Tom McFarlin has a thoughtful post on the complexity of creating WordPress solutions, partly as a rebuttal to a friend of his citing that WordPress offers opportunities for “stupid simple money.”
I think it’s fair to say that it’s not terribly difficult to make easy money with WordPress, but that doesn’t preclude the fact that you can also make incredibly mature, advanced, and complicated solutions that work alongside the software, as well.
Further, the nature of the project on which you’re working – be it setting up a theme for someone or solving a complicated caching problem that must also deal with race-conditions – doesn’t necessarily equate to the amount of money that you’re going to make within the economy.
I think that it’s easy to read the revenue reports of many of these notable shops and think “Man, I need to be there.” Sure, we’d all like to be there – some of us choose to do so and make good money, some of us choose to do so and still have other jobs, some of us choose to do so and not report on it, and some of us choose to do so if for no other reason than to have fun and to build cool stuff.
So when you’re talking about the money that comes with building WordPress solutions, remember that there’s much, much more in play that the revenue reports that you’re seeing being published by some of the authors.
