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Welcome to Episode 24 of mastermind.fm! This week our resident masterminds Jean Galea and James Laws look at the software that they use at work every day for productivity and development. They also mention Slack once or twice. There’s a lot of neat tools here, so be sure to check it out! Show notes are below as always, but catch the full audio podcast right here so that you don’t miss a thing!

Welcome to Episode 23 of Mastermind.fm! We’re doing something a little different today as Jean and James interview Pippin Williamson, author of Easy Digital Downloads, Affiliate WP, and Restrict Content Pro. He’s a man that’s made the WordPress space a little more awesome for all of us, and a sharp mind to listen to for advice. You can find the questions we’re hitting him with from both ourselves and Mastermind listeners below, but tune it to the full episode to hear what he has to say!

1) How did you get into PHP programming and then into WordPress?

2) What was the first product that you actually sold as you moved away from freelance work? What inspired you to make the product and make the move away from freelance?

3) How much did you sell your first product for? Where did you market it? Did it sell well in the beginning?

4) When did it hit you that “Hey, I can make a living doing this!”? How long did it take you to decide that this was going to be a full time pursuit?

5) How important were mentors along the way? How important were these people in influencing you to go full time?

6) How many people are you working with at the moment? What does your team look like?

7) What does support look like for you? How do you onboard and what kind of resources do you devote to it?

8) Is there a point where you will “release” a customer? i.e. are there certain situations where you realize a customer just can’t be supported anymore? What factors play into a decision like that?

9) You’ve become successful with a number of different plugins. How do you manage your time and effort between these and where do you draw the line and say ‘enough is enough’?

10) How do you divide your team among the different projects and products that you have?

11) What is the most important piece of advice you’d give to someone starting or wanting to start their own business?

12) If you had it to do all over again (starting a business), what one thing would you change?

13) What would you say is the most challenging thing in your business today?

14) What is the most exciting thing going on in your business right now?

WP Ninjas

WP Mayor

WP RSS Aggregator

Easy Digital Downloads

Affiliate WP

Restrict Content Pro

Pro Blog Design

Easy Content Types

Welcome to Episode 22 of Mastermind.fm! Today our masterminds Jean and James will be talking about starting your plugin business from scratch. In the last 2 episodes we talked about getting your new product off the ground and gaining traction. We’re going to back up a little here and look at the pre-launch phase. What’s involved? What do you need to plan and prepare for?

How do you break into the WordPress space and carve out a niche of your own? Listen in! As always, show notes are below but catch it all in the audio!

Jean and James open up talking about the close-knit, unique nature of the WordPress community. The sense of community is strong in WordPress and coming in with an attitude that projects humility and an open mindedness to learn the terrain means a lot for your success within the community. Engage with members, get involved, and be respectful to be successful.

It’s an industry with a value system, which is something fairly unique in larger industry settings. Learn the community and be willing to merge with it, don’t come in swinging or trying to reshape the ecosystem in your own image right off the bat.

If you have the capital up front, finding an established WordPress business that already has an established brand and team behind it is one option for entering the WordPress space. What you’re getting in this scenario:

Understand that you’re not buying the code. WordPress plugins operate under General Public License (GPL), meaning code is open and available to the public. This is an important point to remember. Don’t look for a product first- look for an established brand with a positive, well established reputation in the community and a stable customer base.

So you can build something awesome yourself and want to join the community? Great! This is how Jean got his start. How long is it going to take to make this a replacement for your full time job? How much can you make how fast? This is very variable.

For James and the WP Ninjas, it took him one year to feel comfortable leaving his previous full time job. He recommends getting started with your business side by side with your full time job first, closely following your monthly growth, and saving all of it until you get a year’s salary saved. If growth is sufficient and stable at that point, you can consider replacing your previous full time income with your WordPress income.

Jean recommends planning for a year to two years, but notes that the time and effort you are able to devote to it is going to affect that timeline considerably. Regular checkups are important- don’t just set out a 6 month or 12 month income goal. Look to the customer base, market penetration, and other growth factor metrics outside of just revenue.

If you can’t build a product on your own but have good business chops, consider partnering with someone who does. It’s important to choose someone you trust and who will be around to support your product wholeheartedly.

It’s not enough to hire someone to build a product and then hire a developer to support it. You need someone with a vested interest who won’t bat an eye at responding to a 2 am crisis if something goes wrong.

Even if you’re a technically talented person that can build a product on your own, a vested business partner can be a huge boon. Someone to bounce ideas off of, brainstorm, share the down times with you, etc can be a huge advantage unless you’re someone who is just hardwired to go it solo!

Welcome to Episode 21 of Mastermind.fm! Today our masterminds Jean and James will continue last week’s discussion of product launches and gaining traction for your new product. Last week they covered getting a website together, building a mailing list and social media presence, and a handful of other great advice for making your product launch successful. What else will they talk about today? Come find out! As always, show notes are below but listen in for  the whole conversation so you don’t miss a thing!

What are people saying about your product? There are a few good places you can test the pulse of your product from and use to draw more interest with your own feedback to users.

In the early days of any product, there are bound to be bugs and a shifting of focus/use cases from your original intent. Pay close attention your first customers, engage them, make fans and cheerleaders of them. Word of mouth in the early days is critical! Build a great reputation as an engaged developer right out of the gates.

Building a foundation of great content surrounding your community and product is a great way to draw attention while contributing back to your community. Delicious Brains is a great example of blogged content built up around products. Offering content via email is another great way to reach people.

Joining in with others raises visibility and lends credibility to your product. You’re essentially paying people to promote your product, but in James’ words: if you believe in your product, what does it matter how people discover you? Get it out there to them however you can if you’ve got something that’s going to make their life better.

If possible, team up! Partnering with theme companies can be great promotion and ensure that your product looks great in popular themes. Hosts are another good potential partner. GoDaddy for example is moving to a heavy focus on the WordPress ecosystem, partnering with popular plugin developers to offer a great experience to WordPress users. Attend business conferences like Pressnomics and be prepared to lay out how your product can be a solution to a company’s needs.

WordPress reaches a much greater audience than just the English speaking world. Provide a translated readme.txt and work towards getting translated into as many languages as possible. This not only gives you a wider potential audience, it gives you a huge advantage over non-translated competing plugins. Even if you can’t afford to hire a translator, there are other incentives you can offer, such as free licensing.

Welcome to Episode 20 of Mastermind.fm! In this episode, our resident masterminds Jean and James talk about product launches and what it takes to get traction for your new product. It’s a great listen for anyone thinking about launching a new product now or in the future, and it just might inspire the rest of us to get out there and build something! Hang out with us for a while and give it a listen!

This will be a multi-part discussion, so be sure to tune in next week for a follow-up episode. As always, show notes are below but treat yourself to the whole show with the audio!

Assumptions: Starting a premium product to launch from ground zero. What do we need to get off the ground and where do we start?

This doesn’t have to be a big elaborate affair. Just lay out the basic value proposition for your product if nothing else. What is it? What does it do? Why do you need this product? Have a basic landing page so that you can, if nothing else, hand someone a url and say: check this out!

Having a landing page also gives you more control over how you talk about the product. Sales copy, product pages on other marketplaces, etc may not say everything you want to be said as you don’t have full control of the messaging. Your own landing page accomplishes this in exactly the way you want.

Some things to consider for your website/landing page:

You need to keep people in the loop, especially prior to launch. Building a mailing list gets you an audience that knows what the product is and that are ready to get more info when it launches. It gives you an interested, engaged audience that’s ready and willing to use your product. Build intrigue and interest by showing components of what you’re about to release, features, what it will do for people, etc.

Email isn’t the only vehicle for getting the word out about your product and getting people engaged. A growing number of people are more easily engaged via social media, especially twitter. Be a cheerleader for others, share their work, and actively engage with others. They’re likely to want to return the favor when you launch your product. Build relationships!

If you’re starting completely from scratch, follow great people inside your industry. Share their work  frequently, comment, engage. Don’t just retweet, but talk about why the product you’re retweeting is awesome. It’s about being a good neighbor and building good will. People will see you, see that you’re a positive presence, and engage back. It takes time to build- don’t be discouraged and engage regularly in real time!

You need a dedicated support channel if there’s not already a suitable solution in your marketplace (if you’re launching in an existing marketplace). Groove and Helpscout are great examples of support solutions you can look into and implement before launch. For the user, all that’s required is sending an email. For you, there’s a dedicated, organized queue that you can easily log into even on the go!

Easy Digital Downloads +Software Licensing (premium addon) for digital products or WooCommerce for physical products both provide great mechanisms for making your product accessible. There is role crossover between the two, but they definitely specialize in their digital or physical spheres.

Paypal Standard comes packaged in Easy Digital Downloads, but you’ll need Paypal Express for recurring payment options. Recurring payments are a good thing for you. Check into and consider this option. Stripe will allow for credit card payments if you want to give customers greater payment flexibility.

Also: do your research on taxes early. Consult a lawyer or accountant if needed. There are often factors like out of state or VAT taxes that are easy to overlook in the beginning. There are easy solutions for tax considerations, but you need to plan for them in advance!

Welcome to Episode 19 of Mastermind.fm! This week our resident masterminds Jean and James will be talking about WordPress.org. Specifically, the challenges and benefits of listing your plugin on WordPress.org, and some alternatives to it. Sit back and listen with us for a while while they parse the pros and cons! Show notes are below, but tune in for the full conversation!

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1) Feedback

You can get great feedback on your work from users. With both a support forum and a review section, you can hear what your target audience feels about your product, and get a sense of where else you can go with it- share with a greater community and see how it gets used! It’s great material for considering premium features and testing the market.

2) Motivation

There’s nothing quite like watching your plugin grow. The first notification that your repo is available, committing the first release and seeing your plugin go live – it’s exhilarating. The WordPress community is great, and getting involved in the positive feedback loop of the community can really drive you to do your best.

1) Support

When you have multiple plugins listed on the repo, it can be very difficult to manage support through the .org support forums. Also, even when you’re just posting something for fun or as a side project, support expectations from users can be very demanding in the forums.

2) Reviews

There is no accountability for the rating system in the repo. Users can leave very poor reviews with no substantiation and there is no way to challenge that type of review. The moderators do an outstanding job of moderating and read every single review, but there is not a system in place to deal with unfair or flippant reviews.

3) Search Results

There are known problems with the keyword search functionality in the repo. For example, searching for keywords related to RSS Aggregator or Ninja Forms such as “RSS” or “Forms” does not bring the most relevant results related to either product. This is an issue that is being addressed but still currently impacts the searchability of products. There is also very little rhyme or reason to the ranking of returned search results.

4) Measurables

Active install data is very poor for giving you a picture of how many active installs you actually have. The reported intervals are too broad for accurate assessments, and there is no other data such as version number or type of installed sites available. An almost complete lack of measurable statistics in the repo means a 3rd party system is necessary for actionable data.

1) For a paid product, Code Canyon is an excellent option. Pippin Williamson’s first products, for example, were released through CodeCanyon. They have a huge audience and it is a great place to test your market.

2) Another product’s marketplace. For example, Easy Digital Downloads and Ninja Forms both offer marketplaces for premium add-ons to their products. With this option you don’t have to worry about coming up with your own ecommerce solution.

3) Managewp.org/plugins – same type of setup as the .org repo, but displayed in a visual manner with better search parameters. Also features new and trending plugins.

4) The Periodic Table of WordPress Plugins (plugintable.com) features the top 100 most popular WordPress plugins. This is something that you have to break into over time as opposed to listing yourself on initially, but is fantastic to have around when you get there.

Welcome to episode 18 of Mastermind.fm! This week our resident masterminds Jean and James will continue last week’s discussion of office hardware & tech. Last week we talked about standing desks, ergonomic office chairs, and the monitors of choice around the WP Mayor and WP Ninja offices. This week we’ll explore more of what we use around the office.

As always, the shownotes are below for your convenience, but tune in so that you don’t miss a thing!

Jean swears by his wireless Apple keyboard. It’s slim, lightweight, and you don’t have to fool with batteries on the newest model- you just charge it with a USB cable. It’s perfect for traveling and hauling around in general. It’s also rechargeable and holds its charge for a long time.

James concurs here: the newest model Apple keyboard is his bread and butter. He does point out that there are a handful of different keyboards around his office, though. The WP Ninjas dev team prefers mechanical keyboards with lots of tactile feedback, for example.

Jean is using a Logitech MX Master and feels it’s one of the best on the market currently. It can be connected via USB or Bluetooth, has a number of programmable buttons, and is comfortably ergonomic. He also uses an Apple trackpad for gesture navigation at his left hand.

James prefers the Apple Magic Mouse. The native functionality means a lot to him for navigation. While he concedes that it’s not terribly ergonomic, his use case finds his hands on his keyboard much more frequently than on his mouse, so it’s not that big of a deal for him.

James uses three different headphones for the different tasks he takes on from day to day. The basic Apple headphones serve for common tasks, Bluetooth Beats headphones come into play for exercising, and V-Moda Bluetooth headphones for traveling and noise reduction.

Jean uses B&O Play and Bose headphones. He uses his B&O Play primarily for watching movies and relaxing to music. The Bose headphones are work headphones that reduce office noise nicely. Several other bluetooth headphones get use when he’s moving around or at the gym.

Jean and James both emphasize the importance of continuing education in business. Both of them appreciate the Kindle for reading and staying up on news and industry movements. Jean swears by the Kindle exclusively for reading, while James oscillates back and forth between that and his iPad. They both agree that nothing really beats the Kindle for reading, though.

James primarily backs up to the cloud, which is a practice he’ll tell you quickly that he doesn’t recommend. Physical backups are important. Jean uses BackBlaze and Apple Time Capsule. Photo backups and cross-device photo management is an area that they both find a lack of solutions for. Suggestions are welcome!

Welcome to Episode 17 of Mastermind.fm! Join masterminds Jean and James today as they discuss hardware- the technology we use to do what we do each day. Computer hardware is probably the first thing that comes to mind when you think hardware, but today’s banter isn’t limited to that. Join us as we delve into standing desks, ergonomic chairs, office tech, and more!

Stay on the lookout through this episode for a free Mastermind.fm giveaway you won’t want to miss!

James swears by these and loves them for their ability to get you up and moving while you work. Jean concurs. Getting up and moving (dancing?) can be inspirational! Next Desk tends to be the top of the line ($2k+) while Up Desk better fits the budget range of $400-500. Apparently Jean has found one that can order food for you? Who knew. Jean recommends Ikea standing desks that run around $500.

Jean likes IKEA here as well, and you can pick up a nice one for around $150. James can’t remember the name of his chair, but I, your anonymous writer of shownotes, can vouch for their awesomeness as well. Unfortunately they don’t have any branding on them. They’re a cloth mesh seat and back with adjustable lumbar support and adjustable just about everything. The extra lumbar support is amazing.

James’ office uses 100% Thunderbolt displays, which works because it’s a 100% Mac environment. Jean has tried his both Macbook Air and Pro, and likes the 15” screen of the Pro. He’s also experimented with using his iPad as an alternate second monitor connected by a USB cable. It takes an app to connect them, but is a perfect second monitor on the go. He also uses a 27” monitor on his work desk.

Look for Jean and James’ discussion of hardware to continue next week!

Welcome to Episode 16 of Mastermind.fm! This week our masterminds Jean and James delve into the topic of hiring and support. Look for this week’s conversation to revolve mostly around support, and then turn to hiring next week. You’ll find a brief overview below as always, but be sure to tune in for the full scoop! You won’t want to miss it!

James kicks things off by laying out his philosophy on support: instead of looking at support as the inevitable thing we have to do because we have a product, look at it as an opportunity to engage with your customers. The goal of support shouldn’t be to close a ticket or end one conversation so you can move on to another one, but to build trust and relationships.

Jean addresses logistics. As a beginning business, how much of your small team’s time do you devote to support and development? You have to manage setting priorities and scaling as your company grows. What’s the factors to consider in managing this aspect of your growth? It’s a reality for almost everyone. The ‘passive income’ of a plugin that doesn’t need support is a reality to varying degrees, but it’s tantamount to chasing unicorns. You need to plan for support!

In a nutshell, target and address top issues for your customers proactively.

Support can, in Jean’s words, “quickly take over your life”. How do you handle it within your team?

For James and Ninja Forms, a key quality in a support team is to act as customer advocates. People that can show empathy and relate to the customer. Someone who can solve a problem for the customer and, when warranted, come back to the development team and suggest changes. They’re not just ‘question answerers’, but team members that are actively engaged in shaping the direction of product growth. They are support-first hires rather than developers that handle support too.

For Jean, the nature of his team’s work require developers in the support role. That’s a common arrangement shared by other organizations like Delicious Brains and MailPoet. This brings a high degree of technical know-how to the support aspect of the business. Jean’s team uses a three-tiered system for support where tickets are delegated based on the nature of the individual ticket and which developers are best suited to address them.

Email or form support may work ok in the very early days, but both Jean and James strongly recommend adopting a help desk solution early. Even a homebrew support method is going to be overwhelmed quickly by your evolving needs. Don’t be afraid to research and experiment with different systems, but look into a professional solution early.

Welcome to Episode 15 of Mastermind.fm! Today our resident masterminds Jean and James tackle the topic of having a successful WordPress plugin: from zero to success. Join them today and take a tour through the major attributes that a plugin business needs to become successful, from a pair of entrepreneurs who know the drill firsthand. We’ll outline them below, but tune in for the full story!

Attributes of a successful plugin business:

Point 1 and 2: Solve a problem, but make it as pleasurable of an experience for the user as you can. Nobody wakes up in the morning excited to build a form for their website, but they shouldn’t dread having to do it either! Style your plugin so that it is tasteful and comfortable within WordPress. It doesn’t have to be a WordPress UI clone though- sometimes you have to think outside the box to solve your users’ problems.

Point 3: Is there a need to fill, and is there anyone filling the need in the way you are intending on doing it? A saturated market is a proven market with a clear need, so don’t be afraid to wade in with other large, successful competitors. The fact that the market is saturated indicates a clear need, just find your niche and fill it in an awesome and unique way.

Point 4: Don’t be afraid to strategically add people to your team to help you grow and mature.

Point 5: People have to know you’re there. The WordPress repo is a great tool for this. Build relationships whenever possible also.

Point 6: The vote of confidence of other users and high profile community members is huge for growth. The role of Pippin Williamson in supporting Ninja Forms early on was enormous for the growth of Ninja Forms, for example. His vote of confidence added a lot of fuel to the business. You don’t necessarily want the biggest names (though Pippin is a pretty huge name in WordPress), but just well respected, honest members of the community

Point 7: Build for potential growth. Build better and bigger will follow. Make your plugin extensible and easy to add to for collaborating developers.