Bob puts out so much writing and audio at Do the Woo and has so many different people featured, it's hard to keep up! These are some recent ones I've taken note of but didn't get into a post or…
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?
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.
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.
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.
Vito Peleg, Atarim's cofounder and CEO, explains how he "cracked" the partnership problem to find alignment with other companies that can help them all accelerate their growth. Vito explains what Atarim's latest partnership with Rocket.net brings to both companies and their customers — and he anticipates more deals like this in the year ahead.
WordPress Founders Invest in Atarim • Gridpane and Automattic Team Up to Serve Agencies • Salary Transparency — Why Not? • Learning Together in Post Status Slack: Adobe's Figma Acquisition and PayPal vs. Stripe
Vito Peleg and Dennis Dornon have teamed up to bring MainWP's site management tool inside the Atarim agency dashboard. https://twitter.com/vitopeleg/status/1557395997973684225
The perennial question — to SaaS or not to SaaS? Both? WordPress-centric product and marketing, or not so much? Danielle Di-Tommaso and Josh Barling from Acsell join Vito Peleg from Atarim to talk about their experiences in these scenarios with…
