Episode 72: WPForms with Jared Atchison

Our sponsor today is Post Status. Post Status is an industry news site that covers the WordPress ecosystem for professionals and enthusiasts. There’s also the Post Status club, which gives you a news-filled email, access to a WordPress directory, a Slack community, member-exclusive deals and so much more. Check them out at poststatus.com.

Today we have a special guest, Jared Atchison, the owner of Atchison Consulting and WordPress developer. He’s been writing code for over a decade and growing his business for about five years. He’s also the lead developer of WPForms. Today he gives us some great insights from the perspective of a developer.

Some of the topics you’ll hear about today include:

Some of the changes and highlights in Jared’s personal life and business since he was on the show two years ago.

How Jared would describe WPForms: It’s a form plug-in which focuses on the user and usability. He goes into more detail about what to expect with this plug-in and what sets it apart.

What made Jared want to dive into such a competitive market and how he navigated the process of developing and releasing the plug-in.

Some of the challenges Jared had when developing WPForms.

The primary marketing channels for WPForms; the biggest one is content marketing.

Jared’s favorite and least favorite parts of developing WPForms.

Links and Resources:

Post Status  (Sponsor)

Draft Podcast

Episode 17 with Jared

WPForms

Behind the Scenes of WPForms blog post

WPBeginner

Jared on Twitter

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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 72. Today we are joined by a special guest, Jared Atchison. Say hello, Jared.

JARED: Hey, guys.

PIPPIN: Glad to have you.

JARED: Absolutely. Thanks. Thanks for having me on.

PIPPIN: It’s going to be our pleasure. So before we jump into talking to Jared about a bunch of different things, this episode is sponsored by Post Status. Post Status is an industry news site devoted to covering the WordPress ecosystem for professionals and enthusiasts. It is a news site run by Brian Krogsgard, but it’s much more than a news site.

He also has the Post Status Club, which gives you access to a special members notes newsletter, which is a handwritten WordPress news and insights email delivered multiple times per week. It gives you access to a WordPress directory. Think of like a LinkedIn style profile where you can go and be listed along with all the other Post Status members.

He’s got a Slack community on there and as well as member exclusive deals for people that join the Post Status Club. There’s also both myself and my products from Pippins Plugins, as well as the products from Brad and WP Migrate DB Pro are included in that members deal. Brian also has a podcast called Draft. Post Status is a pretty sweet site, so we really want to thank Brian for his sponsorship of the episode today.

I believe all three of us are members of his Post Status Club. Let’s talk a little bit about what does the club benefits give you guys. What do you think?

BRAD: I use the email newsletters. As soon as I get it, I usually open it up and see, you know, Brian’s take on news that’s happening in the WordPress community. The way he breaks down the newsletter is just like little — I especially like the little — I can’t remember what they’re called. I think they’re just called notes.

PIPPIN: Footnotes?

BRAD: Yeah. Yeah, and he just summarizes, like, what it is, so it’s usually a sentence, right? I don’t know. It just saves you so much time than digging around on a bunch of different sites to try to figure out what’s going on.

PIPPIN: The newsletter that he sends out is one of my favorites, and it’s actually one of the very few newsletters that