I spoke to Pippin Williamson for the Post Status podcast, and in the podcast proper (which will come out soon), we discussed the revival of Restrict Content Pro. It was a lot of fun, and we talked about why he decided to revive RCP, how they went about it, and into a variety of topics around revenue, the business, and the product.
Afterward, we had an additional conversation — just for Club Members — to discuss hosted WordPress eCommerce. Pippin told me that he has been interested in providing a hosted experience for EDD and RCP for over a year now, and that he hopes to make it his personal project now that RCP is on its new trajectory.
We talked about the advantages of hosted eCommerce versus self-hosted, and what’s going into their team’s thinking for making a project like that. They have acquired branding, and it wouldn’t be marketed as a WordPress product specifically, but they do plan to use some of their own products, like the Site Creation RCP add-on.
Pippin thinks a hosted product would help prevent server-centric support issues, and would lower the level of knowledge necessary to provide support generally; whereas currently his support team members have to be highly proficient with WordPress.
He also acknowledges that a hosted product would be much more marketing-centric, and less development and product centric — which is an area where his products do well currently. He knows that they’d be diving in head first to the deep end, and they’re excited to try.
The supplement to the podcast is only fifteen minutes, so I hope you’ll give it a listen.
