Scott Bolinger

Adventures in Software Engineering

  • The Real Prize

    I was driving to work today thinking about all the things I have planned for this year, and I couldn’t wait to get started. I am so energized by my work right now, and so excited about all the possibilities. Sometimes I wish it would all just be done in an instant, or that I…

  • How Do I Increase Product Sales?

    I recently answered a Facebook post that asked: For the past 4 years I’ve been able to sell 10-20 products per month, how do I increase sales? In the past I might have told this person to do more content marketing, buy Facebook ads, or redesign their website. In fact, that’s what the other answers…

  • Re-thinking discounts. Kind of.

    A while back I wrote a post about a bunch of ways to run discounts. At AppPresser, we’ve always been in favor of discounting, as long as they are timed appropriately. I don’t think it hurts our brand, it gives people who are on the fence a reason to take the leap. Our biggest month…

  • The Real Cost of That “Easy to Build” Feature

    I recently sent out this tweet, judging by the number of RTs and likes it struck a nerve: I sent this tweet while building a new integration for my product. It turned out awesome, but it’s going to create a lot of changes to our infrastructure, so I have to consider the cost of releasing it.…

  • Client Work Slowing Down?

    I’ve had a few conversations lately with friends who build WordPress websites for clients, and I was surprised to hear all of them say things have slowed down. I thought at first it might just be a certain segment, or maybe just the smaller shops. I asked around and it seems this slowdown is affecting…

  • Progressive Web Apps – 3 Reasons To Say Screw the App Stores

    Progressive web apps are all the rage these days. Many articles have been written about the technical aspects, but I wanted to give some real life examples of when a PWA is a better option than putting an app in the app stores. If you don’t know, a PWA is an application that utilizes modern…

  • Strong Arming Your Growth, Paid Acquisition With Free Content, & Other MicroConf Takeaways

    MicroConf (Growth) just finished, and it was excellent. Here are my most important takeaways. 1. Strong Arming Your Growth Ankur Nagpal of Teachable shared how he grew his company to $10M ARR using non-scalable tactics. They set a goal to grow 30% each month, and focused on how they could achieve that. For example, when…

  • How to Submit a Gravity Form While Offline

    I get requests to build apps with offline form submission every so often, so I thought it would be fun to build one. In this tutorial I’ll show you how to build a web page on your site that works while offline, and can submit to Gravity Forms on your website when it regains a…

  • Cordova In App Purchases – Validating Subscriptions

    I recently built a fairly complex in app purchase system for a client that uses recurring subscriptions. It allows users to purchase a recurring subscription which gives them access to membership content in the app. Recurring purchases are quite a bit more complex than one-time purchases, because you have to keep track of when the…

  • Building a WooCommerce REST API Mobile App

    Recently I updated my WP Ionic project to include WooCommerce REST API support, just for fun. It’s become a pretty cool little app, so I thought I’d share it along with some things I learned. Here’s the tl;dr: It’s fast, really fast Variable products, shipping, and payments are the pain points There are pros and…