The trend is small. But it’s growing. The concept is simple. So simple, in fact, that it’s surprising that it’s taken this long for it to bubble up in our own WordPress community. But it’s powerful. And useful. And the financial benefits won’t be immediate. But they’ll be felt for years to come. So it makes sense that we should stop and take notice. To understand it is to understand the nature of how most of us work in the community. We’re all over the map. We’re located across the globe. The person helping with support might be six states […]
Putting on a Business Conference for the WordPress Ecosystem
Pressnomics 2.0 is underway and their formula has, once again, demonstrated what’s critical about events like these. When you put on a business conference for the WordPress ecosystem, one thing is more important than anything else. And no, it’s not the speaker selection. It’s not about speakers. Speakers are important. I really like good speakers. Heck, this year I was one of them. But speakers create a one-way information exchange. That’s nice, but truly secondary. No, what Josh & Sally Strebel really understand about putting on a business conference for the WordPress ecosystem is that two-way information exchange is most […]
Easy to Start a Company, Hard to Build a Business
The other day I received an email about a new site (gplclub.org/club) that was offering over $2500 worth of premium WordPress themes, plugins and WooCommerce extensions. For $25. Then, two nights later, at our San Diego WordPress meetup, someone else stayed late to ask me about sites like these. Are they legal? What’s the hook? How do these work? My answer was pretty simple: It’s easy to start a company and hard to build a business. Easy to Start a Company Starting an online company requires 3 steps. First you have to pick a name. Then you need to get […]
3 Metrics for WordPress Startups
I don’t know if you’ve ever visited Boston or Cambridge. I’ve been out to the area several times and other than where I live (San Diego), it’s my favorite part of the country. One of my favorite things to see there happens on the Charles River. Wake up early enough and you’ll notice rowers out on the river, working in tandem to move up or downstream. Only a couple of years ago did I get curious about how they do what they do. After all, I think it’s the only sport where people cross the finish line looking backwards. Right? […]
Thoughts on Pricing WordPress Plugins
We all think we’re pretty good about assessing value, but we’re not. In fact, we’re all so bad, that one of the longest running game shows (since 1956) has been “The Price is Right.” Pricing is tough. There’s no two ways about it. And if you’ve heard me talk about pricing, I almost always use the same example to highlight my point. Predicting Value is Tough If I were to ask you if $40 for 80 oz of M&Ms was a good deal, how many of you would know? If you’re like audiences I speak to, few of you would […]
Community Managers in the WordPress Ecosystem
When I was first getting started in my professional career I read a book called Microsoft Secrets. The biggest takeaway was a tiny fact embedded in their hiring process. According to the book, Microsoft had no trouble hiring developers or marketing staff. They’d just visit the best computer science schools or MBA programs, respectively. The real effort was finding their program managers that connected both groups. It was the missing role that once put in place, really helped them grow by bringing more (and better) products to market. Today, if you look at WordPress companies that focus on plugin or […]
Do You Have a Business? What About a Business Model?
Almost every week I find myself in a conversation with someone where we’ve meandered towards the question of their business model. Sure, maybe it’s my tendency to want to understand the “system” behind how a company works, but you’d be surprised at how many decisions stem from the core of a company’s business model. What’s more surprising than the fact that I engage in these conversations often, is that when push comes to shove, a lot of the people I’m talking with start getting a bit sheepish about talking about their business model. It’s not because they don’t have one. […]
WooThemes Has Raised Their Prices
You want to blame someone? Blame Steve Jobs. Seriously – here’s why. He created a computing ecosystem that suggested tens of thousands of dollars in software development costs could be recouped at $.99 per transaction. That’s not a model. There’s no feedback loop to that model. In the end, some companies are wildly successful because more and more people make one-time decisions, while other companies just fail and disappear. But this isn’t a post about Steve Jobs. I just thought that if you wanted to get to the bottom of all this, we should look to him – as he’s […]
Edge Case Hosting
“Why are they edge cases? Because they’re likely to happen in only the rarest of circumstances.” Leveraging the Pareto Principle Several years ago I was invited to assemble a team that would create a new version of an existing platform. It was a platform for car sales and real-time auctions – all for off-lease vehicles that companies like Ford Credit wanted to offload to their franchise dealers. We did what any smart team of software engineers did. We focused on the core features (the 20% that made up 80% of the use cases) in a way that would make Vilfredo […]
How Do We Keep WordPress Going Another Ten Years?
Chris Lema on optimizing the next ten years of WordPress. Donde está el baño? Tens of thousands of students in the United States walk into classrooms every Fall to learn a new language for the first time. It’s the first day of Spanish 101 or French 101 and all they know is if they practice enough, they may learn a new language. Unfortunately, the curriculum for those classes is always the same – as students learn some simple things first: like introducing themselves, or asking where the bathroom is. What happens next has been happening for decades. Armed with just […]
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