Derrick is the co-founder of Drip, which was acquired by LeadPages. He started an app called Level, worked on it for a year, and it ended up failing. We talk about why it failed, his framework for validating products now, and how he is applying that to his next project StaticKit.

Sometimes the word SEO elicits eye-rolls from those of us who have been around for a while, but this episode with Brendan Hufford is not what you might expect.

Brendan takes a different approach to SEO, he looks at a business with a holistic lens, and offers non-scammy, practical tips for improvement. This is not about guest blog posting, backlinks from infographics, or any other gimmicky nonsense. It's about how to improve what you are doing on the web.

I took away more than one useful strategy to implement in my  business, including doing more product demo videos, how to find target keywords, and more.

In this episode, we discuss how Jordan had an eCommerce store making $75k/mo, which gave him a lot of insight into making eCommerce products. He started out with a cart abandonment solution for multiple platforms (I even tried this out for Easy Digital Downloads). He actually avoided integrating with Shopify, but he had an idea to make a checkout that was customizable.

There's a growing trend towards using a Javascript based front-end for a database driven site. In this episode I talk with Zac Gordon about my experience using Gatsby as a front-end for WordPress, and the pros and cons involved with that.

Zac is the creator of javascriptforwp.com, a place to learn all about Javascript frameworks like React, Vue, Angular, and more and how they work with WordPress.

Jack McDade is a fun guy making a fun product. 

He is the founder of Statamic, a static website CMS built on top of Laravel. Building this company was not easy for Jack and the team, he says it took 6 years before he could stop doing client work. Jack has created the best branding I've seen in a bootstrapped software company. It's not just the design (which is awesome), it's the pricing, the mission, and the product. 

The folks at Statamic are doing something they believe in and having fun at it, and it shows. In this episode we talk about why he built a static website CMS, what that actually means, and his journey convincing people to buy it.

Enjoy!

Jason Bahl created WPGraphQL, which is a plugin that adds a GraphQL API for WordPress sites. He created it because he worked for a large publishing company that had 250 million pageviews per month, and the WP REST API was too slow.

In this episode we talk about why you would use WPGraphQL instead of the WP REST API, how it works, and what it has to do with Gatsby. (Gatsby is a React based static site generator that also uses GraphQL.)

This is the first Dev Chat, which is a developer focused episode where we talk about code, infrastructure, and the process of building products. My normal interviews focus more on the business of selling products.

Brad Touesnard founded Delicious Brains, makers of WP Migrate DB and SpinupWP.

I love asking about failures of successful people, and Brad and I got into what he did before Migrate DB was a profitable enterprise.

I first heard Brad's name from his product WP App Store, which tried to be a marketplace inside of a WordPress plugin. It failed for a number of reasons, including the fact that starting a marketplace is really hard.

What I never knew before is that he took on investment money for the project, and when it failed he decided to pivot their investment into Delicious Brains. That meant that those investors in WP App Store now owned shares in Delicious Brains, and he eventually bought out all but one.

Brad created WP Migrate DB because he had trouble migrating client sites while working at an agency. He was scratching his own itch, and he didn't really think much of it. The product gained lots of installs, and he eventually released a pro version.

In the podcast we also talk about Mergebot, a product that his team worked on for 2 years and killed before launch due to insurmountable technical issues.

I love Brad's philosophy of working on products he thinks are cool, and scratching his own itch. SpinupWP came out of this, and I think it will be a success.

We discussed funded startups vs. lifestyle businesses, 32 hour work weeks, selling your company, and more.

Enjoy!

If you aren't familiar, Justin Jackson created Megamaker, Marketing for Developers, and most recently, Transistor.fm. 

I love how open and honest he is.

In this podcast, he talks about why going on his own and hustling to pay his bills led to some great things, but also to depression. His course Marketing for Developers, along with his other obligations really drained him. He had to be "on" all the time, and it was exhausting. He wanted to do something new, and his pal Jon Buda was building a podcast hosting platform.

Justin loved the idea, and he was already deep in the podcasting world. He opens up about how he basically begged Jon to let him into the project. Jon eventually did, and the project became Transistor.fm.

Even though Justin had a pretty big audience for their launch, Justin recounts being about 6 months in and only having a few thousand in revenue. He felt a sense of despair because they were growing so slowly, and were still so far away from being able to pay themselves what they needed. 

They are now at $20k MRR, and although this sounds like a great success, Justin says they aren't quite where they need to be yet. They use the Profit First method of taking 50% of revenue for salaries, which only amounts to $5K each. With 4 kids, a mortgage, and all the obligations of modern living, he needs more than that.

We also talk about why you should start a podcast even if no one listens. I agree, I'm having a blast with this one. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

Justin has been doing LearnDash since 2012, and he is crushing it. I was curious about how he started his company, and what he did before that. 

One of my favorite moments in this episode was learning that Justin sold massage chair vending machines. His life could be very different if he stuck with that.

He also created a clever business that gave away free domain names and made money through affiliates on the back end. It brought in a few hundred bucks per month until he finally sold it for $2,000. Check the "successful exit" box!

LearnDash ended up being profitable within 48 hours, Justin talks about how he built an audience pre-launch and generated lots of buzz for his launch.

We also talk about how hiring consultants is undervalued, something many product developers don't normally do.

Enjoy!