Twelve days after publishing that post, on January 10th, Accessibility Checker hit 10,000 active installs on WordPress.org. The graph above has been updated to include that milestone.

Accessibility Checker is five years old and has shown steady growth, but, as I wrote last December, it really took off over the past 12 months. We more than doubled active installs, from 4,000 to 10,000, in seven months, and increased Accessibility Checker revenue by 44.3% in 2025. Year-to-date in 2026, we’ve exceeded our product revenue target (based on the budget we set in December) by more than 26%.

There has been a lot of talk in the WordPress space about the impact of AI on plugin companies, and several WP founders have openly discussed sales stagnation or even dramatic revenue decreases. As described above, we have not experienced a slowdown—we’re fully in ramp-up mode.

I’ve been promising for a while to shine a light backstage, and this 5-year, 10k+ installs milestone feels like a good moment to do it. So, that’s what this blog post is. A look at what it has taken to get over 10k active installs and some advice for other product owners.

Marketing in the early days

How Accessibility Checker started

Accessibility Checker was built during COVID. It just happened that, right before the world went crazy, we were already planning to create a software product and had taken out a Small Business Administration loan to fund our team working on an internal project instead of client work. Accessibility Checker development and the Equalize Digital website build were funded by that ~$120k SBA loan and additional Paycheck Protection Program funds that saved us when much of our client work dried up during COVID.

When we launched Accessibility Checker in December 2020, we didn’t have an email list beyond 50-60 current clients. We had been doing accessibility work in client projects, but we were known as a marketing and web shop, not an accessibility company. We were “known” as Road Warrior Creative (RWC)—I put “known” in quotes because I won’t say I was particularly good at marketing or differentiating us as RWC. We had some great clients, but we didn’t have a strong inbound pipeline or any audience we could lean into to buy our newly released plugin.

Equalize Digital was a massive pivot not only in what we were selling, but in our entire company identity.

Initial challenge: time and money

If any time was the right time for that pivot, COVID was it. However, we knew that users and buyers would not come overnight, and we hedged against that.

When you’re bootstrapping a WordPress plugin or any software product, you typically need something else to pay the bills. We kept the RWC website up and kept doing business as RWC for more than two years after we first released Accessibility Checker in December 2020.

Let’s just say, it’s not “build it and buyers will come.” This isn’t the field of dreams.

Because we could only afford to take time off from client work for a short time, initial marketing efforts in 2021 were limited, and then we dove back into client work to ensure bills were paid.

You can see that client work was taking priority by looking at the number of blog posts and the GitHub commit history for Accessibility Checker. We didn’t release many plugin updates that year, and there were months when we didn’t publish a single blog post. Accessibility Checker dev and marketing had to squeeze into whatever available time we had.

2021 marketing

In the first months after launch, I marketed the plugin in whatever free ways I could find to reach other people’s audiences (because we didn’t have one):

• 7 podcast interviews (you can find these on my press page if you want to see what early-day messaging sounded like).
• 1 feature on The Enterprise League blog.
• Spoke at a handful of WordPress meetups that were still meeting online post-COVID.
• Spoke at Knowbility’s AccessU accessibility conference, which is local to me (no travel costs).
• Organized WPCampus 2021, which was online and targets one of our key customer groups: higher education. (Fun fact: organizing this conference was what got me noticed by the team building the NASA website, and eventually led to NASA buying our plugin and hiring us as the accessibility team on the NASA.gov rebuild.)
• Spoke at WordCamp Santa Clarita (online).
• Joined several WordPress-related Facebook groups (like The Admin Bar) and engaged whenever there was an accessibility question. I never broke the “no self-promotion” rules; I just provided really helpful accessibility advice so people would start to see me as an expert.
• Started our own Facebook group.

In addition to speaking and engagement, I did three key things to set us up for marketing success:

1. In July 2021, I started the WordPress Accessibility Meetup. This provided a way to educate people about accessibility and guaranteed that at least two blog posts (meetup recaps) would be published on our website each month. I didn’t have time to create much content, but it was simple for our content specialist to write presentation summaries without any knowledge of accessibility. Bringing in outside speakers also helped us get in front of the speakers’ audiences when they shared the event and recap links. Average attendance was 25 people per meetup.
2. In November of 2021, we started an email newsletter, figured out a process for getting people to subscribe, and made a plan to send emails every other week.
3. Also in November, we took the advice of Kim Coleman of Paid Memberships Pro and added our free plugin as a product on our website, instead of directing people WordPress.org. Downloads still pull from WordPress.org, but this gave us a way to capture people’s email addresses when previously we had been sending them off-site. This lets us add people to a drip automation for nurturing into paying customers.

In 2021, we published 21 blog posts, 12 of which were meetup recaps. Our website was brand new at the end of 2020, so we didn’t have any pre-existing traffic to leverage. Until we created our email newsletter at the end of the year, we didn’t even have a good way to capture prospective customers or follow up with people who attended the meetup.

We ended our first year with 560 active installs.

2022 marketing

Marketing in 2022 was much like 2021: doing what I could around client work and largely things that took time or effort but little money. The underlying theme of my efforts was “be as helpful as possible” — I figured that sharing knowledge and being helpful was the best way I could reach people when we didn’t have any budget for ads.

This was marketing in 2022:

• Ran 25 meetups with an average attendance of 54 people at daytime events and 47 at evening events.
• Published 37 blog posts (24 of which were meetup recaps).
• Sent email newsletters about twice a month (sometimes fewer).
• I gave 7 podcast interviews.
• I spoke at AccessU again (in person, but local) and was paid to deliver several accessibility webinars for iThemes and The Nonprofit Learning Lab.
• I spoke at Recurring Revenue Retreat, which made this possible by covering my travel expenses.
• Continued engagement in Facebook groups, especially The Admin Bar, where the frequency of accessibility questions was higher than in a lot of other groups, but also, it just had the best vibe for connecting with agency owners.
• We got the meetup pre-approved for continuing education credits toward accessibility certifications with the International Association of Accessibility Professionals, which opened our meetups up to a new audience beyond typical WordPress attendees.

In 2022, we sold one of our other WordPress plugins to Liquid Web (it’s now part of The Events Calendar), which gave us extra cash to invest in marketing Accessibility Checker:

• We paid to sponsor HighEdWeb’s online accessibility summit, a conference geared toward web and IT professionals in higher ed. The sponsorship was less expensive than many in-person events, but it gave me a speaking slot, and we received an email list of opted-in attendees, all of whom were in one of our key customer groups.
• We also paid for our partner Steve and me to travel to WordCamp US in San Diego, where I spoke on accessibility, and we did a lot of networking with other WordPress folks.

In 2022, I started contributing more to the WordPress open source project than I had in the past. A few times, I opened tickets in Trac or participated in accessibility team meetings via Slack, and became more vocal about accessibility in WordPress itself. I attended my first contributor day at WordCamp US. And, together with Joe Dolson, I revived the WP Accessibility Day conference, with Equalize Digital as a top sponsor.

Plugin growth in 2022 was slow but picking up. In February, we saw the growth curve steepen slightly, and we hit 1000 active installs in June 2022 — 508 days after launching on WordPress.org.

We ended the year with 1,654 active installs, 1,100 more than the prior year.

Making a bigger investment

We knew early on that we wanted to grow faster than we could by bootstrapping and funding the product with client work.

In 2021, we participated in the Mass Challenge accelerator. I spent a good portion of late 2021 through Q3 2022 trying to find investors, without much luck. We had a handful of promising conversations that dried up in the summer of 2022 due to world economic changes. Chris, Steve, and I decided to put fundraising on pause as a result. Then, just a few months later, we connected with Joost de Valk and Marieke van de Rakt, which led to a pre-seed investment from their company Emilia Capital in March 2023.

Bringing on investors gave us extra cash for two important things: hiring a full-time developer so the plugin could move faster, and paying for paid marketing and travel.

2023 marketing

Investor dollars enabled us to do much more marketing beginning in 2023. Here are some of the highlights:

• Ran 24 meetups with an average attendance of 82 people at daytime events and 51 at evening events.
• Published 34 blog posts (22 of which were meetup recaps).
• Launched our Accessibility Craft podcast in February 2023, which releases episodes every Monday, alternating between conversations with Chris, Steve, and me (there were 21 of these) and meetup recordings.
• I wrote a weekly accessibility column on The Admin Bar website — 51 articles(!), which were shared in the Facebook group, are still cited by agency owners, and continue to bring us traffic three years later.
• Started sending email newsletters weekly and additional emails 24 hours before events.
• I gave 4 podcast interviews, and we were written about in at least 6 articles.
• Steve and I both spoke at WordCamp Birmingham (in-person).
• I spoke at WordCamp Phoenix, AccessU, and Cloudfest USA (in-person).
• We sponsored:
  • Atarim’s agency summit (online)
  • HighEdWeb accessibility summit (online)
  • WordCamp USA (in-person, with 4 team members in attendance)
  • WP Accessibility Day (online)
  • A11yWeekly newsletter (all year)
• Paid 2 YouTubers to create videos about Accessibility Checker.
• Chris started speaking.
• We started putting more effort into hosting company partnerships and became a recommended solution for several hosts, including Nexcess, Convesio, and WP Engine.
• Before Black Friday, we paid for some sponsored listings in WordPress Black Friday round-ups.
• Continued engagements in Facebook groups and Slack channels.
• Continued participation in the WordPress community, through leading WP Accessibility Day, being an accessibility table lead at WordCamp US, and contributing to WordPress core.

In 2023, we also experimented with paid Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn ads, both in connection with a sale (GAAD during May and Black Friday in November) and retargeting campaigns outside of sales. None of these seemed to work or could be attributed to sales, and in some cases, the cost per click was so high that it mathematically didn’t make sense at Accessibility Checker’s price point.

I also tried to get PR and people talking about the exciting things that happened to us in 2023. I was successful in getting people to talk about Emilia coming on as an investor and NASA funding the development of a feature in our plugin, and at the end of 2023, we won a GAADY award for the plugin.

If you can’t tell from that list, I worked my butt off in 2023. And while I was working on marketing, Chris was continuing to refine a sales process and automation campaigns in a new CRM, and Steve and our devs were building many new features that made the plugin more appealing to less-technical users and more “mass marketable”.

We hit 2,000 active installs in March 2023 (273 days from 1,000 to 2,000) and 3,000 active installs in November (245 days later). We ended the year with 3,127 active installs.

2024 marketing

We kept up the fast pace in 2024, trying to do way more than was humanly possible in each day or week, with a big focus on content creation. Here are the highlights from 2024:

• Ran 24 meetups with an average attendance of 98 people at daytime events and 54 at evening events.
• Published 55 blog posts (23 of which were meetup recaps) or more than one per week. This included our WordPress page builder comparison, which became our first piece of content to create meaningful buzz in the community.
• Published 26 Accessibility Craft podcast conversation episodes, which, along with meetup recordings, meant we continued to put out a podcast episode every week.
• We started putting more effort into YouTube as a marketing channel and switched Accessibility Craft from audio-only to a video podcast, which was also available on YouTube.
• We teamed up with WP Buffs to publish an e-book about accessibility for small businesses, which we use as a lead magnet and promote in a pop-up on our blog posts. (Yes, we have an evil pop-up on some parts of our website, but it works.)
• Sent weekly email newsletters, 24-hour event reminders, and multiple drip automations for a total of 148 different email campaigns.
• I gave at least 3 podcast interviews (probably more, but I didn’t track them well on my press page).
• Events:
  • Steve, Chris, and I went to WordCamp Europe for the first time. Equalize Digital was a sponsor; I spoke and I was an accessibility table lead for Contributor Day.
  • I spoke at WordCamp Canada (twice: on a panel and with my own talk), and I was the accessibility table lead for Contributor Day.
  • Steve and I went to WordCamp US, and I was on stage three times – Steve and I gave two talks, plus I did a WordPress speed build. We also hosted an Accessibility Craft IRL Meetup at a brewery before WordCamp started, with 60+ attendees. And, yes, I was an accessibility table lead for Contributor Day.
  • I spoke at a handful of other virtual events
• We sponsored:
  • HighEdWeb accessibility summit (online)
  • WordCamp Europe (in-person, with 4 team members in attendance)
  • WP Accessibility Day (online)
  • A11yWeekly newsletter (all year)
• Paid to promote our Black Friday sale.
• Continued engagements in Facebook groups and Slack channels.
• Continued participation in the WordPress community and organizing WP Accessibility Day.

2024 was a big year for us on the WordCamp front. We learned in 2023 that the small local camps didn’t have enough attendees to justify the travel expenses, so our focus in 2024 was on the flagship events.

The NASA hype at the end of 2023 worked well for us, and we decided to take the risk of paying to attend WordCamp Europe because the European Accessibility Act deadline was approaching in 2025.

2024 was also the third year of my intentional effort to be more visible in the community. Thanks to meetup, my participation on the accessibility team, the content I had been creating, and all the prior year’s efforts, there was a perfect storm that helped us get a lot of stage time and build credibility.

This directly led us to bring in more accessibility service work, which more than covered the cost of attending the events, but I can’t say it drove any dramatic changes in plugin sales or adoption.

One noteworthy change we made in September 2024 was to our website checkout flow for free and paid users. Prior to September 2024, customers were taken to an unstyled Easy Digital Downloads checkout page that required a ton of information (account creation, phone number, billing address, etc.), likely killing conversions for some paid users, and especially free users. In September, we launched a new, more professional checkout page for purchases and a sign-up page for free users that only asked for one thing: an email address. This significantly increased our conversions, especially of free users that we could nurture.

We reached 4,000 active installs at the end of June 2024, 231 days since the 3,000 mark. I suspect we would have ended the year with nearly 5,000 active installs, but the #WPDrama that left some hosting companies unable to pull plugins from WordPress.org means the numbers on WordPress.org are no longer fully representative of all websites using a plugin. By my estimates, we ended the year with approximately 4,700 active installs.

2025 marketing

2025 was a year of transition. In 2023 and 2024, we intentionally burned cash, but we went into 2025 knowing we wanted to work our way back to breakeven or profitability. That meant that I needed to be more thoughtful about our marketing plan and ROI, and I cut a bunch of things, most notably our event travel budget.

Here are the highlights of our marketing in 2025:

• Ran 20 meetups with an average attendance of 110 people at daytime events and 56 at evening events. We ended up canceling all evening events in Q4 and beyond because we had trouble securing speakers for that timeslot.
• We started promoting our meetups differently:
  • We created Meetup groups in six different cities so our events would show up for people across the US (not just in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the “official” group is located).
  • We started posting meetups in different Slack Groups and discussion boards for the accessibility industry, not just for WordPress folks.
• Published 71 blog posts (21 of which were meetup recaps), several of which were lead magnets where people had to give us an email address to access the content.
• Published 25 Accessibility Craft podcast conversation episodes (+ meetup recordings).
• Steve and William (developer) started live streaming changelogs on YouTube a few times per month, following big releases.
• Sent weekly email newsletters, 24-hour event reminders, sales emails, and multiple drip automations for a total of 290 different email campaigns.
• I gave 4 podcast interviews and did a handful of virtual talks, but Chris and Steve started speaking more to give me a break, so I wasn’t the only one speaking. (I don’t have a number for how many talks/interviews they gave.)
• For budgetary reasons, only Chris and I went to WordCamp Europe. Equalize Digital was a sponsor; I spoke and was an accessibility table lead for Contributor Day.
• Beyond WordCamp Europe, we only sponsored WP Accessibility Day and the A11yWeekly newsletter.
• Ran our own virtual contributor day for Global Accessibility Awareness Day.
• Continued participation in the WordPress community and organizing WP Accessibility Day.
• Reduced/only occasional engagements in Facebook groups and Slack channels, because I created two courses last year, which took up a lot of my time.

WCEU got all of our travel budget because of the European Accessibility Act deadline on June 28, 2025. We wanted to make sure we were there and present.

We kept costs down by only sending two of us, but that made the event feel less successful. It was difficult to schedule meetings because we didn’t want to leave the booth empty, and I got super sick and had to spend part of the last day in our hotel room, leaving Chris representing us alone. I couldn’t tie any sales directly to the event (no one used the coupon code), but adoption accelerated around that time, so it’s possible that being at WordCamp Europe helped, along with all the other efforts we were putting into the content front.

We hit 5,000 active installs on April 27, 2025. That was 301 days since reaching 4,000 (that number is higher than the previous milestones because fewer hosting companies are sending install data back to WordPress.org).

After 5,000 active installs, things really took off:

• 6,000 installs on June 27, 2025 (61 days).
• 7,000 installs on August 28, 2025 (62 days).
• 8,000 installs on October 11, 2025 (44 days).
• 9,000 installs on November 27, 2025 (47 days).
• 10,000 installs on January 10, 2026 (44 days)

I’m guessing we might be at around 15,000 active installs right now, though we don’t have access to the data to prove it, since the next visible milestone on WordPress.org is 20,000+.

Measuring impact

The cost of marketing

Some of our marketing activities, like traveling to a conference, have obvious costs, but even content creation is not free. Time is not free, even if it’s your own, if it takes you away from doing billable work.

Here’s what our marketing spend looks like in recent years (excluding salaries):

• ~$63k in 2023
• ~$71k in 2024
• ~$35.7k in 2025

We break marketing expenses across several GL codes in our accounting software. Here’s what’s included in each:

• Software
  • Active Campaign
  • Castos (podcast hosting)
  • Descript (video editing, now podcast recording)
  • Restream (live streaming)
  • Canva (fast graphics)
  • Buffer (social media scheduling)
  • Adobe (1 seat, all tools)
  • Zapier (this isn’t solely marketing; also has some ops use)
• Subcontractors
  • This is where we pay outside writers or designers, if applicable.
• Marketing: Internal Events (a.k.a., meetup)
  • Zoom Webinars
  • Live captioning services
  • Post-event Transcription
  • Meetup.com Subscription for extra groups beyond the official one
• Marketing: External Events
  • Event Sponsorship Fees
  • Event Admission (if we have to buy tickets to attend)
  • Event shipping, electricity, room rental, misc fees
• Marketing: Content
  • Video Creation/Editing (if we were to pay a vendor to do this, curently we do it all in-house)
  • Video Transcription
  • Podcast Beverages
  • Podcast Editing (if we were to pay a vendor to do this, curently we do it all in-house)
  • Podcast Transcription (we used to pay a vendor for this, but now do it in-house)
• Marketing: Advertising
  • Adwords
  • Facebook/Instagram Ads
  • LinkedIn Ads
  • Influencer Marketing
  • Targeted Display & Other
• Marketing: Partners & Affiliates
  • Product affiliate commissions (20%+ varies based upon the partner)
  • Service affiliate commissions (10% of what the referral pays us for 12 months.)
• Marketing: Swag
  • Things we givaway if attending an event in person.
• General Marketing
  • Press release distribution
  • Misc. marketing
• Meals & Entertainment
  • Meals comped at US federal per diem rates
• Travel & Lodging
  • Event travel costs (airfare, trains, parking, Ubers etc.)
  • Event Hotels
• Dues & Subscriptions
  • Shutterstock
  • IAAP Membership

Travel (field marketing at events) has been, by far, the most expensive part of our budgets — though we have only dabbled in paid ads. I can see how paying for clicks could have rapidly dwarfed everything else if I had let it.

Second to external events are internal events. Every WordPress Accessibility Meetup we run costs us $650 or more, including Zoom Webinars, live captioning by CART providers, and post-event transcription. We have worked in recent years to bring in sponsors to help cover these costs (thank you, GoDaddy and Kinsta!), but it is still a line item we’re aware of and have to account for in case we have unsponsored events.

This year, we’re not traveling to events because we needed to shift budget into redesigning our website. We’re only sponsoring WP Accessibility Day and the A11yWeekly email newsletter, but otherwise focusing on meetup and content creation. We went back to the less extravagant, bootstrapped approach to marketing from our early days, and our marketing budget is still $25,000 (not including salaries). This is what I consider our “zero” for producing the content we create, and basic sponsorships that have shown clear ROI.

How much time does it take?

In the last year or two, one of the biggest changes we made was to make marketing part of everyone’s job.

In the early days, marketing was handled solely by me, with some support from our content specialist (first Emma, then Paola) around client work. The reality, though, is that there is too much for just one or two people to do while also doing client work. We also realized that it’s important for people to see everyone at the company as an expert, not just me. That led us to make marketing part of everyone’s jobs.

Now, everyone helps, whether it’s speaking at a meetup when we can’t find an outside speaker, Steve and William livestreaming to YouTube and helping with writing documentation, our accessibility specialist, Maria, writing blog posts, or everyone applying to speak at outside events or engaging with accessibility content on social media.

What does that look like from a time perspective? In 2025, our six-person team tracked 2,362 hours on marketing-related activities (20% of total time tracked). Multiply that times the cost per employee (or yourself), and you have a picture of how much marketing actually costs.

Calculating ROI and cost per lead

At the end of last year, because I knew we were going to be more limited in what we paid for this year, I spent a long time reviewing everything we’d done in the year, how much it cost us (including literal cost and people’s time), and how many new leads to our CRM came from that activity. This helped me estimate the cost per lead acquisition for each marketing activity.

Then I figured out the average number of days between entering our CRM and first paid purchase, as well as our subscriber-to-paid-purchase ratio.

I’ve shared our subscriber-to-paid-purchase ratio with a few people and in Post Status, and everyone has told me that the percentage of people who go from free to paid is really good (high for a WordPress plugin). So that tells me that we’re reaching the right people and doing a good job of nurturing them once they join our list. We just need to keep reaching more of these same people.

Calculating the cost of getting an email address helped me figure out which activities we should do more of and which were not worth the effort or might need a process adjustment to make them more effective. It was a lot of work, and I definitely wouldn’t do it every year, but if you haven’t done it, I think it’s worth doing at least once.

It is worth noting that there is a lot we do that is hard to track ROI for, but that has definitely helped us. More on that later.

The big picture

It’s important to note that any given year is not a complete picture.

Here’s a graph showing the previously mentioned days to 10k active installs, in 1,000-install increments. This tells a story of ROI over time.

Why growth accelerated in 2025

Looking at this graph and having heard that we cut our marketing spend in 2025, you may be wondering, “Why did growth suddenly accelerate so dramatically?”

This may be partially attributable to regulatory deadlines in 2025 and 2026 for the European Accessibility Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. But I don’t think the legal requirements alone are the answer — I know accessibility-focused companies that aren’t doing well right now.

Instead, I think that what happened in 2025 was the result of work that started years earlier.

By 2025, we had published hundreds of blog posts, run more than 90 meetups, sent over a million emails, produced over 100 podcast episodes, spoken at conferences around the world, contributed to WordPress core, organized WP Accessibility Day, and helped thousands of people solve accessibility problems for free.

All of those efforts compounded.

Someone might discover us through a blog post, subscribe to our email list, attend a meetup six months later, hear me speak at a WordCamp a year after that, and only then install Accessibility Checker. Looking at attribution reports, it would be easy to give all the credit to the final touchpoint, but in reality, every interaction helped build trust.

I also think timing plays a role. Agencies, hosting companies, and website owners were suddenly paying more attention, and we were already positioned to help them when they became aware of these laws. If you’re building a product, you need to identify a gap in the market and look ahead to what might be coming in the future.

It’s not just about the marketing strategy

Plugin quality matters

It’s worth mentioning that the product itself is much stronger than in previous years. Two to three years ago, Steve started the process with our dev team of completely modernizing Accessibility Checker, taking it from a “proof of concept” software product to something more modern, secure, and scalable.

We have more features and a more polished UI. The plugin is much easier for a broader group of users to use and understand, without accessibility or dev expertise. When people find us now, they are more likely to stick around than they were when our plugin was a year or two old.

It’s also fully compliant with coding standards and can pass even the most stringent code reviews — something that really matters if you want your plugin used on enterprise websites.

This positioned us well for increased demand in the marketplace. The best marketing strategy means nothing if the product itself can’t deliver on marketing promises.

Sales strategy plays a big role

Chris’ work on the sales side also can’t be ignored.

Marketing brings people to our website or social profiles, but it wouldn’t matter how many visited if they left without engaging with us. The change we made to our free user signup flow in late 2024 was huge. Creating more lead magnets over the past two years also played a big role in our being able to capture more email addresses.

But getting email addresses isn’t enough. You have to follow up with them. We send multiple emails a week, and Chris built automated nurture campaigns that focus on providing as much value as possible to people. Some of these campaigns include 8+ emails that are sent over many months.

Also, unlike many WordPress plugin companies, he is always happy to Zoom or have a phone call with people. We have a phone number posted on our website that people can call, and he answers.

That personal touch makes a difference when people are unsure whether Accessibility Checker is right for them, and it helps us stand out from other companies that don’t answer the phone.

Marketing is a snowball

Perhaps most importantly, we’ve reached a point where people are recommending Accessibility Checker without our involvement. Years of content created, podcast interviews, or being “ever present” build upon one another, and over time, credibility grows.

Customers tell colleagues about it. Agencies recommended it to clients. People bring it up when answering questions in Slack groups and on Facebook or Reddit. Those recommendations are incredibly powerful because they come with built-in trust, as they’re from a third party unaffiliated with us.

The more happy users you have, the more people might be out there recommending your plugin, and then more people will hear about it without you even having to do anything.

My advice

If you’re building a WordPress plugin or software product and trying to figure out how to market it, here’s what I would recommend…

1. Build a community

My top recommendation is not to underestimate the value of community. Figure out who your target demographic is for your product, and then do what you can to be as helpful as possible in that industry or to those people. All of the content you post online should present you as an expert who will help them solve X problem(s) on their website.

Some of the activities that are hardest to justify on a spreadsheet end up creating the strongest long-term returns. Running meetups, contributing to WordPress, organizing WP Accessibility Day, helping people for free, and reporting accessibility issues in other plugins all helped to position us as experts in our field. This builds trust that our plugin will do what we say it does. Trust is difficult to measure, but it matters.

If you are trying to market a plugin, spend time figuring out how to consistently help the people you want to serve. Give back in a way that shows your expertise, and then people will naturally see your product as a solution they want to try.

Figure out a way for people to easily connect with your company in a safe, low-risk way. Running free meetups has worked very well for us. Other companies have done this with Facebook groups. Do what works for you, but if possible, get their email address so you can stay in touch and nurture the relationship over time.

2. Stick with it

My second piece of advice is simple: play the long game.

One thing I’ve learned over the last five years is that most marketing activities don’t work immediately. A blog post might not generate meaningful traffic for months. A conference conversation might not turn into a customer for a year or more. Someone who joins your email list today might not buy until they’ve received dozens of emails, attended multiple webinars, and seen your name repeatedly over time.

It’s tempting to look for the shortcut, the growth hack, the ad campaign, or the viral moment that will suddenly change everything. Maybe those things happen for some companies, but they didn’t happen for us.

What worked for us was showing up consistently.

We published content when it felt like no one was reading it. We organized meetups when attendance was 20 or 30 people. We sent newsletters to a tiny list. We answered questions in Facebook groups without expecting anything in return. We made time to contribute to WordPress. We built relationships. We kept improving the product.

Then we did it again the next week.

And the next week.

And the next year.

I also think it’s important to recognize that marketing and product development aren’t separate activities. The best marketing in the world won’t save a product that doesn’t solve a real problem. At the same time, even a great product can struggle if nobody knows it exists.

The two have to work together.

Every year, while we were creating content and building community, our dev team was also improving Accessibility Checker. We were listening to customers, adding features, fixing bugs, refining our sales process, and providing thoughtful support. Growth happened because both sides of the business were improving at the same time.

The companies that seem like overnight successes often have years of work hidden beneath the surface. As a product owner, you need to plan for that slog. Figure out how you’ll fund the growth years, whether it’s with continued client work, investor dollars, or business loans. I also can’t say enough how helpful it’s been to have partners on this journey — there’s no way I could have gotten this far as a solopreneur.

Five years ago, Accessibility Checker launched to a list of fewer than 100 people. Today, we’re serving thousands of websites around the world. Looking back, there wasn’t one thing that got us here. It was thousands of small actions, repeated consistently, over a very long period of time.

When I look at today’s growth curve, I don’t see a single successful campaign. I see the cumulative effect of five years of consistently showing up, creating content, helping people, building relationships, improving the product, and staying focused on the same mission.

That’s probably not the answer people want to hear because it’s not fast and it’s not glamorous. But if there’s one lesson I’ve learned from growing Accessibility Checker, it’s that sustainable growth usually results from many small things done consistently over a very long time.

Post Script

I have additional thoughts on why AI hasn’t hurt us like many other WordPress plugin owners have reported, and I want to talk about the impact of being featured on the front page of the WordPress.org plugin directory (which we were in March). But this post is already well over 6,000 words, so I’m going to save that for future posts.

In the meantime, post any questions you have about our marketing approach here, and I’ll answer them. I’ll admit this post ended up more tactical than strategic. If you have more questions about the high-level strategy, let me know.

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Only a few months after Pocket died, the girls started lobbying for another dog. At one point, Chris and I were even given a Christmas wishlist slideshow presentation featuring multiple dogs available for adoption. But, with our crazy lives, I kept saying no. Between building a new house, moving, and all the travel we had planned over the last two years, introducing a new creature to care for did not make sense.

Last December, when we wrote our company budget for 2026, we knew we wanted to rebuild our website and that we would need to hire a designer. We ended up shifting the marketing travel budget to subcontractors to pay for a designer. Which means that, for the first time since COVID, I will not be traveling to any conferences this year.

The nonprofit that I am on the board of, WP Accessibility Day, tried, as an experiment, to run a crowdfunding campaign for a sponsor booth at WordCamp Europe. We were hoping to run an accessibility help desk, raise accessibility awareness, and use funds to cover board member travel costs to WordCamp Europe. Unfortunately, while we received some traction, we didn’t get the response we needed to make it happen, so no WordCamp for me.

I’m bummed not to be going to any WordCamps this year, and definitely sad not to be going to WordCamp Europe in Poland. WordCamp Europe is my favorite WordCamp and a great way to continue expanding our reach in Europe. But when you’re bootstrapping, there’s not infinite money for all the things, and we’re definitely at a point where investing in a new website is the best use of marketing budget.

So I was sad not to be going to Poland in June, but a year with no travel also presented an opportunity…

Make the kids’ day and get a puppy!

I surfed around Petfinder, and one Monday, we surprised the girls after school with a trip to visit a litter of puppies at a rescue in Cedar Park.

The rescue hadn’t seen the mom, just the puppies, so we’re not completely sure what he is, but he’s the cutest little terrier mix with scruffy fur. He’s 16 weeks old now and 15 lbs, so he’ll be bigger than Pocket, but not by much.

Following our tradition of choosing “P” names for pets, the girls named him Pico… as in Pico de Gallo. 😆

Diesel seems pretty happy to have a dog sibling again, too. They’ve been playing together and sharing a bed, plus puppy training means lots of treats all day long for both of them, which he’s definitely not complaining about.

As far as the upsides of not going to Europe this year, a new puppy is a pretty good consolation prize.

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Addie’s is a sharpie drawing of houses in a neighborhood connected by string lights on a purple and blue watercolor background.

Vivi’s is a drawing of herself painting on a canvas that says, “I love you,” with a multi-colored striped background.

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My heart feels like it’s bursting with love and joy when I look at him.

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Given how much Kadence has been focusing on accessibility and how far ahead they are than many other page builders in terms of accessibility, this is a fair question. He had a follow-up comment that he thought going full custom was slowing us down:

Honestly, that's a weird choice. Not about Kadence at all (I'm officially unbiased now)… Why not just build a flat file custom site with Loveable? If you can't build the perfectly accessible site with common WP blocks, only your own custom blocks, then why keep building in WP!?…

— :Cromwell: (@learnwithmattc) January 16, 2026

I started replying in X and realized it was long enough for a blog post… so here we are: a post about my thoughts on block libraries and page builders, and why we generally don’t use them at Equalize Digital (my company).

First, a Clarification…

We use and love core blocks! I’m all about core blocks, and if a website can be built with only WordPress core blocks, that is the best way to build.

This website is, in fact, built on the core Twenty Twenty-Four theme and uses only core blocks. When I launched it, I wrote on our company blog about how I rebuilt my site in 2 days and eliminated thousands of accessibility issues simply by moving away from my previous “off-the-shelf” premium theme and using a core WordPress theme and blocks instead.

Not only did switching themes help with accessibility, but it also significantly improved load times and performance. The coolest thing about using a core theme and only core blocks was that, when I needed to troubleshoot something on the site, I deactivated all my plugins, and my home page looked identical to how it looks with all the plugins active. You pretty much never see that.

So yes, we use core blocks. We just don’t use block libraries. If there’s something we need that core blocks can’t handle (say, tabs), our approach at Equalize Digital is not to look for a plugin to add that functionality; instead, we would code a custom block or a custom ACF block.

Why We Don’t Use WordPress Block Libraries… Anymore.

We used to use block libraries.

We were early adopters of building hybrid websites with the block editor. We were building websites for clients with blocks pretty much as soon as it launched in 2018.

At that point, we used block libraries available via WordPress.org, because, to be honest, we didn’t know how to build custom blocks, and core blocks were incredibly limited (still are).

For years, we sped up our website builds and added cool features without code by using block libraries (and occasionally page builders like Elementor). Back then, most of our revenue came from small businesses or nonprofits, and the goal was to build websites as fast as possible, then maintain them on monthly retainers. Block libraries helped make that possible and allowed us to build nice-looking websites for under $20k.

So what changed?

A few devs ruined it for everyone.

Here’s the short story, without naming names:

• Library A was bought by a hosting company, which then deprecated it and wanted people to switch to a renamed version that was basically the same, but used different class names, which would have required us to edit all our custom styles.
• Library B changed its CSS class names during an update, breaking all our custom styles.
• Library C, on update, changed the loading order of its stylesheet so it loaded last, which meant it loaded after our theme stylesheet and thus overrode all our custom styles.
• Library D was abandoned and then removed from dot org due to security issues, which we had to patch in the version on our website because it was used in too many places to remove and was no longer supported.

There are amazing block libraries that do what they do really well, and I put Kadence up there. But basically, A, B, C, and D ruined it for everyone.

No one wants to test a plugin update and realize they have to redo a ton of work or spend hours on support with the plugin dev before they can push updates live — especially for stupid reasons like CSS class name changes that break backward compatibility.

To put it frankly, after those experiences, I don’t trust third-party devs who know nothing about my website or my priorities to not F my website up. 😂

Enterprise websites require a lot more attention to detail.

The other factor in our decision not to use block libraries is that, over the years, we shifted from building small-business websites to enterprise websites and web applications for government, higher education, large publishers, health care clients, and the like. Projects were no longer $15k; instead, they were $60k–$140k+—essentially enterprise WordPress.

In the land of enterprise WordPress, where accessibility, security, legal compliance, performance, and conversion optimization really matter, you have to be a lot more picky about what goes on the site. Every plugin introduces risk: extra code to monitor, potential accessibility barriers, new security risks, performance overhead, and UX decisions you don’t fully control. At scale, those trade-offs compound quickly, so the question isn’t just “Does this plugin help us build faster?” but “Does it meet our standards, integrate cleanly with our stack, and help our clients meet their legal, business, and user experience goals over the long term?”

Increasingly, block libraries never felt worth the trade-offs or loss of control, especially because they are the foundation of the website.

If something goes wrong with a block library, it can require significant rework.

When you build your website with a block library, you use components that are central to how your pages look and are interacted with. Things like accordions, tabs, layout blocks like columns or grids, maybe even basic components like button links, headings, or image galleries are controlled by the library. These components are typically used everywhere on the website.

If that library is abandoned or you decide you don’t want to use it anymore, you’re now signed up for huge amounts of work to remove or replace the components across potentially hundreds or more pages. The entire site may need to be rebuilt even if you didn’t change the theme. (This is no different from if you decided to switch away from a page builder.)

If you, instead, build your pages with only core blocks or custom/ACF blocks, there’s less inherent risk of needing to rebuild because:

1. Those blocks are not controlled by a company that has totally different priorities than you do.
2. Even if you rebuild, it’s easy to migrate your custom block code between themes or restyle core blocks in a new theme.

Not wanting to rebuild lots of old content during your next redesign is one of the reasons I advocate for only using core blocks in blog posts, and definitely never building them with a page builder. I’d also say it’s safest to make rules like only using core container blocks (columns, grids, etc.).

There is a Line

I’m not saying there is no place for block libraries. I’m also not saying that everything on websites should be custom.

Some things are not worth maintaining.

For certain complex functionalities, such as forms, e-commerce, CRM, payment gateway, or API integrations, etc., it makes total sense to buy a plugin rather than maintain them yourself.

Features that are deeply intertwined with security or legal compliance, or that add mission-critical platform functionality to your website, are typically better achieved by buying a plugin rather than custom coding. Companies (or individuals) who work on these plugins full-time will be much more in tune with ongoing platform changes, and keeping up with all of that in custom code is rarely a good use of your time or budget.

These plugins benefit from dedicated development teams, regular updates, broader real-world testing, and community feedback. In these cases, the website is far more likely to remain stable, secure, and compatible over time with the addition of a third-party plugin rather than with something coded once during the initial build and never updated.

The thing is, block libraries don’t pass this test. If your tab block is coded once and doesn’t get updated, it won’t break your website. If you do need to make slight padding or margin changes or add the ability for a different design inside the tabs, that’s trivial work. It’s not the same as maintaining compatibility with the Stripe checkout API.

The best use case: non-mission-critical websites.

For personal or business websites that are not mission-critical (where a bit of downtime or layout oddities after an update don’t truly matter, or sales aren’t happening on the site), an off-the-shelf theme, block library, or page builder is just fine.

Most small, local businesses don’t need a fancy custom design. They need something that looks generally professional, is findable in search, and allows people to get key information about their business and how to contact them. This is especially true for companies that get most of their business via Google Maps or review sites like Yelp. Think websites for restaurants, hair salons, churches, single-location brick and mortar businesses, or small nonprofits with very tiny (or essentially zero) budgets.

These websites are ideal use cases for a page builder or a block library. They typically don’t have a large budget for either the initial build or ongoing maintenance, and so custom isn’t possible. In many cases, the people building the sites may not even be developers. They also don’t need the same attention to detail to achieve their goals.

If custom isn’t possible (or necessary) and a desired feature doesn’t exist in WordPress core, then a block library can help fill the gap. I say this to make it clear that I don’t think block libraries are all bad. Block libraries play an important role in the WordPress ecosystem. If I were building these types of websites, I would probably be using a block library like Kadence.

How about the Equalize Digital website?

So why don’t we use block libraries at Equalize Digital?

We’re not an enterprise company yet (working on it!), but we treat our website like an enterprise site because we need it to always be available for sales. We don’t run autoupdates, and we question everything we put on the site.

I really don’t want my website to look “off” or broken. We sell to enterprise organizations, and we need to communicate trust. Increasingly, I care deeply about performance optimization because we make sales on our website every day.

I want our site to look polished, not have increased load times due to bloat from a library loading code on every page for blocks we’ll never use, and to funnel people through to a checkout with as little maintenance on our end as possible.

We’re a small team doing a lot of things. I don’t want to test updates on staging and see new “features” added that I didn’t ask for or that require us to go back to the dev for support before we can run updates on live – all things we’ve seen with past block libraries.

Does it slow us down during the initial build to have to create blocks from scratch? Yes.

But in the long run, it speeds things up because it gives us fewer things to test during routine updates and a lot more peace of mind that things will stay as we have built them, without surprises.

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1. Start blogging weekly.
2. Create (and stick to) healthier habits around exercise, sleep, and sugar.
3. Be on a path toward profitability in our business that doesn’t require excessive work hours.
4. Ride in a hot air balloon.

It’s December 27th, and I’m writing the first blog post I’ve written since January 13th, and I’m here to say that I failed every one of those goals.

I did, in fact, turn 40 in March.

But I can’t say I accomplished any of the things I hoped to achieve before or around then.

It’s the time of year when many people write “year in review” posts, and since I’m strapped into a car, driving from Texas to Iowa to visit family for the holidays, it’s the perfect opportunity to reflect on 2025, my failed goals, and my hopes for 2026.

What Happened?

I’ll start with my last goal, riding in a hot air balloon, because it’s both the easiest and also the most aggravating to explain.

The hot air balloon vendor stole our money.

Long story short, for my birthday in March, Chris booked a hot air balloon ride with the only vendor he could find in Central Texas. I was going to celebrate with a glass of champagne up in the clouds.

This seems like it should have been the easiest goal to check off. Alas, the day before my birthday, we got a text from the vendor that it was too windy to be safe to go up, and we would need to reschedule. No problem — I want to survive the hot-air balloon ride — so we coordinated child care for a different day later in the month and rescheduled.

What ended up happening was that it was always too windy and “not safe,” even when the weather said there was no wind. The balloon’s operator repeatedly cancelled bookings, never answered his phone, and took weeks to reply to a text or email. He refused to refund the ~$600 Chris had prepaid, and in May, he even told us he was moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and that we could go there to get our ride. 😡

This is a pattern that we saw reported in other online reviews of his business around the same time. We attempted a chargeback with our credit card after we gave up on rescheduling, but by then the chargeback window had already closed. So he got our money, and I still haven’t ridden in a hot air balloon.

There aren’t any other hot air balloon companies in our area, so I had to give up on this dream for now, and it’s going to stay on my “someday” bucket list when we can fit it into a trip away. 😥

I still haven’t figured out a good balance between work and life.

The first two goals on my list were weekly blogging and better health: more sleep, more exercise, and less sugar.

First, the good:

I ran a 5k in February, pretty much without stopping, and I was really proud of myself.

It took effort to be capable of running a 5K, and Chris and I happily claimed our participation medals.

Now the reality…

I still haven’t built a good habit around exercise, but the 5k was one milestone that feels like it should count for something. Though I’ll admit I haven’t gone for a run or done any meaningful exercise since October, so I still have a ways to go toward making exercise a regular practice.

I still spend way too many hours at a desk, fueling late-night work sessions with chocolate, cookies, and brownies to stay awake, and I don’t exercise regularly.

I also didn’t meaningfully improve the amount of sleep I got. In 2025, I averaged 6 hours and 46 minutes of sleep per night, only 10 minutes more than my 2024 average of 6 hours and 36 minutes. And as the publication dates on posts show, I didn’t even manage monthly blog posts, let alone weekly ones.

The biggest blocker to these goals continued to be the number of hours I work, which brings me to goal number 3: balancing work and life was a giant fail.

Hours in 2025

As I reflected on this year, I looked back at my time reports in Toggl (our time-tracking software). Here’s what I found:

In 2025, I clocked 2,562.11 hours. That’s an average of 50.24 hours per working week and 10.63 hours per business day.

We have 16 company closure dates for holidays, but I worked about half of those days when we were closed rather than taking the time off. I took one 3-day vacation in June and a 5-day vacation in July. Generally, I “paid” for time off by working more in advance and/or after a vacation or holiday.

I considered this goal a complete failure because not only did I not work less in 2025, but I actually worked 302 hours more than I did in 2024. Here’s what my time looked like for the year:

Why I Work so Much

Over the past few years, I have intermittently looked back on my time, trying to figure out what to cut out and whether there are things I’m doing that are less efficient. I keep wondering whether I suck at time management or delegation, and if that is why I’m working so many hours.

I spoke with a female founder I admire earlier this summer, sharing my frustration about time. She told me she doubted that time management was the issue. It’s not an inability to manage time or a lack of delegation; I’m in a phase of business where I’m simply doing a lot with few resources.

Looking back at a few years’ worth of clocked hours, this is clearly the case. I keep adding more to my plate without taking anything else off to make room.

The Trajectory of My Work Hours

Here’s a look at how my yearly work hours have changed since I started tracking time in 2014.

Key milestones from this timeline:

• In 2016, Chris joined me in the business, and I started working “full-time.” Prior to that, I was working part-time while primarily raising the girls, and he supported us as a chef.
• In 2017, our third daughter was born, and I didn’t take maternity leave because we couldn’t afford for me to take leave. We also moved cross-country to Texas that year.
• 2018 was the first year we had full-time childcare, making it easier to take on more hours.
• In 2019, our fourth daughter was born, and by then we had a larger team, so I took a short 6-week maternity leave (meaning I worked fewer hours in 2019 than in 2018).
• In December 2020, we launched Accessibility Checker. That year was the first year I clocked around 2000 hours (the truest equivalent to full-time work: 40 hours x 50 weeks).
• 2021-2022 Accessibility Checker was one of our offerings, but our business was primarily funded by new website development projects, not software revenue, and we let Accessibility Checker take a back seat. We didn’t release new features regularly and weren’t aggressively marketing, so I didn’t work much more than a full-time job’s worth of hours.
• In March 2023, we raised a pre-seed investment from Emilia Capital to grow the product side of our business, and I began working more aggressively to market it. This is when you see my work hours jump considerably over 40 hours per week.

Growing scalable, recurring revenue is hard.

We built Accessibility Checker because we wanted scalable, recurring revenue that didn’t require a human to deliver it. Services are more expensive to deliver, and team members have long been the largest line item on our P&L. Chris and I realized early on that our best retirement plan is to build a business we can sell, and service businesses are far less sellable, with far lower multiples.

With that in mind, we teamed up with our lead developer, Steve, to create a new business with a greater emphasis on product.

The initial development of Accessibility Checker, branding, and website development for Equalize Digital was funded by a small-business loan. The loan allowed us to turn down client work for a few months while we kept paying our team to work on this internal project. The initial build also coincided with COVID, and we received PPP funds that helped pay the team when client work didn’t resume as expected.

This initial funding allowed us to launch the product and brand that was central to our plan to build more scalable, recurring revenue; however, as anyone who has launched a WordPress plugin will tell you, it’s not “if you build it, they will come.”

Growing brand recognition and gaining a user base for a software product takes a lot of hard work. And here’s the catch: if you don’t have piles of money to pay yourself and your team while you’re growing the product, you have to do double the work — service work to keep the lights on and work to grow the product.

Taking an investment was incredibly helpful. It allowed us to hire a full-time developer for the product (not client work), so we could release new features faster and invest more heavily in marketing. But it wasn’t large enough to fund the entire company for the number of years it might take the product to get to that point. Which means we’ve been able to reduce service work, but not eliminate it entirely.

Which brings me back to why I’ve been working so many hours the past few years:

I’m working two jobs: delivering services for clients and trying to grow a product company.

This year was particularly intense because we decided to increase revenue opportunities by adding courses and another WordPress plugin. I created and launched two courses this year:

• Screen Reader Testing with VoiceOver in May
• Screen Reader Testing with NVDA in August

I also supported Chris as he created a course on selling accessibility services and worked with the team to develop our ArchiveWP plugin, both of which launched in November.

We added all these things without eliminating anything else, which meant adding more hours to our work weeks to get them done.

Successes

All this effort is not for naught on the business side. We have seen incredible growth, particularly on the product side. Accessibility Checker has become an ever-larger share of our revenue.

Here’s a graph showing the growth in Accessibility Checker’s active install count, as reported by WordPress.org. This is the user base for our free plugin:

Noteworthy details from the chart above:

• We had slow but steady growth in the plugin’s first three years, when we did less marketing.
• We had reached 2,000 active installs around the time we closed our investment and were already seeing faster growth before then.
• I haven’t dug into this deeply, but in 2024, I worked fewer hours than in 2023, and you can see the growth that year was slower. It took 70 extra days to get from 4,000 to 5,000 than it did to get from 3,000 to 4,000 (in the prior year when I was working more). This could be a coincidence, but it’s an interesting note.
• There was rapid growth in installations from April 2025 onward, going up 4,000 installs this year alone.

We more than doubled our active installs this year, rising from 4,000+ to over 9,000. At our current growth rate, we expect to hit 10,000 installs in a few days. We also grew Accessibility Checker revenue by 44.3%.

This growth is fantastic and shows the results of a lot of hard work by our entire team, not just this year, but in prior years, which set the foundation for this year’s growth.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note how great this is — obviously, all those work hours have been delivering something meaningful. So while I may have failed at my personal goals, I met or exceeded my business goals.

Which brings me to 2026…

What Does 2026 Look Like?

I’ll be frank: this year was exhausting. To work the hours I do and be present for the girls, I usually take an evening break around dinner or to drive them to activities, then sit back down for a second shift late at night. But more often than not, I barely feel present, and Chris is doing the bulk of the parenting and household management.

More than once this year, I’ve had people remind me to put my own oxygen mask on first. I was less engaged with WP Accessibility Day, the conference I co-lead, for the first time not running an organizing team, and stopped co-hosting the WP Product Talk podcast. That bought me some time, but not much, and it certainly didn’t leave time for personal goals. (Also, it sucks to stop doing something you enjoy.)

Every December, our team gathers to plan next year’s goals and budget. This year, I put a lot of effort into reflecting on our marketing initiatives and trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. (More on this in a future post.) I told the team I want to work less in 2026, but I’ll admit I struggle to figure out what that looks like.

Do I stop creating the long-form content that brings people to the website, but that takes many hours to produce? Do we stop the podcast? Do we increase our marketing budget so more of that can be delegated? If so, where does that money come from?

We experimented with reducing our virtual meetups from two to one per month at the end of this year, which cut our workload but also reduced the number of new people added to our email list each month. It’s a bit scary to think about cutting marketing efforts, because I worry that it could limit growth.

I finally finished reading Thrive by Arianna Huffington this year.

I started it when it first came out, but gave up on it a few chapters in. Last spring, I found myself wondering if there might be some helpful advice hidden in there and picked it back up. But I ended it with the same impression I originally had, however many years ago: it’s easy for a billionaire who already has a booming business to tell us to work less and sleep more. It also doesn’t offer any practical guidance on how to bootstrap a business in a 36- or 40-hour workweek. Would HuffPost be what it is today if Arianna hadn’t worked all those late nights?

I’m starting to wonder whether I need to choose between pushing hard to rapidly scale the product side of the business and having a normal work life. Perhaps it would be better to focus on the service work that pays and let the product grow at whatever rate it grows organically?

I don’t know yet what 2026 looks like. I started this section with a question that I can’t fully answer, which may make this blog post anticlimactic and incredibly aggravating to read, but this is my truth today.

I still have the same goals that I wrote at the end of 2024. I want to be more present for the girls and more intentional about my own well-being. I’m just not sure how to get there yet.

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Zara’s goal is to sell 1600 boxes. This is just a small percentage of that goal. 😅

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