Episode 74: Looking Back at 2016, and Ahead to 2017

2016 had been a year filled with challenges, achievements, and good experiences for both Pippin and Brad. Today, we’re going to talk about the year in review, both professionally and personally. We’ll also think ahead to what we are hoping to continue, change, and accomplish as we look forward to a dynamic and successful 2017. Sit back and relax to a fun hour of reminiscing, goal-setting, and chatting about various topics.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

Fun stats for Apply Filters: How many episodes, how many downloads, and which episodes were the most popular.

Some of the challenges in 2016. One major one for Pippin was that the growth of EDD seemed to have stalled.

Brad’s challenges. One is that he realized that he’s taking on so many different tasks that he’s not doing them all well.

Thoughts on deciding when to hire someone and how to hire the right person.

Brad’s highlights from 2016: the Better Search Replace plugin, new team members, a retreat in Vienna, a huge increase in revenue, and more.

Goals that Pippin met during 2016, including going to New Zealand and turning on automatic subscriptions for all of his primary products, as well as some highlights from the year, both professional and personal.

Insights on what Brad and Pippin want to achieve in 2017, including hopes for hiring, conferences, and personal goals.

Links and Resources:

Episode 55

Episode 66

EDD 2016 Year in Review Post

Better Search Replace plugin

Pippin.com

If you’re enjoying the show we sure would appreciate a Review in iTunes. Thanks!

Transcript

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

BRAD: Welcome to Episode 74 of Apply Filters. This time Pippin and I will be looking back at 2016 and also looking forward to 2017. Pippin, how about you get us started off? How has your 2016 been?

PIPPIN: Yeah. So we’ve got a few things that we want to go over. First of all, I think there were some interesting challenges that we both faced in 2016 on personal levels and business, in the business world, development, et cetera. We had some good highlights, and we have some good goals going forward in 2017.

Before we get into those, because we’re doing a podcast, I think it makes sense that we go ahead and give a couple of quick fun stats that we just looked up from 2016 for Apply Filters. First of all, in 2016, we managed to record 21 episodes. That’s a little bit more than one episode per month. Episodes were downloaded over 50,000 times. And Episode 55 and 66 were the most popular with about 1,800 downloads each. As we learned today for the very first time, there is actually more than one person listening to this podcast, which is kind of cool.

BRAD: Yeah. We averaged about 1.75 episodes per month, actually, so that’s not too bad.

PIPPIN: No. We try to record once every two weeks. Every now and then we get delayed a few weeks. One of us gets sick or on a trip or something like that, but 1.7, that’s pretty close.

BRAD: That’s why I thought, like, the average would be much lower, much closer to one per month, so I’m happy with that.

Challenges in 2016, do you want to start?

PIPPIN: Sure. Over the course of the year there was one big challenge that was consistently on my mind, both from a business perspective, a personal perspective, and a development. That was that the growth of EDD, at least in terms of the revenue that we were able to bring in from the project, seemed to have kind of stalled. I wrote up a big year in review post and published it last week or earlier this week. I think I published it on Monday and gave a whole bunch of details on it.

Basically, we had started to see, maybe towards the end of 2015 and all of 2016, that EDD had been really skyrocketing up at a pretty good clip. Maybe not skyrocketing, but at least going upwards pretty consistently. It was for the first time that we really saw it level o