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:

Do you hire them as full-time salaried employees?

Do you pay them based on how many tickets they respond to or based on hours? How do they log their hours?

Do you give them admin access to your site so that they can handle payments/transactions/refunds etc? How did you find developers you could trust?

Did it take a lot of effort to train them to be able to support your plugins?

How do you handle communication and ticketing?

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

Show Notes:

Podcasts: Startups for the Rest of Us, Tropical MBA

Books:

Blue Ocean Strategy from W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne

Inner Game of Tennis from W. Timothy Gallwey

Rework by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson (Basecamp guys)

Getting Things Done by David Allen

Anything from Seth Godin

Trialing at Automattic blog post by Dave Clements

Big Snow Tiny Conf

Review us on iTunes

Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Apply Filters, the podcast all about WordPress development. Now here’s your hosts, Pippin Williamson and Brad Touesnard.

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 that you would cohost a podcast then.

BRAD: Yeah. That might have had something to do with starting this thing because I get so much inspiration from other podcasters that have been at it for years, right? They’re on, like, episode 200-and-something.

PIPPIN: Yeah.

BRAD: I’m just like, holy crap these guys are crazy.

PIPPIN: Dedicated.

BRAD: Yeah. Probably my favorite would be the Tropical MBA podcast. The reason is because I love traveling. These guys just kind of travel the world and run their businesses remotely, and so I’m kind of living vicariously through them. It’s always fun to hear where they are next and that kind of thing.

PIPPIN: That is really cool.

BRAD: The other one is Startups for the Rest of Us. Those guys also have a conference that I attend every year. They spend each episode either answering a listener question about business or just kind of giving a report on their own businesses. Those guys are software guys as well. Those are developers who have turned into business owners, and so it’s very relevant to what we do, I think, so a really great podcast. Check those two out for sure.

PIPPIN: Yeah, definitely.

BRAD: Have you ever listened to those, Pippin?

PIPPIN: I’ve never listened to either one, but I hear about them constantly, both from you and from others. Clearly they’re great things. I actually find myself not listening to podcasts very often unless I’m driving in the car.

BRAD: Y