Simple:Press, a forum plugin for WordPress that has been around for more than a dozen years, is available for adoption. Developers Andy Staines and Steve Klasen announced their plans to shutdown operations last August on their customer support forum and have had little luck finding a suitable replacement. Staines and Klasen will retire on August…
This is a guest post written by Katie Keith, co-founder of Barn2 Media. In this post, Keith shares the lessons she and her husband learned transitioning from client work to selling WordPress products in one year. If you’ve ever dreamed of quitting client work and earning passive income by selling WordPress themes and plugins, you’re…
Back on August 10th, we wrote about the uncertainty of Headway Theme’s future amid a lack of communication, ability to provide support, and possible financial troubles. The article prompted customers to reach out on social media to Grant and Clay Griffiths, co-founders of the company, to find out what’s going on. On August 20th, Red…
WordPress professionals have demonstrated a decent appetite when it comes to listening to and supporting podcasts on a wide variety of topics, including industry news, development, e-commerce, marketing, and startups. Cory Miller, founder of iThemes, and Matt Danner, the company’s COO, are adding a new business podcast to the mix with the launch of Leader.team.…
This post was contributed by Mario Peshev. Mario is the founder and WordPress Architect at DevriX building and maintaining large WordPress-driven platforms. With over 10,000 hours of consulting and training, Mario’s Yin and Yang is his Open Source advocacy and business growth strategy. Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success…
Over the weekend, I attended Prestige, a conference geared towards freelancers, entrepreneurs, and small agencies looking to grow their businesses. Unlike WordCamps, plugins, themes, and WordPress in general were rarely mentioned. Instead, sessions included high level topics such as, how to land enterprise clients, knowing when to move on to the next big thing, and…
WordPress agencies provide a critical connection point between users and the software by building custom solutions and guiding some of the more complex implementations. Yet client work is challenging, and many developers who work in it are concurrently planning their escape into product businesses. Growing an agency reliably is one of the more difficult business…
Last week, I attended the third annual PressNomics conference in Phoenix, AZ. The event focuses on the business side of the WordPress ecosystem and provides opportunities for business owners to learn from those who are blazing a path towards success. On the evening before PressNomics, I joined several business owners for dinner. A half hour into…
One of the most difficult parts of running a WordPress business is coming up with a revenue strategy. In a post on the official SIDEKICK blog, Ben Fox explains that in the past two weeks, customers went through a pricing experiment with an opportunity to provide feedback. The feedback to SIDEKICK highlighted areas ripe for…
If the WordPress community is your only barometer of knowing how an open source community works together, then you might want to explore outside a bit further to gain a broader outlook on other cultures. Some of the differences are worth examining. A few days ago I noticed an interesting observation regarding the relationship between…
Created by Syed Balkhi and Thomas Griffin, OptinMonster is one of the most popular WordPress plugins when it comes to converting visitors into subscribers and customers. Its success is one of the reasons the duo decided to join forces. While the team enjoys the success of OptinMonster today, the plugin almost didn’t make it to…
Jason Schuller who was the previous owner of Press75.com, has published a great post detailing his experience of running a WordPress commercial theme business from 2008-2014. While Schuller describes a variety of ups and downs he encountered while running the business, I thought his reasoning for losing his way in 2010 was fascinating. As WordPress…
Sprout Apps will soon be launching a suite of business apps targeted at WordPress freelancers and small businesses. WordPress developer Daniel Cameron is behind the project, which is centered around creating plugins that help business owners work more efficiently with WordPress. Sprout Apps aims to bring tasks like invoicing, estimates, and client tracking into the…
Prestige is a new conference that is taking place October 3-5, 2014 in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota and is being organized by Josh Broton and Kiko Doran. Unlike WordCamps, Prestige only has one track and its devoted to the business of WordPress. Tickets are on sale and if you can’t make it to the event in…
Oli Dale has an article on WPLift that describes what subject matter he’d focus on if he started a site devoted to WordPress today. Throughout the article, he mentions niches that are already well covered such as WordPress news and tutorials. He concludes the article suggesting that new sites about WordPress be narrowly focused on…