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Brian Hogg is a Canadian, WordPress Plugin Developer, Educator, and more. He has a few great courses on how to create WordPress plugins and a very informative newsletter to go with them. In this 2 part episode, we discuss his plugins as well as general plugin development; this includes build tools, SVN, submitting to the WordPress repository, and more.
Offering a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is an excellent way to test your initial product offering when starting a new software business. The Lean Startup methodology (http://theleanstartup.com/principles) and building MVP plugin offerings have been an important first step for many WordPress plugin and theme authors. However, it seems at the same time; many great MVP products have been released for WordPress, only to be abandoned as the developers can no longer keep up with the rapid user growth, demand for support, and ongoing development required to make it a success. Unless you have the systems in place to facilitate growth, such as onboarding customers, offering top-notch support, and the ability to scale your software and support offerings, then you will have a hard time making a successful business around WordPress.
Hi Seth!
You’re right, you do need to plan for some time responding to support and the like, but it’s a nice opportunity to engage with users and come up with ideas for your plugin which you can implement when you have time. Consistently setting aside a couple hours a week can help push things forward, whether it be support, new features, or marketing (blog posts, youtube how-tos, etc).
You can go a very long way without hiring so the need to rapidly scale (in order to pay for a bunch of employee salaries) isn’t there. If that’s you’re goal great, but I advocate this as a lifestyle business for 1-2 people full time or on the side for most.