This episode is a continuation of Episode 26 and is all about business. We wanted to discuss some of the various ways that we find inspiration and motivation to continue building our businesses.

At the end of episode 26 we asked for listeners to submit any business related questions they had, and we received a really great submission from John Brackett. We wanted to take some time to address his questions, which included:

This episode was sponsored by WP Ninjas, the creators of Ninja Demo and the highly popular Ninja Forms plugin.

Show Notes:

PIPPIN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Apply Filters, Episode 27. Today is going to be a continuation of what we talked about last episode, and it’s all about business. As developers that are leading businesses in the WordPress world, there are certain challenges that we face that we’re maybe not entirely accustomed to facing or that other developers aren’t accustomed to facing. We want to talk some more on that.

Specifically, we want to talk about where do we get inspiration and motivation to keep working and building businesses, and then we’re going to directly answer some questions that a listener had regarding dealing with sales and support growth. Brad, why don’t we go ahead and start out. Tell us a little bit about where you find personal motivation.

BRAD: Yeah, I mean there are plenty of different sources. I guess I’m kind of a podcast junkie, I guess you would say. I pretty much have to —

PIPPIN: It seems appropriate t

We are both active developers that have, over the last few years, made the transition to operating successful product businesses. The transition was slow, sometimes painful, almost always challenging, but exceptionally rewarding. During this episode, we share some of our experiences making the transition from developers to business owners in the hope of helping others going through the same transition or looking to make a change in their work lives.

Every person that takes the plunge has different experiences. If you have anything to share or would like us to try and share some insight on an a challenge you’re facing, post it in the comments below and we will address it as best we can in episode 27.

This episode was sponsored by Prestige Conference, a premium interactive business and career development conference.

Show Notes:

BRAD: Welcome to Episode 26. Today we are talking about transitioning to a product-based business, and we’re going to talk about our businesses and kind of where we started.

PIPPIN: Before we jump into that, though, we want to give a quick shout out to our sponsors for this episode. This episode was sponsored by Prestige Conf, which it’s a new conference. It’s going to happen here on October 3rd and 4th in downtown Minneapolis. It’s going to be — it’s a live event there. It’s also streamed live. And it’s a business conference for career development.

There are a lot of really awesome speakers that are going to be there this year. Actually, this is the first year. Lisa Sabin-Wilson, Matt Medeiros, Carl Hancock, Jake Goldman, Reid Peifer, and a whole bunch more. If you are interested in building your own business, which is exactly what we want to talk about today in our own history, go check out Prestige Conf. It’s October 3rd and 4th. You can find it at PrestigeConf.com, as well as the show notes.

BRAD: Cool.

PIPPIN: Brad, take us away.

BRAD: So – business. So this is new for us. We’ve really been just talking about WordPress development. You know, we obviously mentioned our businesses before, but we haven’t really dove into any of our business activities or where we started and stuff, so I wonder, like, so

WordPress 4.0 was released on Thursday of last week and includes some really excellent improvements. In this episode we discuss the changes in WP 4.0 as well as what we have both been working on recently, including updates for WP Migrate DB Pro and Easy Digital Downloads.

This episode was sponsored by Sprout Apps, a suite of applications powered by WordPress for freelancers and small businesses.

Show Notes:

PIPPIN: Welcome back to Apply Filters for Episode 25. I’m Pippin Williamson, along with my cohost Brad Touesnard.

Today’s episode is sponsored by Sprout Apps, which is a suite of business apps for WordPress built specifically for freelancers and small businesses, starting with invoices, estimates, and payments. If you want to learn more, go to SproutApps.co. We actually had Dan Cameron, the developer behind Sprout Apps, on Apply Filters last week, so if you want to learn more about the business, the product, etc., go to SproutApps.co and also listen to last week’s episode.

BRAD: Awesome!

PIPPIN: Today, we want to talk about WordPress 4.0. But before we do that, Brad, why don’t you jump in and tell us what you’ve been doing recently?

BRAD: Sure thing. We actually just released 1.4.2 of Migrate DB Pro. It’s a minor release, but it actually included a ton of code changes because it’s the first release since we re-factored everything to merge the free version and the pro version together, so there was a lot of code reorganization that went on.

PIPPIN: Mostly just like code cleanup?

BRAD: Yeah, not too much cleanup. It wa

Dan Cameron is a freelance developer that has been working with WordPress since before version 1.2. Today he is the lead developer of a suite of WordPress products called Sprout Apps that are geared to helping small business and freelancers manage the business side of things. The first app available is for invoice and estimate tracking.

(more…)