RS075: Running a WordPress Based Business with Phil Derksen

Today Dave and I sit down with Phil Derksen of WP SimplePay Pro to talk through best practices in running a WordPress product business.  Phil and Dave are now veterans of the WP plugin space, and now that Craig is finding his way into the WordPress dev community it’s a nice time to have this roundtable discussion.

In this episode we talk through:

• Managing developers, even when you’re not actively contributing to your codebase
• Pricing in WordPress, and how to manage support of Free vs. Paid users
• Testing for future WordPress releases and different hosting environments
• Imposter Syndrome – how do we all feel about not being the main developers on our projects

Links to Resources Mentioned

• Pippin’s WordCamp US 2016 talk – Two of EDD’s biggest mistakes at 19:00, including the freemium + paid add-ons model.
• Premium plugins containing add-on functionality within a single plugin.
• • Advanced Custom Fields Pro – Elliot Condon
  • Coming Soon Pro – John Turner
  • Jetpack
• Chris Lema’s WordCamp talk on dealing with the imposter syndrome.
• • We didn’t discuss this one but thought I’d add it.
• Phil’s been using Kyle Brown’s WPSaaS.net support service for a while now and is loving it.  WordPress Support as a Service.  Love it!

Connect with Phil on Twitter!