Business

A Visit from the Good Idea Fairy

Dan Knauss

October 21, 2022

Building, Supporting, and Selling a Winning Product — With or Without WordPress.org • Are Active Install Counts Relevant to Your Business's Success? (Even if they are accurate? And they haven't been.) • Let's Fix What's Broken (The Plugin Repo) Not What Isn't (The Freemium Model) • Follow Leaders, Adopt Standards • Tools and expertise from rtCamp • Some great and "doable" ideas for the future of plugin business metrics on the .org repo. Could some of them help put an end to intrusive and manipulative dark patterns in the WordPress Admin dashboard and notifications?

Post Status Excerpt (No. 71) — Building, Supporting, and Selling a Winning Product — With or Without WordPress.org

Dan Knauss

October 21, 2022

BusinessDesign

This week I sat down again with Eric Karkovack to talk about the WordPress stories and topics that are on the top of our minds. Independently, we made nearly the same selections. There's a single throughline in this episode — what works, what doesn't, and what will take WordPress businesses forward in the product, agency, and hosting spaces.

Connect freemium plugins to premium extension sales?

Dan Knauss

October 21, 2022

BusinessNotes

Justin Labadie's wishlist for the WordPress.org plugin repo:

1) Ensure all search results are relevant.
2) Standardize a Premium product upsell interface.
3) Make it possible to show other products by the same author.

Five takes on helpful plugin stats and insights

Dan Knauss

October 20, 2022

BusinessFeatures

Good ideas for the future of data disclosed to plugin authors using the wordpress.org repository:

1) Identify surges of unhappy users reacting to a bad release — and the opposite, happier outcome.

2) Use pageview analytics to estimate total potential user interest and conversion rates.

3) Assess a plugin's performance with the .org search algorithm, the quality of releases, and plugin incompatibility as well as PHP compatibility issues.

4) Collect significant user behavior data anonymously without phoning home.

5) Just reveal all the raw data with privacy options for individual authors — no interpretive analysis on wordpress.org.

BONUS: Let's take this discussion somewhere else!

How to sell plugins, themes, and services on WordPress.com

Dan Knauss

October 19, 2022

BusinessPlanet

Read the FAQ.Fill out this form.Agree to the WordPress.com Marketplace Vendor Agreement.If needed, integrate with the WordPress.com Store Licensing API.

Does WordPress.org Data Belong to the WordPress Community? Should It?

Dan Knauss

October 14, 2022

BusinessNotes

Today WP Watercooler sought Solutions to the Active Growth Problem. In a pointed but respectful conversation moderated but Sé Reed, the Watercooler crew got one new detail from Otto about the decision to remove the active install charts: it was…

Over, Under, Around, and Through

Dan Knauss

October 14, 2022

BusinessPlanet

This week Alex Denning (Ellipsis) draws on Iain Poulson's historical, high-level plugin data at WP Trends to offer some thoughtful, somewhat contrary, but practical and grounded perspectives on the value of Active Install Data. At the WP Watercooler and elsewhere, a realization seems to be setting in that the data is not open source and not the property of the WordPress community. Like last week's episode of Post Status Draft with Katie Keith of Barn2 Plugins, Till Krüss (Object Cache Pro, Relay) offers a lot of lessons this week about less travelled paths to success in the plugin business even as a very small company or company of one. Performance, testing, and support are key, interrelated parts of Till's success and probably the most important ones to borrow in your own life and work if they resonate.

Why the WordPress.org growth charts might not matter

Dan Knauss

October 14, 2022

BusinessFeatures

In 2019-20, only four plugins entered the space and broke into the upper tiers. These were Site Kit for Google, Facebook for WooCommerce, Creative Mail for WordPress and WooCommerce, and Google Ads and Marketing by Kliken. Has the WordPress.org repository become a closed shop, a tapped-out ecosystem where the winners have taken all? Here are some suggestions about how to break in or changes that could be proposed to open and diversify the repository. Until that happens, do growth charts matter?

Till Krüss on WordPress, Performance, the Plugin Business, and Life

Dan Knauss

October 13, 2022

BusinessHosting

What plugin owner has not felt the pain of an extraordinarily busy support forum? Till is up to (wait for it..) 5-10 minutes a day on support — which he aims to decrease. How? Testing to ensure the highest quality.

Trust Issues

Dan Knauss

October 7, 2022

BusinessPlanet

Cory Miller asks, "What can we do to better support our plugin developers and product owners?" Katie Keith offers some clues with the story of her WordPress/WooCommerce agency and product shop, Barn2 Plugins. Dan Knauss and Nyasha Green talk about microaggressions, the Active Install Growth Data story, and US federal legislation aimed at Open Source Security. In an increasingly "demon-haunted world," how can we know who is doing what with the hardware and software tools we use? Ben Gabler, CEO and Founder of Rocket.net, is in our Member Spotlight.

Post Status Excerpt (No. 70) — Trust and Distrust: Microaggressions, Active Install Growth Data for Plugins, and Open Source Security

Dan Knauss

October 7, 2022

BusinessDesign

In this episode of Post Status Excerpt, Dan and Ny take on three issues in the WordPress community that can threaten or impair trust while also revealing how foundational trust and healthy communication are: 1) racism and microaggressions, 2) the sudden removal and uncertain fate of the active install growth chart in the WordPress.org plugin repository, and 3) open source and security. Briefly discussed: emerging US federal policy that aims to secure open-source software. Zero-trust architecture might work well for networked machines, but human relationships and communities need trust.

Diversifying Revenue, the 50% Coding / 50% Marketing Lifecycle, Active Install Clawback, and Turbo Admin

Daniel Schutzsmith

October 7, 2022

BusinessPlanet

Here’s a glimpse of what’s going on in the world of design and development in the WordPress space this past week. As I look around the Post Status Slack and the chatter on Twitter, this week has been filled with conversations emphasizing the struggle of running a business as a solo devpreneur.

Active Install Charts Removed from Plugin Repo

Dan Knauss

October 3, 2022

BusinessFeatures

In reaction to as-yet-unpublicized details about the abuse of active install data in the WordPress.org plugin repository, the charts displaying that data have been removed from plugin pages in a move expected to be temporary. Important (and some familiar) questions are emerging as this story unfolds: how to balance the values of openness, security, and privacy as well as cooperation and competition at WordPress.org — still the central hub for WordPress plugin businesses.

WordPress Biz Roundup for the Week of September 26, 2022

Dan Knauss

September 29, 2022

BusinessPlanet

2022 Web Almanac CMS findings • WP Cloud • Sponsored core contributor and sponsor data • WP Biz Dev • Female-Owned and Led WP Businesses • and more →

What is WP Cloud?

Dan Knauss

September 29, 2022

BusinessFeatures

WP Cloud is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) built on the hosting infrastructure that’s behind WP.com, Pressable, and WordPress VIP with GridPane soon to follow. Agencies that want to white label their client hosting are ideal customers for WP Cloud via GridPane.