Post Status has been a haven for kindness and generosity, but it's thanks to our members, readers, listeners, colleagues, and friends that the work we do together and the fun we have is good, meaningful, and regenerative for our community. On that note, this is my last post in my role as editor at Post Status...
This week in Post Status Slack, Lesley Sim, the founder of Newsletter Glue, dropped this announcement: "While everybody is offering discounts for Black Friday, we’re planning to significantly raise prices. We’ll be narrowing our target audience and focusing mainly on medium-large publishers and online businesses; working with them more closely and providing a high level of customization and support." What motivated Lesley's decision? Where does she expect it to take her company? How can plugin owners find enterprise agency partners? Listen to this episode of Post Status Draft and find out.
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.
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.
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 explains how he found his way into WordPress and a successful business that's solving the hard problems of caching and performance optimization. His work and business model suggest several areas of opportunity for developers and founders working in the WordPress plugin market today.
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.
WooCommerce 6.4 RC 1 📦 Blocks and Admin 🔌 Time to Retire ZeroClipboard ⚠️ Clients in a Candy Store 🍬 Sustainable Woo? 🪴 Zach Stepek, Carl Alexander, Till Krüss, and JJJ 🎙️
