP* Themes that suck –  Avada | Responsive Multi-Purpose Theme* Justin Tadlock brings the awesomeness – Unique: Customizable WordPress Magazine Theme* Bloated themes* The “plugin in a theme” makes things hard for a developer to work with* Making a newly installed theme look like the demo requires lots of work and confuses users* Documentation, Documentation, Documentation and Documentation!* Woothemes take work to make them look like the demo* ThemeForest take work to make them look like the demo* It shouldn't take a consultant to make easy changes to a theme that should work “out of the box”* Not documenting the prerequisite plugins* Post Type Switcher doesn't work with Press This.* You can download this show as an Audio Podcast in iTunes. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

EPISODE OUTLINE Welcome to our “product creation” episode! This time around I'll share rapid product creation methods you can use to create your own product in a day or less. Announcements If you have enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe (and leave a review) in iTunes. Plugs for audio shout-outs, either MP3 or call in at (509) 713-2679 Plugs for hosting accounts using this link. Free book promo for April; top 10 commentators Congrats on latest students – over 200 new students in WITS and PLATFORM! Follow Ray on Twitter and friend Ray on Facebook   This Week's Bluehost Hosting Plug Thanks and congratulations to Wendell Saunders of WendellSaunders.com on his new website! This Week's Tip(s) Convert your old VHS tapes to digital with iMemories, and your old cassettes to digital with Southtree Spiritual Foundations God's grace looks like SUPPLY… “And this same God who takes care of me will supply all your needs from His glorious riches, which have been given to us in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 4:19, NLT Feature Story: 7 Ways To Create Your Own Product In Less Than 24 Hours Product creation is easy! Writer: Type up a how-to. Interviewer: Interview an expert. Expert: Have someone interview you. Teacher: Teach something on video. Encourager: Make an audio recording. Researcher: Assemble information. Reporter: Document your experience.   LISTENER QUESTIONS I answered questions from these listeners: Steve Hawk had nice things to say about me, Shel Horowitz made a pitch for going green. Fleetwood Gruvver wants Joomla themes. Tom makes a point about mobile websites. Christy Sales asks about “the long copy debate”.   EPISODE RESOURCES Links to resources I mentioned in the show: Joomla themes by RocketTheme. WP Touch mobile theme. Responsive themes from Studiopress and Woothemes. SUBSCRIPTION LINKS If you have enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe (and leave a review) in iTunes. Call in your questions or comments to our new, fancy “request line” at (509) 713-2679 Question for you: What's your favorite “quick product creation” method? What  has worked for you? Comment below, or call in at (509) 713-2679