In January of 1848, James W. Marshall discovered a shiny piece of metal in his Sacramento lumber mill. He showed the metal to his boss John Sutter, and the two discovered that it was gold. Sutter tried to keep the discovery a secret in order to avoid endangering his agriculture business. He failed. In the […]
A Brief History of the WordPress Product Business Read More »
I built a new thing, it’s called Holler Box. It’s a WordPress plugin I built for myself, because I wanted a better way to communicate with my site visitors. For example, I did a webinar a couple weeks ago, and I was trying to figure out how to announce it to people on my website
Announcing Holler Box: A Better Way to Communicate With Your Audience Read More »
Being a business owner who codes is an advantage in some ways, but also a major disadvantage. It’s great to be able to build your own products without paying someone else, and do it on your own timeline. The problem is that it’s nearly impossible to pull yourself away from the code when it’s time
Marketing: What Works and Doesn’t Work (For Me) Read More »
One of the most important metrics for my business is net revenue, but it’s a harder number to find than you’d think. I use Easy Digital Downloads, and their reporting tool and app shows you a revenue total. For example, let’s say you see this in the EDD reports: Total earnings this month: $10,000 You
Net Revenue Stats in Easy Digital Downloads Read More »
Earlier this month my sales counter app for AppPresser ticked over to 7 figures. This is pretty exciting for me, it’s a major milestone for my career in selling products. It took us about 3 years to get to 1 million (not counting other revenue), and and it feels really good to reach this milestone.
2016 brought a lot of change in the WordPress product space, and lots more is coming in 2017. Companies are getting bigger and more mature, hosts are pushing their weight around with acquisitions, and new players are entering the game. Established products are still doing well, but new products by old companies are gaining momentum.
2016 WordPress Business Review Read More »
Now that the WP-API is in core, here are some useful tips for you. Filtering Posts Filtering posts was a bit confusing for me at first, because the documentation seems to suggest you would visit an endpoint like /posts/category/40 to get posts from a certain category. Instead, you are supposed to use arguments in your
Some WP-API Tips for WordPress 4.7+ Read More »
I’ve been working on a new plugin for Easy Digital Downloads called EDD Metrics, it’s now released on the WordPress plugin repository. This plugin gives you valuable metrics on your business with comparisons to previous periods. If you are familiar with Baremetrics, this is basically a copy of that. I love Baremetrics, but it just doesn’t
EDD Metrics Plugin Released Read More »
It’s true. No one wants to use your product, and it would be better if they didn’t have to. This is not just about crappy products, it’s about great ones too. Using your product is a necessary evil, because a better way doesn’t exist yet. It would be better if I didn’t have to use
It would be better if your product didn’t exist Read More »
It’s important for a modern front-end developer to have good tools and workflow that is going to survive the perpetually changing land of frameworks, ES specs, Typescript, and slightlybetterthanwhatyoudidyesterday.js craziness. I’ve been working with modern JavaScript tools and frameworks for long enough to have nailed down a pretty good workflow, which I’ll share today. The
My Javascript Tools and Workflow Tips Read More »