Links

• Debitum
• Jean’s review of Debitum

We dig into how P2P lending for consumer loans works, and what kind of models power the decisions to give loans or not to new customers. We discuss the ethical side of P2P lending, and the big issue with millions of unbanked people in developing countries.

For example:

• 44% of Vietnam’s population was unbanked in 2022, but a higher percentage remains under-banked.
• Only 6% of the population in Vietnam have credit cards.

We also talk about how Lonvest works, why Roman started this new business after many years in the fintech and traditional consumer loans space, and what comes next for the platform. Roman also explains how Lonvest is differentiating itself in the market and bringing a new level of transparency to the game.

Invest on Lonvest

Links

• Lonvest
• Roman’s Linkedin
• Jean’s review of Lonvest

We’re thrilled to have with us a special guest, Martin Slaney, the visionary behind ProductPrompts.com. Martin is a thought leader in the AI space and has extensive experience in harnessing the power of intelligent tools to enhance productivity and drive growth.

In our conversation today, we’ll explore a wide range of AI-powered tools, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, Dall-E and Midjourney, and we’ll discuss how these new tools are enabling businesses to streamline their operations, make better decisions, and ultimately, redefine what’s possible.

From AI-driven customer persona generators to automating customer support and data analysis, Martin will share his insights on how AI is changing the way we approach our work and the potential pitfalls to watch out for as we continue to integrate these powerful tools into our daily lives.

So, grab a cup of coffee, sit back, and get ready for an enlightening conversation about the AI revolution with Martin Slaney. Stay tuned, because this episode of the Mastermind podcast is one you won’t want to miss!

Links

• Martin Slaney on Twitter
• Product Prompts
• Westworld
• Humans
• Almost Human
• ChatGPT

Links

• Cointracker

Links

• Jean’s post about embarking on his artistic journey
• Jean’s generative art resources
• DCinvestor on-chain gen art collector thesis
• The rise of long-form generative art
• Mandelbrot set
• Picasso’s The Bull

* Featured image art by Tinbane

Links

• Eric Rubens on Instagram
• Collective Strangers
• Justin Aversano
• Dave Krugman
• Cath Simard
• Nick Kuchar
• Drift

Links

• Stephen’s Twitter
• NFTfi

Links

• Classicality
• ZAR’s Twitter

They share what they loved about the events and what was a bit of a letdown.

If you haven’t been to NFT NYC, this is a great way to catch up on the past week’s events.

Links

• Evan’s Twitter
• Thetraderisk.com

We speak about the challenges and also big wins that ultimately helped Lionel transition into working as a generative artist full-time. I am extremely bullish on the potential of NFTs to empower artists and bring their ideas and work much more accessible to collectors the world over.

Links

• Lionel’s Twitter
• @mattdesl
• @amygoodchild
• Lionel’s first sketch using Slashes shapes
• Article about Lionel’s journey
• Lionel’s linktree

Links

• Hanif’s Twitter
• Jean’s article on generative art NFTs
• Picasso Punks
• GrailersDAO
• Fidenza by Tyler Hobbs
• Chromie Squiggles
• Dmitri Cherniak
• Century by Casey Reas
• Gazers by Matt Kane
• Stefano Contiero
• Rhythm by Jeff Davis
• Infinite Objects frames
• Mov3
• Quantum Key
• Grails by PROOF

The Meebits are 20,000 unique 3D voxel characters, created by a custom generative algorithm, then registered on the Ethereum blockchain. The original 9000 Meebits were available for purchase through a Dutch-style auction starting from 2.5 ETH. The remaining NFTs were distributed to holders of CryptoPunks as well as Autoglyphs.

A simple gas fee transaction could be used to redeem a Meebit with a punk or glyph. Because of its rarity as well as scarcity, the collection had topped the charts as well as sustained constant sales. With $127 million in sales volume, this became the 7th all-time top collection in just four months. At least ten Meebits have indeed been sold for over a million dollars.

Links

• MeebitsDAO
• Yugalabs acquisition
• Jadu Mirrorverse

Join us as we explore the many facets of the metaverse and how it will impact humanity in this wide-ranging episode.

Links

• Metaverse Land Club
• Robin on Twitter
• Gaia Forums
• Nano reef tanks (I was also a huge aquarium hobbyist growing up)
• Lemonnerd art
• Gaming guilds
• My Pet Hooligan
• BT Forum – Orbs (Gala Music)

Books mentioned

• Minimum Viable Mockup
• Traction
• Atomic Habits

Here are some of the main numbers from Bulkestate’s performance over the past years.

• Total funding volume originated as of 31.12.2021: € 24 307 835,00
• Total number of projects funded: 135
• Weighted average annual return: 14.33%
• Number of active investors: 10 171
• Capital lost: 0
• Repaid objects: 86
• Defaulted objects (Historically): 6%
• Delayed objects: 13%

Biggest project: Marijas Street 1 750 000 EUR with 740 investors and 17% return. That ended up being 2% more than planned.

With regard to group buying, here are the main stats:

• A total volume of group-buying deals: 14 992 883 EUR
• Number of group-buying deals: 4
• Total area sold in group-buying deals: 15 350.8 sq m
• Number of participants in group-buying deals: 83
• Total units sold: 95

Links

• Bulkestate is 5 years old

We started discussing uncertainties of crypto taxation and what is crypto from a legal standpoint. A big part of the discussion ahead was about the traditional art industry and legal backbone, as well as the concepts of authenticity, derivatives, and value compared to the digital NFT world. The other important topic we touched upon were DAOs from the legal perspective and their prospects in governance.

Links

• Hearsay on Twitter
• Creative commons
• NFT License
• NFT License Breakdown: Exploring Different Marketplaces and Associated License Issues
• NFTs and Intellectual Property: What IP Owners and NFT Creators Need to Know
• Protecting IP and Limiting Liability When Licensing IP for Digital Art and NFTs
• BAYC – The case for licensed commercial use rights
• NFTs, Minting and Copyright

Following our more introductory first episode with Jalil, in this episode, we continue evolving some of the topics we touched upon previously as well as introduce some other very important concepts and guidelines that all NFT investors or creators should know about.

Some of the topics discussed:

• An exploration of NFT contracts on Etherscan.
• How metadata and images are stored on IPFS.
• What software was used to build the scapes?
• What’s happening behind the scenes in a project’s reveal stage?
• Potential for exploits, cheating, unfair advantages when a project is launched.
• Why ENS domains are important and how they fit into PunkScapes.
• Some innovations in the PunkScapes metadata, such as the date assigned to each scape.
• Upcoming PunkScape apps and functionality(animations, gallery, background builder etc).

Links

• Etherescan contract – PunkScape
• PunkScape token 1 on IPFS
• Example of PunkScape PNG file hosted on IPFS
• Pinata
• Cryptopunks contract
• Figma
• Affinity Designer
• Tom Sachs Rocket Factory

About Kumo’s World

Kumo’s World is a fantastical place where you control the story. Go on adventures with the other explorers and discover the hidden gems the world of Kumo!

Here, you can let your inner child free and just be yourself without judgment.

We hold expeditions in our discord that are like text version of RPG, where the story follows the explorers actions. They have set challenges to overcome and with each challenge, they grow stronger as a team.

There will be factions where grouped resident classes will compete against each other in World leagues, as well as pets with special powers that can open up different realms for more adventures in unknown parts of world. A new currency kxwCoins will be in circulation post drop. These coins are only available through taking part in the leagues, explorations and community events. Shops will open in the future where the coins can be exchanged for items/pets.

Future roadmap includes children story books, merch, collabs with other similar projects, live events and many others to come!

Links

• Kumo x World

How do we visualize value, what are and why digital identities are important, how NFTs can be used not only for visual art? These are just minor parts of the topics we discussed with Jalil. Of course, we covered the basics (well, they are not so basic after all):

• NFT minting process and ownership
• Algorithms and ideas behind NFTs
• How do NFT treasuries work?
• How NFT is a form of money?
• What are the prospects of NFT in the future?

Apart from that, we talked about PunkScape, the NFT project Jalil founded and now runs with his team, as well as other projects like the CryptoPunks.

If you are new to NFTs, jump over to the ‘How to Invest in NFTs’ article on my personal blog to learn more about the topic.

Links

• PunkScape on Twitter
• Jalil on Twitter

• how investing in crypto and in traditional currencies differs;
• why Fintelum is not a stock exchange;
• what backlashes exist against p2p landing;
• the essence of token;

Arnab introduced us to the story behind STOKR and how it operates. And we’ve discussed lots of interesting topics including:  inefficiencies of capital market, equity vs. crowdfunding, hybrid IPOs and Liquid Network of Bitcoin. Also we talked over Blockstream Mining Note, one of the most recent ventures on STOKR.

That’s not all, we’ve discussed more:

• how bank authentication is different from crypto wallets
• trusting 3rd parties vs managing your own private keys
• security vs convenience
• how multi signature wallets work

You can find more information on Bitcoin and crypto security in general here:

• Casa
• Casa Blog
• Jameson Lopp Blog

To help us dig deep into the topic we were joined by Andrew Farrugia, blogger, fitness instructor and investor.

We’ve discussed how COVID-19 impacted loans landing companies, investors and the P2P lending market overall. Also, we touched on the loans secured by cryptocurrencies – a new product Bondster is preparing to launch very soon.

Links

• Bondster

To help us dig deep into the topic we were joined by Andrew Farrugia, blogger and fitness instructor who ran into the issues of the content business himself covering fitness and lifestyle topics.

Listening to the podcast you will know more about:

• Things you need to check before buying a website
• Challenges of the industry
• How does the content businesses market operate
• The process of buying a website, its management, and returns

Apart from that, we’ve talked about the newly established Domain Magnate Capital fund, which aims to help investors benefit from such alternative investment as an online content-driven business.

Brickfy can be called a platform of platforms allowing investors to join real estate crowdfunding projects from a single marketplace with no need to register on a variety of platforms.

We’ve discussed how Brickfy operates and their development plans.

Apart from that, we touched on the future of real estate crypto tokenization and the frictions behind government and crypto adoption in the real estate loans market.

Links

• Join Brickfy.com

Mauricio is a very charismatic figure in the crypto space and this was one of the best conversations we’ve had so far.

What we loved about Mauricio is that he has an amazing story that led him to create a product that solved his own problems.

We talk about Venezuela, Turkey and other countries that have experienced runaway inflation, and how Bitcoin fixes this.

Expect, of course, a deep dive on the Ledn platform, and especially the B2X features which is extremely interesting for those crypto hodlers who are extra bullish on Bitcoin and want to maximise their returns.

What growing up in Venezuela has taught me:

– "Bad Money" never dies, it just resets.

– Most people have no clue what causes inflation.

– Even less people get the concept of taxation by inflation.

– Empresarios can be demotivated and corrupted without fair competition rules.

— Mauricio (@cryptonomista) March 29, 2019

Links

• Ledn
• Mauricio’s Twitter

In this podcast, we talk all about the opportunities and pitfalls of buying and selling websites, and what kind of person this investment class is suited for. If you’ve heard about buying and selling websites for a profit, Amazon affiliate marketing, authority sites etc. and have always wondered how this new asset class works, this is the episode for you.

Links

• WebsiteIncome
• MotionInvest
• ContentRefined
• SiteBuddy
• Authority Hacker
• Jon Dykstra – Fat Stacks Blog

Gustas is a young but extremely knowledgeable serial entrepreneur who has founded multiple businesses, and its always a pleasure for me to speak with him and discuss the latest trends. You might remember Gustas from his involvement with Evo Estate, a platform that has been doing very well in recent years within the European real estate scene. Gustas in fact remains a shareholder of that company, but is now focusing all his efforts on InRento as he has moved back to Lithuania to build up this platform.

If you’re looking to learn more about how the rental market works, and what is the risk spectrum for the different ways you can invest in the real estate market, this is the podcast for you.

Links

• InRento

BlockFi offers several products in the crypto space:

• Crypto lending and yield generation
• Borrowing facilities in USD, with crypto as collateral
• Crypto trading
• Credit card with crypto-denominated rewards

If you’re interested in generating yields on your crypto holdings, this episode is for you.

And if you’re a long-time hodler, you should probably also look into the possibility of obtaining a loan from BlockFi by using that crypto as collateral. This is a very efficient tax strategy as it avoids you having to sell your cryptos and thus triggering capital gains tax which can be a hefty burden and decimate your holdings.

Links

• BlockFi
• Jean’s review of BlockFi

With a background in strategy consultancy advising major corporates and private equity funds on corporate strategy and buyouts, Mike has been investing in property since 2002, investing in high potential proptech businesses since 2014 and sits on the Investment Committee of Pi Labs, Europe’s first and most prolific venture capital fund investing exclusively in early-stage ventures in
the proptech vertical. Mike has an MBA from London Business School, was named in the Peer2Peer Finance News Power 50 list in both 2018 and 2019, is a founding board member of the Innovate Finance 36H Group alongside other leading peer-to-peer lending platforms and was named ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ at the Midlands Business Awards 2020.

After listening to Mike speak about CrowdProperty and the sector in general, I think you’ll have a much better understanding of how investing in real estate through online platforms works, and you’ll be ready to make your first investment.

Links

• CrowdProperty

We talk about what stablecoins are and why they are used. It’s hard to come up with a shortlist of all the topics we touched upon in this episode, so just go ahead and listen to this monster episode and I bet you’ll have a much better understanding of stablecoins and their impact on the crypto system at the end of the episode.

Links

• Stasis

In this wide-ranging interview, we go into details about how the platform operates as well as general real estate investing trends that Mihkel has been observing over the past years.

Links

• EstateGuru

Over 40,000 solopreneurs globally have signed up with Xolo. They are launching either their fully-owned, Estonian-registered companies or using Xolo’s unique partnership-based virtual company model. Xolo manages a third of companies incorporated by Estonia’s e-residents.

Links

• Xolo

Raizers’ competitors when it started were private banks, family offices etc. Raizers’ innovation was in digitizing the way to give loans to entrepreneurs.

This platform offers loans to real estate developers, with a maximum 24 months and average of 21 months.

There is currently a 0% default rate on Raizers, and there aren’t any long-pending projects either.

They have financed over 500m in projects. In 2020, they have financed 52 companies with the help of 4 internal analysts (from big four and other important firms in the real estate and finance space, including venture capital funds) and 1 lawyer. This works out at one deal per analyst per month. I’m mentioning this to show that approving projects is not an automatic thing and requires a lot of work. Many proposals are dropped quickly after being received. For example, Raizers will not accept any development project if they don’t yet have the permit to build. In the end, only 10-15% are selected and forwarded to investors for consideration.

Raizers is very serious about debt collection if the need arises. All mortgages are first rank and there is personal liability as well.

Why do borrowers raise money via Raizers? One would say that if you can get a loan at the bank and you come to Raizers there is something strange, since the interest is higher. So that’s the first question asked if a client tries to borrow and avoid the banks outright.

Speed is typically one of the main reasons for skipping the banks, as the banks take way longer than platforms like Raizers. If everything is going well Raizers can give the money in 1 month, while with banks it would take 3-6 months. If you want to buy a building and you have a tight deadline for getting a great deal, the bank option would not be feasible. Another point is that as a borrower, you can repay the loan before, and you have additional fees like the initial fee and the exit fee at the end. So it might work out cheaper in the end for a borrower to use Raizers.

The minimum investment is 1000 euro and you need to pass a suitability test first. Raizers is not trying to find gullible and inexperienced investors and trying to attract them via ridiculously low minimum investments as other platforms do.

Raizers does not withhold any taxes for you. You can read more about taxation of P2P lending in my post on the subject.

In 2021, we might see Raizers offering the opportunity for investors to invest in the platform itself. This is something that other platforms have done in recent months, and it might be a good investment to consider.

We really enjoyed this conversation; Maxime proved to be very knowledgeable and open, and we’re impressed with this platform.

Links

• Raizers
• Jean’s full review of Raizers

Cointracker offers two main products:

• Cryptocurrency portfolio assistance – see all crypto holdings in one place, both hot wallets on exchanges and cold wallets on hardware or paper wallets. The free tier allows unlimited wallets while the premium tier adds tax-loss harvesting strategies, DeFi and further detailed reports.
• Tax reporting – reconciled ledgers of all their transaction history and reports that can be presented to accountants and tax lawyers for the presentation of your crypto taxes.

We talk about the IRS tax form 1040 and taxation issues around the world.

If you hold Bitcoin or you’re looking to enter the crypto space, this is an essential episode for you, because it’s very important to know what happens if you eventually sell the cryptos in the future.

Also, with all the exchanges that have proliferated plus the massive DeFi space, it has become more and more difficult to track all your holdings, which is where tools like CoinTracker come in.

Links

• CoinTracker
• Chandan’s Twitter

The team has considerable experience in Latvia and they want to expand to the rest of Europe, with Germany and Spain being one of the first big markets they are targeting. We spent some time discussing their upcoming focus on agricultural loans, which both Jean and Joe found fascinating.

In this episode Nikita also shared his thoughts on why most of the lending platforms are based in the Baltic states. I found that piece of history quite interesting.

I would recommend having a look at LendSecured as it might be one of the most innovative players in the space going forward. It’s worth mentioning that LendSecured also has skin-in-the-game for every project launched.

Links

• LendSecured

We talk about why they are based in Lithuania and the pros/cons of that, as well as their great track record with loans so far. We also talk about investing in the Baltic region as well as Nordstreet’s plans on expanding beyond the region.

This platform has been returning 10-14% for its investors, although according to market fundamentals the expected returns in the next year should be around 10-11%, and Tomas was very open about the fact that returns are ultimately a function of market conditions.

Nordstreet has experienced 0 defaults while it has raised €10m so far, mostly from Lithuanian investors. It is open to all investors, however, with the only requirement being that they use a Paysera account for depositing and withdrawing funds.

Links

• Nordstreet

*We apologize for the sound quality in Jean’s part of the recording, unfortunately we had a technical problem and had to use the backup audio recording on this episode.

Links

• Rob’s Blog
• The Property Hub
• Property Geek
• The Property Podcast

You can check out Jean’s review of YouHodler if you’d like more details on the platform, the article is a perfect accompaniment to this podcast episode.

If you like the content we’re putting out, please consider leaving a 5-star review on iTunes, it helps a ton and encourages us to keep producing quality episodes for you.

Links

• Multi HODL walkthrough video
• Is YouHodler safe?
• How crypto savings works
• Turbocharge
• Fees and commissions
• Follow the latest news on YouHodler’s Twitter, Blog and Telegram channels

Lending and alternative lending is not a new industry at all, but many European investors only became aware to this asset class in recent years, also because before there was no real way they could get involved since it required insider knowledge, contacts or big sums of capital.

Mintos itself start out with the founders and 4 developers, and it has not grown to over 160 people.

It was a pleasure to speak with Martins and have him share some of his widespread knowledge in the P2P lending space.

Mintos has been operating for 5 years and is the largest P2P lending marketplace with over 50% market share in Europe. More than 6 billion euros of loans have been facilitated so far and the average investor invests around 3000 euros.

The biggest number of investors come from Germany, Spain and the Czech Republic respectively, but this is mostly a reflection of those countries’ familiarity with this type of investing. There are more than 340,000 investors that have used Mintos and they come from 90+ countries.

More than 60 lending companies offer their loans on the Mintos platform, with over 25,000 people working at these companies and spread over 33 countries, so you can have a global reach when investing on Mintos.

The company supports 10 languages via its multilingual support team, while the website is available in 6 languages and there are loans available in 10 currencies.

If you’re intrigued by this episode, do make sure you check out Jean’s extensive review of Mintos on his blog.

Links

• Mintos
• Review of Mintos
• AMA about funds in recovery

As an investor, one may use several products available on the MyConstant site to obtain interest on their fiat currencies or stable currencies. On the other hand, you can also act as a borrower, by depositing crypto as collateral and obtaining a loan from MyConstant.

The platform focuses a lot on educating investors about crypto-based lending and borrowing, and as such is an ideal platform for those new to this type of investing.

Links

• Jean’s review of MyConstant

We talk about work and travel, homeschooling, building newsletter businesses, and Chris’ favorite locations around the world for spending a few months a year in.

This episode is a must-listen for anyone who is location-independent or has aspirations to become a digital nomad and wants to learn about how you can make it all work, even with family in tow.

Links

• Chris on Twitter
• Chris’ course on building successful newsletters

Qardus is a sharia-compliant lender to small and medium-sized enterprises to help with their cashflow needs.

They provide short-term halal business loans, or halal business investments.

As an investor, you provide the capital to lend to the business, and get paid as the business pays that money back.

The kinds of businesses Qardus go for are well-established, strong-revenue companies, typically in stable markets such as the medical or pharmaceutical industry. There is an emphasis on the people behind the businesses as well, so they focus on high net worth owners to minimise risk. For a company to be accepted on Qardus, it must have at least 3 years of good performance, being profitable in at least 2 of those 3 years. It is thus not an ideal platform for new and speculative projects.

We enjoyed talking to Hassan about the nitty-gritty of Islamic finance and how Qardus can be a diversification piece in any investor’s portfolio.

Check out Jean’s full review of Qardus over on his blog if you want to read more about this platform.

We discuss the Lendary platform, which consists of a system to optimize the yield on lending to traders on the Bitfinex platform. We go into the nitty-gritty of how this type of high yield lending works, including the risks involved. I liken their system to that of a crypto trading bot, but applied to lending instead. You can choose from various strategies that have different risk/reward numbers.

Results over the past year have been pretty spectacular, and this could be a very interesting way for people to get exposure to the crypto space without actually trading cryptos themselves.

I think that people who are used to P2P lending, in particular, will find this platform interesting, as the returns are even higher than those found on P2P lending, while the risks are arguably less, since loans are typically over-collateralized.

Links

• Lendary.net

He began his entrepreneurial journey at quite a young age and moved from his native Sweden to Malta to be around other entrepreneurs and have a better lifestyle. Eventually, he moved to Cyprus, another Southern European country that is similar to Malta but also offers some interesting tax advantages, which we talk about it in the show.

We talk about the divided between northern and southern European culture and why high taxation does not always equal better public services. On the other hand, southern Europe has a more laidback lifestyle that usually leads to more bureaucracy and delays, and we talk about how one can adapt to this different way of living and thinking.

It was great to catch up with Johannes and I think he is a great inspiration for Millenials and younger kids who dream of having their own business and being location independent.

Links

• Blog of Johannes
• Financer.com

We delve into the case for investing in Latvia as well as Bulkestate’s unique group buying feature, where investors can buy apartments instead of just invest in crowdfunding campaigns.

Links

• Jean’s Bulkestate review
• Bulkestate website

He doesn’t hold back on sharing his experience on how things started off and how much investment he needed to make in order to build this platform. He also shares what mistakes they made over the years, including that of diversifying into working capital loans, which are notoriously hard to manage and assess reliably.

As an investor, I too have suffered from this misstep, as I have a few non-performing working capital loans, however, overall I am still making a profit, and on a long-term perspective things are looking good. If you’re looking for a real estate platform where you can invest across several geographical areas as well as different risk levels, Crowdestate should be one of your first choices.

As I always say, one of the most important steps in conducting your due diligence is to get to know the people behind a platform, and I hope that this episode will help you to get to know the founder Loit in a better way, then make your own decision on whether you want to invest.

Links

• Crowdestate
• Crowdestate review

We take different angles on the gold topic and discuss the main reasons for holding hold and the different ways you can do it.

One of my biggest takeaways from this episode is that gold is not an investment per-se, but a protection against the loss in value of conventional assets like fiat currencies. To put a simple example, if you have saved €25,000 now and that’s what a new car costs at the moment, you need to know that in 10 years’ time that same money will not be able to buy you a new car, as it would cost €35,000 or more then. This means that your fiat currency has been devalued through the effects of inflation.

On the other hand, if you convert that €25,000 to gold, you have a good chance that in 10 years’ time if you take the gold and convert it back to currency, the car will have an equivalent cost in ounces of gold, which means that you have been able to store your value successfully.

• Voima Gold
• Jan on Twitter
• Jean’s article on gold investing

This is a really new asset class with the biggest advantage being that it has very little correlation with other asset classes.

We discuss the legality and ethical background behind litigation funding (it is still illegal in some European nations) and the future for this asset class, as well as how investing works in practice. This includes what returns we can expect, duration of litigation cases as well as the biggest risks investors face.

This was a thoroughly enjoyable chat for us and we learned a lot from Cormac. We came out of the interview very excited about delving deeper into litigation funding and with the intention to put some money to work in this asset class.

Links

• AxiaFunder
• AxiaFunder review

This was an interesting and eye-opening chat with Jose, who was very open and honest about how the platform operates, the challenges faced by this asset class during these months, and their plans for the near future.

I base a lot of trust on the team when evaluating platforms, and Jose made an excellent impression on me. I encourage you to check out the full review of Brickstarter and consider this investment as part of a diversified portfolio with several asset classes.

Links

• Brickstarter

I find the entire field of crypto assets incredibly fascinating as it really is one deep rabbit hole. One of the aspects that has captured the imagination of millions worldwide is crypto trading. We’ve all seen stories of young people who found incredible riches through trading cryptocurrencies, although there undoubtedly are many (less publicized) failures too.

Trading can be a brutal job though, requiring long hours of looking at screens and usually inflicting a significant emotional toll. I was looking into how things can be simplified and structured when I came across Coinrule.

In today’s world, more than half of cryptocurrency trading volume is driven by complex trading bots. Yet, 75% of all hobbyist traders cannot write a single line of code. Coinrule empowers regular traders to compete with professional algorithmic traders and Hedge funds: a smart assistant to build automated rules for crypto exchanges without having to code.

Coinrule have just closed their second round of funding, and they are conducting all the legal aspects of the funding through Seedlegals, which is another interesting project to look into if you’re interested in startup investing.

In this episode, we explore how beginners can start trading with the help of Coinrule. Some topics discussed:

• The different types of traders
• A few popular trading strategies
• How to manage risk while trading
• Connecting exchanges
• Complementary tools for traders

Coinrule is still a relatively new project, but the team has great plans for the future, including AI assistance while trading and several interesting integrations with DeFi projects.

For example, you might be able to create a strategy whereby your crypto would be used for staking when the crypto asset you’re trading is in a sideways period, and then switch back to trading when the price action picks up. With the growth of DeFi and AI there will be infinite possibilities for such services to help traders create ever more interesting strategies.

I finished off the episode asking Oleg and Gabriele what Fintech projects and areas they are most excited about, given that they are based in London, which is a hotbed for financial innovation in Europe.

Links

• Coinrule’s website
• Seedlegals

We discuss the differences in the fintech spaces of Europe and the United States, his journey with Smartasset.com, why he decided to create Founderslist and what are the problems that founders still face and that he is trying to help with.

With Malta being such a small country, it’s not common to come across such highly successful entrepreneurs as Philip, so his journey should serve as an inspiration to all those who come from small countries and regions that are far from the epicenter of startups and investors.

Links

• Smartasset.com
• Founderslist.com
• Philip on Linkedin

Kris now dedicates his time to investing the handsome returns from the acquisition and runs Stockanalysis.com where he shares the results of his research and learning.

In this conversation, we talk about the personality traits and skillset needed to build a successful authority site. We also go through some of the challenges faced by website owners and how to know when to sell.

Both Kris and Jean agree that there is a lifecycle that one goes through when owning an authority site, and it’s important to know at what stage your business is at in order to have the right expectations and select the appropriate strategy, which might even be that of selling, as in Kris’ case.

Big transitions are never easy, and we discuss how Kris’ life changed after the financially life-changing sale of his site to Healthline.

If you want to learn how one person with the right focus and perseverance can build a hugely successful internet business make sure you don’t miss this episode.

Links

• Stockanalysis.com

We touch on various topics, including:

• Malta’s advantageous corporate tax system
• Whether Malta really is a “blockchain island”
• Investing in COVID-19 times and beyond
• Cryptocurrencies
• Real estate investing
• Diversification

I enjoyed catching up with Chris and having some of my ideas challenged; this is an exercise that is extremely important to sharpen your thoughts as an investor.

As in many other areas of life, there isn’t necessarily either a good or bad to do things, it all depends on your circumstances and future plans. While I might have an investing strategy that is diametrically opposed to someone else’s, we can both achieve our goals simply because the goals themselves are very different.

And that is why I predicate caution in blindly copying what other investors are doing. My most important conversations are those that I have with my own family and my accountant as well as a close circle of investor friends where we discuss our goals and possible outcomes in order to eventually pick the strategy which has the highest probability of being successful in our scenarios.

Enjoy this episode, and please let me know whether you liked the show in the comments section or by leaving a review on iTunes.

You can contact Chris via email on chris[dot]grech[at]white[dot]mt

Shownotes

• Guide to investing online
• Best European P2P platforms
• Best European Property Investment platforms
• Best Tax structures in Europe

Gabriella is new to the investing world and is trying to figure it all out, while Yoran has been researching the best way to invest and allocate assets in a sensible portfolio for several years. He developed a tool for Europeans to backtest different portfolios and thus help decided which portfolio they want to adopt.

In this episode, we focus on index investing, with a specific focus on European investors. We discuss how to track an index, what asset mix you should have in your investment portfolio, how and when to rebalance, how to choose an ETF and stock broker, and how taxes play an important role in your investment returns.

It was a pleasure for me to interview Yoran and you’ll find that this episode is packed with information. I also recommend the book “Investing Demystified” that Yoran recommends. I had bought and read it a while back, but I am going to go back to it and give it another read, as I think there will soon be very good opportunities in the stock market, making it a great time to build a stock and bond portfolio.

Links

• YoranBrondsema.com
• Curvo.eu
• Investing Demystified – Book
• Investing Demystified on YouTube

We discuss many aspects of investing in real estate, including the hottest trends in real estate investment in Europe, why invest in buy-to-rent properties vs developmetn loans, and where most of the investors come from and why. It was a really enjoyable episode for us to do, and I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Links

• Reinvest24
• Jean’s review of Reinvest24

It is a platform that is dedicated to serving the investors’ needs, as Gustas emphasizes. In this episode, Jean is joined by his dad Joseph, an experienced finance expert and together they discuss Evo Estate and online real estate deals in general with Gustas.

We thoroughly enjoyed our discussion with the young but very knowledgeable Gustas and we think you’ll enjoy this too.

Links

• Evo Estate
• How to Invest in Real Estate online

We discuss how he built the initial capital that he now invests, thoughts about living in China, and how he goes about choosing P2P platforms. We touch upon setting up an auto invest strategy on these P2P lending platforms, and what would happen in an economic downturn.

Other topics we go into are the calculation of XIRR, the three fund portfolio, ETFs vs funds and real estate investing.

Sterling together with his friend Scrappy are very involved in the European FIRE community as well as several forums dealing specifically with P2P lending, so I really encourage you to listen to this episode and visit their site for their latest monthly reports.

Links

• P2P Millionaire on Twitter
• P2P Independent forum discussion about what would happen in a crisis
• How liquid is the Mintos secondary market
• Mintos Auto Invest settings
• European Investing Blog aggregator

In our chat, we talk about the FIRE movement and differences between the European movement and the US movement, how he evaluates P2P platforms, living in Denmark, how to raise a financially intelligent kid, real estate investments and much more.

Definitely an episode that will be useful for all those who want to make their money work for them and provide some very good returns. Jørgen is averaging more than 10% returns per year on his investments, with his favorite platform being Mintos, so it’s well worth listening to his approach.

Links

• Financially Free blog
• 1000 True Fans
• EuroFinanceBlogs.com
• Financial Independence Europe podcast

Deal flow has been hard to come by for small investors in the US or investors outside the US with no contacts or physical presence in hotbeds for startups like San Francisco. Republic’s mission is to change all that and make investing easy and open to everyone, whichever net worth they have. This means that you don’t need to be an accredited investor to invest in startups on this platform.

Matthew walks us through the process of investing (as an investor) and raising funds (as a startup). We also talk about success stories (including a company that was acquired by Marcus Lemonis from The Profit) and plans for future expansion.

We also talk about crypto investments and the Crowd SAFE instrument for crowdfunding in startups.

Links

• Republic
• Republic’s Note token

In this episode Mark is joined by Stephan Venter from WooCrew to discuss WooCrew, a WooCommerce maintenance and technical support service.

The conversation delves a bit deeper into the most common struggles WooCommerce users face, what kinds of users are opting for WooCommerce today, and what tests and tools are being used to keep WooCommerce stores up and running (and growing!).

Links

• WooCommerce
• Website: WooCrew.net
• Twitter: @stephanvent
• WordCamp Conferences

Today Jean is joined by Adrian Tobey in a chat recorded at the Collision conference in Toronto.

We touch upon various topics like building a WordPress plugin business from scratch and what that entails, pitching to investors at big conferences, why WordPress people should attend conferences outside of the WP space, working with family members, and more.

Links

• Groundhogg
• Collision

This week Jean is visiting his friends Dejan and Tina in Toronto, Canada. They are all attending the Collision conference that is happening in the city, so they take the opportunity to record an episode and talk about social network automation and management. Tina and Dejan are the cofounders of Social Web Suite, a WP-specific tool for social network management.

We also delve into lessons learned within the WordPress, community, SAAS vs traditional plugins, working with your life partner, and the value of smiling and hugging people

Links

• Social Web Suite

Acquisitions have almost become the norm in the WordPress space in the past couple of years or so. Beyond WordPress, they’re also a common occurrence. Big companies often acquire smaller companies (often start-ups), while some business owners find that it’s time for them to move on to something new.

In this episode, Mark had the opportunity of speaking with Anthony Presley and Craig Williams. They’ve gone through a few acquisitions over time and have recently acquired Templatic, a WordPress themes and plugins shop originally founded by Bhavesh.

The discussion revolves around what an acquisition is, how it comes about, what factors are important to keep in mind throughout the process, and how Anthony and Craig went about their own acquisition of Templatic. The two of them bring up some invaluable insights on key elements to look out for and how to go about something like this, whether you’re the buyer or the seller.

Links:

• Templatic.com

In today’s episode, we welcome Lucas Radke from Plesk to give us a tour of Plesk and all the services they provide. Plesk can be used by many different target audiences, starting from single end users of WordPress right up to big cloud services like DigitalOcean.

We discuss many interesting aspects of managing WordPress servers, including security, caching, managing multiple WordPress installations and their updates, backups, staging as well as Plesk tools for SEO.

Plesk has been making a big effort in the WordPress space in recent years and I thoroughly enjoyed learning about the various services they offer and the situations which would warrant using them.

While many people default to hosted management solutions, they sometimes ignore the fact that having a DigitalOcean or Vultr VPS with a panel like Plesk can be more than enough for their WordPress hosting needs and save a ton of money in the long run. As we discuss with Lucas, one needs to carefully analyze their needs before selecting a hosting solution.

Links

• Plesk
• DigitalOcean
• Vultr

In this episode, James Laws is back and he has some catch-up time with Jean as they discuss what they’ve both been up to in recent months both on the personal side as well as the business side of things.

I have been following Matt Medeiros’ work for a few years through Twitter, Youtube, podcasts and so on. Recently I got in touch with Matt and purchased one of his services, User Feedback Videos, for our WP RSS Aggregator plugin.

I loved his take on things and we got talking from there. Matt accepted my invite to the Mastermind.FM podcast without any hesitation and we were on Skype just a few days later. To me this was a bit surreal as I was used to watching videos of Matt for so long. In fact, at one point in the recording you may notice I seem a bit lost… that’s just because I thought I was watching a video while Matt was explaining something. It then clicked that this was a call and I had to speak, so on we went.

This episode focuses around the topic of managing multiple projects at different stages.

Matt has been involved in many areas of the WordPress space, even having a background as a car salesman, so he has been juggling multiple jobs and projects throughout the years. At the moment he works as an Account Executive with Pagely while doing a number of other stuff, including User Feedback Videos and hosting the Matt Report podcast.

I’ve taken on a more managerial role in the past couple of years, even more so now as the CEO of the team behind WP Mayor, WP RSS Aggregator and EDD Bookings. Recently we also made some changes to our team, so figuring out what to focus on at what time (and why) remains a major task.

In our call, Matt and I discuss some of the pain points one could face in such a situation, how to approach them, and how to overcome them. Listen to the full episode to learn more and understand why even the most experienced minds and the best teams sometimes struggle in these areas.

Enjoy the show!

Mark

Links:

• Twitter: @mattmedeiros
• Podcast: The Matt Report
• Matt’s stuff on the web: CraftedByMatt.com

In this episode, Jean joins Asif on the show to have an informal chat between friends.

We touch on some important topics such as:

• the current state of WordPress and thoughts about its future,
• what it means to retire in your mid-thirties,
• the impact of travel and living abroad on our lives,
• how our parents’ lifestyles shaped our choices and motivations
• life in Bangladesh

Asif is one of my favorite people in the WordPress community; I really respect what he’s managed to achieve so far and best of all the fact that he has remained very humble and open to sharing his knowledge with anyone who approaches him for help and mentorship. I wholeheartedly support the drive to have Bangladesh host their first WordCamp ever, and hope to have the chance to visit this country in the near future.

Enjoy the show!

Jean

Links

• Asif’s blog
• WeDevs
• WP Developer

SEO research may sound daunting to some, but there are some basic methods and tools that everyone should be using.

The Ahrefs team recently got in touch with me when I published this article on WP Mayor discussing WordPress’ performance in comparison to other CMS options. That led to discussions around Ahrefs, and eventually, this episode.

I’m joined by Joshua Hardwick, the Head of Content at Ahrefs, to discuss SEO research techniques using tools from Google, Ahrefs, and others. We delve into a number of areas that every site owner should be aware of and a few technical ones for those who already know the basics.

Among the topics we discussed are:

• What is SEO?
• What is keyword research and what tools can we use for it?
• What are backlinks and how can we build more?
• How to understand what type of content you should focus on to bring in more visitors?
• Analyzing your competition through tools such as Ahrefs.
• Finding competing domains that you weren’t aware of.
• Does social outreach have an impact on SEO?

We went a little deeper in certain areas so it’s certainly worth listening to the entire episode. Whether you’re just getting started with SEO research or you’re looking for some new ideas, Joshua’s got you covered.

Links:

• Ahrefs
• Free SEO tools recommended by Ahrefs
• Google’s SEO Starter Guide
• Twitter: @ahrefs
• Twitter: @JoshuaCHardwick
• Youtube: Ahrefs Channel

This week I welcomed back Jean Galea to the podcast as we found some time to discuss the plugins we’re using at the moment, and why we chose them.

Although Jean and I work together, we rarely find the time to have discussions such as these since we tend to focus on different projects, so this was an opportunity to see what each of us was doing. At the same time, we’re hoping to give you a better idea of how we run our websites and perhaps point out some plugins you weren’t aware of before.

Throughout our discussion we focus on plugins and a few SAAS tools that have integrations with WordPress.

Since the WordPress sites that we run are focused around either content (WP Mayor) or e-commerce (WP RSS Aggregator, EDD Bookings), our choice of plugins is also centred around these markets. Even if your sites are not focused around heavy content or e-commerce specifically, there are some great little nuggets in there for you.

I won’t list down all the plugins we use here, but here is a quick overview of the main ones we have used on all or most of our sites over the years.

•  Content & Subscriber Management
  • Nelio Content to manage our posts more easily
  • Replyable to be able to reply to post comments through email, without having to log in to the dashboard
  • Akismet or Anti-Spam to prevent spam comments from, well, spamming your site
  • MailPoet to send out newsletters and to reach out to subscribers
  • Optin Monster to run various campaigns on our sites to attract subscribers
  • SEO Framework or Yoast SEO to ensure that our content is as optimized as possible
• Forms
  • Ninja Forms as our main go-to plugin, having been introduced to it by James Laws, the other founder of this podcast
  • Gravity Forms is an established solution we used before and still do on some sites
• E-Commerce & Marketing
  • Easy Digital Downloads and its extensions
  • WooCommerce and its extensions
    • Official extensions
    • Trusted 3rd-party WooCommerce extension stores
• Analytics
  • Monster Insights, a great tool from Syed Balkhi
  • Hotjar Connecticator to connect to the Hotjar service for heatmaps, site visitor recordings, polls and more
• Social Media
  • SNAP by NextScripts
• Affiliate Management
  • AffiliateWP to run our affiliate programs on-site
  • Thirsty Affiliates to store affiliate links from other programs and cloak them
  • Impact and Shareasale as alternative ways to run an affiliate program when you need a more professional solution
• Backups & Security
  • BlogVault to manage our site security and backups in a simple and reliable way
  • ManageWP to manage multiple sites from one dashboard, including running updates
  • WP Security Audit Log to track how multiple users are using our websites, which is especially useful when you have multiple authors or editors
• Others
  • Advanced Custom Fields to be able to customise our websites with custom fields where we need them
  • Elementor as our page builder of choice when we need to create a quick website for which a default theme won’t do the job
  • Classic Editor; given that we are unsure of what Gutenberg will bring with it in WordPress 5.0, this is a safety net of sorts
  • PerfMatters, probably the most important of all, to control on which pages certain plugins run, which is essential if you have certain functionality that you only need on a few pages (giving you better performance site-wide)

We mention a few more plugins throughout the show that meet certain other needs, so be sure to listen in and learn more.

Are there any other plugins which you use religiously on your WordPress sites? Let us know in the comments to give them the exposure they deserve.

In episode 103 I am joined by Markus Schwingenschlögl, CTO of ThemeFusion, the company behind the Avada WordPress theme. Markus had recently answered a Q&A for us over on WP Mayor, hosted by David Scott, Envato’s PR and Communications manager. This episode is a follow-up to that Q&A, so I recommend reading the Q&A before starting to listen to our conversation here.

Marcus is an integral part of the Avada theme’s incredible growth on ThemeForest, the WordPress theme marketplace from Envato. They recently hit the $25 million mark in sales with an average rating of 4.77 out of 5 stars from over 21,000 reviews. Those numbers do not lie – the ThemeFusion team is doing a lot of things right.

In our discussion we go over a number of the areas that ThemeFusion has focused on in order to achieve this feat. These included:

• The idea of focusing on the development of a single theme with the introduction of one-click install demos for various use-cases.
• Methods of gathering and using user feedback through comments, reviews, support and a community Facebook group.
• The tracking of feature requests through Github and the idea of building new features according to use-case requests, not just feature requests.
• Other ways of gathering ideas for new features and use-cases.
• The importance of design and attention to detail.
• Why it’s vital for all your team, developers included, to maintain a connection with your user-base.
• The need for a solid company structure to take things in the right direction.
• The premise of releasing a mature product rather than being first to market, even if it means playing catch-up at first.
• The importance of the WordPress community at every stage of developing a product or service.

I would like to thank Markus for sharing his thoughts and insights with us. Remember, if you haven’t read the Q&A we did on WP Mayor, I recommend starting with that here.

Links:

• Q&A on WP Mayor
• Get the Avada Theme on Themeforest
• ThemeFusion’s website: theme-fusion.com
• ThemeFusion’s Twitter: @Theme_Fusion
• Markus’ Twitter: @mschwing
• ThemeFusion’s Facebook Page
• Avada Facebook Community Group

In this episode, Jean and Mark were joined by Michiel Heijmans, the COO of Yoast and an all-around great guy, to discuss conversion optimization and a lot more.

Michiel is much more than just a COO of one of the most well-known WordPress plugins around. He has been a part of the Yoast team from its infancy. In the years that have passed, he has contributed in many ways to its massive growth, especially through a focus on conversion optimization.

In our discussion with Michiel, we found out a bit more about Yoast as a company, their love for Lego, his experience in growing with Yoast, as well as what he and the Yoast team do to keep expanding and improving on their offerings.

One of the topics we covered was content writing and optimizing your blog. We looked into how to make sure your blog performs well, both for search engines and your readers’ experience. For instance, Yoast.com’s blog is categorized into a number of topics. Their team gave a lot of importance to the organization and presentation of these categories. Michiel tells us about how and why they did this, and what else they do.

We also cover a number of other subjects, including speed optimization tools, analysis tools, multilingual content, and more. Listen on to hear about the best methods and tools to use to optimize your site’s conversion rate.

On a side note, Yoast is well-known for their illustrations throughout all their products and services. Not to be outdone, Michiel does a little sketching of his own. Check out his impressive works on Instagram.

Links:

• Michiel’s Twitter: @michielheijmans
• Yoast’s Twitter: @yoast
• Website: yoast.com

Links

• YTtalk
• Streamlabs OBS
• OBS Project
• Screencast-o-Matic
• Kev’s Crypto Channel

Links

• Kev’s Crypto Channel
• How to Build a Crypto mining rig
• Awesome Miner
• Discord
• SafeCoin
• Coinbase
• MiningRentals
• NiceHash

We talk about many different facets of the WordPress space and what it means to be successful in business, as well as how to deal with pursuing different passions while still making a good living. This was a great and candid episode with one of the most honest content creators I know, and we’ll have Kevin back on the show soon to delve deeper into his experience in crypto.

• KevinMuldoon.com
• Kev’s Crypto Channel
• Kevin on YouTube
• Kevin’s Twitter account

After a few discussions we set up a date and recorded this episode. David provides a ton of value to the discussion of guerrilla marketing given his experience in growing seven-figure companies. If you’re not aware of what guerrilla marketing is, here’s how David himself describes it:

One of my biggest frustrations as an entrepreneur and small business owner is marketing can be expensive. Facebook Ads can cost a lot of money, hiring a SEO firm is costly, getting good writers to write content adds up… the list goes on and one. When you’re starting a business, you need to keep costs down: this is where guerrilla marketing helps. Using free or much less expensive guerrilla marketing tactics, you can grow your business faster without breaking the bank.

In this episode, David explains those inexpensive, effective guerrilla marketing strategies that you can use, too. Be it through the use of social media, giveaways or other methods, there’s something in this discussion that will certainly work for you. Sometimes it takes a bit of trial and error to find the one that generates the most revenue for your product or service.

We also get into when and why you should market a product using certain techniques, and when you should even bother about the marketing aspect of your business at all. Even larger companies can sometimes delay the marketing of a new product until they gather some user feedback. David also kindly shares an example of this from his own experience.

David’s insights will certainly get your creative marketing juices flowing, so get to listening!

Links:

• Kingsumo website: kingsumo.com
• David’s personal blog with guerrilla marketing tips: dmkthinks.org

That is where Freemius comes in. It’s an e-commerce solution that takes care of all the nitty-gritty parts of running your e-commerce business while providing built-in marketing tools, some of which are new and exciting for the WordPress e-commerce space, to grow your business. The cost of having bugs and other issues fixed for you, and having access to a vast toolset that allows you to grow your business with relatively minimal effort, is a percentage of your revenue.

When running a small business, this percentage could be seen as worthwhile as you can focus on developing the product rather than handling VAT setups, payment gateway issues, and so on. When your business grows, however, the commission could be seen as quite a barrier.

In this episode, Vova Feldman, the co-founder and CEO of Freemius, joins me to explain why it could be the right solution for WordPress businesses despite being the new kid on the block. We also discuss how Freemius works in comparison to other e-commerce solutions such as Easy Digital Downloads and WooCommerce.

Links:

Vova Feldman

• Twitter: @vovafeldman

Freemius

• Twitter: @freemius
• Website: freemius.com
  • WordPress Feature Comparison: freemius.com/wordpress/features-comparison/

Christie has an M.B.A. in Management Information Systems from Florida State University and has been involved in the WordPress space for a few years now, currently being a partner in the CalderaWP team that is well-known for the Caldera Forms plugin. She enjoys sharing the knowledge she has gathered over the years with others in the WordPress community through talks at WordCamps and shows like this one.

In the episode, Christie took some time out of her busy schedule to continue discussing financial forecasting, business strategies and business administration. We discuss everything from what financial forecasting is to what business strategies are and how you should plan out your future targets.

We also delve into possible ways of learning more about how to run your business without having to necessarily get a degree or go to business school, plus a few other interesting tips and discussions that you won’t want to miss!

Links:

• Twitter: @cicichirinos
• Website: christiechirinos.com
• LinkedIn: Christie Chirinos (check out the delightful brief intro )
• WordPress.tv: Financial Forecasting for WordPress Businesses (WordCamp US)
  • A very similar talk to the one given at WCEU, for which the video is not yet available.
• Plugin: Caldera Forms

We were joined by Alain Schlesser and Anton Ukhanev, two great developers who believe that developing your plugins and themes (and WordPress core itself) to as high a standard as you can will only help your business and the WordPress community grow further.

WordPress is growing in popularity, exceeding the 30% mark for the number of websites running WordPress worldwide. However, it’s also facing some controversy within the community over the approach being taken to Gutenberg, especially from developers.

I won’t give too much away, so listen in to hear about the pain-points within WordPress from a developer’s perspective, how this affects those running businesses around WordPress, and where the WordPress community went wrong and what it’s doing right with Gutenberg and more.

Links:

Alain Schlesser

• alainschlesser.com
• Twitter: @schlessera
• Github: schlessera
• Dependency Injection and Design Patterns in Real Life (WCEU Workshop)
  • Code example from the Workshop

Anton Ukhanev

• Twitter: @XedinUnknown
• Github: XedinUnknown

Other Resources

• PHP: The Right Way
• Learning OOP in PHP
• PHP Code Standards (Dhii) – What is Dhii?
• Join the Make WordPress Slack
• Gutenberg and the Future of WordPress: Conditions for Success – Morten Rand-Hendriksen
• Other talks from Alain Schlesser on WordPress.tv

Servebolt is taking on the WordPress hosting space by claiming that they can beat any other host in terms of speed, and they don’t rely on caching for it. In fact, they believe in caching being used only for scaling, as it was originally intended.

Together we discuss what it is that Servebolt does, where it started, and how they believe they can make such claims as being faster than other top WordPress hosting companies such as Kinsta and WP Engine,

Thomas is challenged all the way, from the company’s decision on its name and why they own serverbolt.com but have not set it to redirect to servebolt.com, to how and why their stack is that much better than those with deeper pockets.

Links:

• Website: servebolt.com
• Twitter: @servebolt
• Test your WordPress host’s performance
• How does caching work in WordPress?
• Servebolt Optimizer Plugin (FREE)
• Test your site on Servebolt for free

For those that are new to WordPress, Pippin is the man behind the Easy Digital Downloads, AffilaiteWP and Restrict Content Pro WordPress plugins.

In this episode, we delve into the all-new Easy Digital Downloads 3.0 which is being built right now. EDD has been around for years, growing from a small plugin built by Pippin himself into a team of 15, including developers, support staff, content writers and more.

As you would expect, when you’re not building a product to scale in the future, you’re going to make some mistakes. This is what happened with EDD, and it’s what they are now trying to fix with 3.0.

Listen to why EDD made the decision to rewrite most of the plugin, how they, and Pippin himself, are approaching the situation, and what the impact of these improvements will (or should) be.

Links:

Easy Digital Downloads

• Pippin’s website
• Twitter: @eddwp
• Website: easydigitaldownloads.com
• Blog post: Easy Digital Downloads 3.0 Development Update

EDD Bookings

• Twitter: @eddbookings
• Website: eddbookings.com
• Blog post: Building a Painkiller for the Appointment Bookings Space in WordPress

Books

• Street Smarts – Norm Brodsky
• Small Giants – Bo Burlingham
• Start with Why – Simon Sinek

In this episode, I took the opportunity to ask Brian about what he has learned from the more than 30 interviews he has done so far. We discuss a variety of topics, from choosing a niche to marketing the plugin, and the lessons learned from our mistakes so far.

If you’re thinking of starting a small plugin or theme business, or you’re already running one, then this episode is for you. If you agree or disagree with anything we said during the discussion, let me know in the comments below. Let’s share our experiences and help each other out.

Links

• Twitter: @bjplink
• Link Software
• The Plugin Economy
  • Twitter: @plugineconomy
  • WP RSS Aggregator Interview
  • CryptoWP Interview
  • Brant Calder Interview
• Word Count Plugin
• WP RSS Aggregator
• EDD Bookings

In part 2 we continue that discussion, delving into the world of teaching WordPress and teaching others how to run a WordPress business. Our discussion ranges from our irritation with those who think building WordPress sites for clients is easy, to the importance of finding the right name for a business, and why we need to educate the WordPress community about all this and more.

Joe is graciously offering all Mastermind.fm listeners with a 50% discount on his “Creating Online Courses” course. It teaches you how to build online courses and Joe shares his own experiences with you along the way. Just click here and follow the steps to get half off using the discount code MASTERMIND.

Show Notes

We discuss what’s been going on in our lives and businesses over the past year and how we arrived to the decision to stop hosting the show. It’s definitely been a great run however it is now time for someone else to take over, and we are convinced that Mark will be doing a great job. You’ve already heard Mark on some of the last few episodes, and one of the main reasons why we decided to keep the show going is because we both really enjoyed listening to these last few episodes.

We talk about what’s next for us in business and also discuss some of our recently discovered productivity hacks and books we read. Since there’s lots of changes happening in our business lives lately, we also discuss the topic of change and evolving. It seems that as we age and also gain more and more experience in the business world, our desires change, and one thing we both feel is a stronger attraction towards brick-and-mortar businesses, which we might be getting into in the near future.

James is certainly not retiring from podcasting, in fact he is already running another show, Adventures in Businessing. He doesn’t exclude doing more shows and also recommends a few of his favorite podcasts during this episode.

For those of you who are interested in podcasting, James also shares his equipment setup towards the end of the show. If you’re looking after having a professional setup, you should definitely listen carefully to that part, while if you’re looking for a modest setup to just get started, check out the equipment mentioned by Jean.

It’s been a great experience for us doing this podcast, and we highly appreciate the support from our audience. It would be awesome if you could take a few minutes to leave a review on iTunes and let us know what you like and want to hear more about in future episodes hosted by Mark. Thank you for everything!

Mentioned Resources

• The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Keeping Your Sh*t Together: How to Run Your Business Without Letting it Run You
• Adventures in Businessing Podcast
• The Punnery Podcast
• 5dF (5 Dollar film) Podcast

Joe Casabona has been around WordPress for many years, starting off like many of us building small WordPress sites, to now coaching and teaching others about WordPress and how to run a business around it.

Mark got in touch with Joe recently in the Post Status slack community and through their conversations, he learnt about how Joe transitioned from working for Crowd Favorite while working side-jobs as a freelancer to freelancing full-time in various, less-discussed areas of WordPress.

The call lasted almost an hour and a half. That’s why we have split the episode into two parts. In part one Mark and Joe discuss Joe’s background, the struggles he faced and benefits he got in transitioning to freelance, as well as his popular podcast, How I Built It, and what he has learnt from the interviews.

Given that the podcast has surpassed 67 episodes now, we hear Joe’s thoughts on WordPress businesses as well as development. The two then delve into the shifts that have been happening in the way products are built, the ways they are marketed, and the problems being faced by product owners today within the WordPress community.

The discussion finally turns to hosting a podcast and how this can be made into a business of its own. Similarly to Mastermind FM, Joe’s podcast began as a mastermind with other individuals and grew from there.

Part two, which will be coming in a couple of weeks, will discuss other projects that Joe has undertaken – a WordPress Business Coaching Program as well as Creator Courses. Sign up below to get notified when it’s published.

Show Notes:

• Website: casabona.org
• Twitter: @jcasabona
  
• Post Status
• Crowd Favorite
  • Chris Lema
  • Karim Marucchi
• How I Built It Podcast
  • Episodes mentioned:
    • Joost de Valk (Yoast SEO)
    • Pippin Williamson (Easy Digital Downloads and Restrict Content Pro)
    • Daniel Bachhuber
    • Jason Coleman (Paid Memberships Pro)
    • GiveWP
• Tools mentioned:
  • ConvertKit
  • Facebook Pixel
  • Google Analytics

Having been involved in support for the WP RSS Aggregator plugin for around 3 years, growing from a support engineer to head of support, and now being part of the team preparing the EDD Bookings plugin for its re-launch, Mark strives to improve the customer service their team provides.

As part of his research, he came across a Facebook live video hosted by HelpScout CEO Nick Francis, in which Nick interviews Customer Service expert Shep Hyken. After getting in touch with the two, Mark reached out to Shep who agreed to be a part of this Mastermind.FM episode.

Shep gives us a brief overview of his background and what led him to becoming a customer service and experience expert, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling author, as well as being inducted into the National Speakers Association Hall of Fame for lifetime achievement in the speaking profession.

Mark goes on to ask Shep a number of questions regarding how support differs between large companies such as Amazon and the smaller teams in the WordPress eco-system. This leads to a discussion about the words “satisfied” and “fine”, and how these are not words you want to hear as the individual providing support.

The discussion then turns onto customer loyalty, first and last impressions, and how you should be handling upset or irate customers. For anyone that has provided any form of customer service, you would know that these situations are inevitable, so knowing how to deal with them is of utmost importance.

Last but not least, Mark and Shep discuss a few tools that can be used for customer service, from chat to social media. Shep goes as far as to discourage the use of a ticketing system, which is something that is widespread in the world of WordPress plugins and themes. Can this change in the future with the introduction of other tools such as live chat and chatbots?

There are also a couple of fun, short stories from Shep’s experiences thrown in there that we’re sure you’ll love. If you don’t, well then, customer service isn’t for you.

Shep Hyken is the Chief Amazement Officer of Shepard Presentations.

Featured on the show:

• Shep Hyken’s website (Shepard Presentations)
• The Customer Focus
• Twitter: @Hyken
• Facebook: Shep Hyken – Speaker
• LinkedIn: Shep Hyken
• Youtube Channel: Shep Hyken
• Google+: Shep Hyken
• HelpScout Facebook Live Video – Nick Francis & Shep Hyken
• We Made Support a Priority, and It Paid Off – Mark Zahra
• HelpU, by HelpScout

Bonus:

• Shep Hyken’s taxi cab story

Topics Include:

• Mr. Derksen’s background.
  • A brief on WP Simple Pay.
  • Phil’s main focus.
• The how and why of selling a business.
  • Plugins, plugins, plugins.
  • Underestimating the amount of work required in order to sell.
  • Balancing split focuses.
  • Supporting multiple customer bases.
  • Metricizing potential.
• Arriving at a sales number [for a WordPress plugin].
• SAAS and automatic renewals.
• Diversifying product and separating your businesses.
  • Do businesses today get into plugin building just to ‘flip’ them?
  • Quantifying a business or plugin’s true value.
    • Purchasing an external business: “Like stepping into a moving vehicle”.
    • Taking on support costs.
    • Buyer’s remorse?
• The startup fate: building software and not getting payed for it.
• Recommended steps toward initiating the sale of your business.
• WP Simple Pay today.
• Segmenting your customers.
  • Talking to your customers.
    • The “five question framework”.
• Profound lessons, epiphanies, and warnings.
• Learning to market.
  • Focusing conversion efforts on your pricing & checkout pages.
  • Customizing your checkout beyond default EDD.
  • Cutting the data you do not need.
• Phil’s number 1 ecommerce hack.
  • “Put your best testimonial on your checkout page.”
  • Social proof is king.

Featured on the Show:

• Phil’s Twitter
• WP Simple Pay
• MicroConf
• SureSwift Capital
• wpSaaS

The two discuss Marius’ background as well as that of his business, WPRiders, before going on to discuss various aspects of running a business. The discussion starts off with how to transition from being a freelancer to running an agency and what Marius learnt from it. The two then go on to discuss hiring; knowing when is the right time to expand and in what areas, how to find the right person for the job and for your team, and making sure the company’s culture is maintained throughout.

Marius also shares some details about what WPRiders does and how it does it, from complete site development to smaller projects with plugin and theme customisations, among others.

Lastly, Mark asks Marius what he does in his personal time to unwind and how he manages to cut off from the business side of his life, and he gives some valuable answers. Be sure to stick around until the end to hear Marius’ advice for those looking to get into freelancing as well as those looking to expand into an agency.

Links:

@mariusvetrici | Twitter

Marius Vetrici | LinkedIn

WPRiders

Codeable

Susy Toolkit

Vipassana Meditation

12: The Elements of Great Managing | Book

Donnacha and Dumitru discuss the series of events that led him to be the first member of the WordPress.org Theme Review Team to publicly call out the corruption that makes WordPress worse for users but, conveniently, hands a million dollar business advantage to leading volunteers.

We talk about how Dumitru’s background, growing up in Eastern Europe before the fall of communism, imprinted upon him the urgent importance of not allowing corruption to slide, especially in slow-moving, bureaucratic, cult-of-personality situations.

For anyone involved in WordPress, this interview is worth listening to precisely because it is so rare to ever hear an insider talk openly about the very real problems that are festering behind the apparent blockbuster success of WordPress.

Dumitru Brinzan:

@dumitru

https://www.Brinzan.com/

@hermesthemes

https://www.HermesThemes.com/

Donnacha:

@WordSkill

https://www.WordSkill.com/

https://www.RedPen.com

https://www.facebook.com/donnacha

Dumitru’s first WordPress job was in 2010 with WPZOOM, where he made themes. There he learnt that a lot of time goes into support.

At heart, he considers himself a PHP developer first, WordPress developer second.

Dumitru explains the difference between Romanians and Moldavians.

Dumitru reveals why a country as small as Moldova has produced so many developers.

Why Dumitru packed his bags in 2016 and moved his family to Dortmund, Germany.

Donnacha antagonizes the entire population of Italy.

Why Dumitru decided to start his own theme company in 2013, and why he thought WordPress would be a good match for independent hotels.

How his decision to sell themes for $200, the most expensive price ever for WordPress themes at that time, sparked outrage.

Typically, theme companies spend 95% of their time on support, and 5% on development.

How his choice of Hermes as a brand name was mocked, all those years ago, by some online idiot … who turns out to have been Donnacha!

Donnacha wanders off into the completely unrelated news that a woman in Dortmund, Dumitru’s new home, has set up the world’s first sex doll brothel, and suggests that this qualifies Dortmund as a thriving center of innovation.

After one year, Dumitru’s impressions of Dortmund, the contrasts with Eastern Europe. Donnacha shares his impressions of life in Northern Thailand compared to Ireland or the UK.

Dumitru reveals his shameful lack of German. As a couple, they are mainly investing in his wife’s German language education, so, he’s going to be really screwed if she runs off with the milkman.

Why did Dumitru choose to live in Dortmund, and not somewhere in the south of Germany, closer to Moldova?

How big changes in the Google algorithm, in April of 2015, destroyed the independent WordPress theme business by undermining affiliate sites, and giving more power to the massive theme shop ThemeForest. Overnight, Dumitru lost half his sales and the effect on other independent theme developers was similar, encouraging many to sell or merge, marking a phase of consolidation and the end of what we now realize was a golden age for independent WordPress developers. The affiliate sites lost around 80% of their traffic, and everyone else became far more reliant on paid advertising … such as that sold by Google.

Donnacha, predictably enough, suggests that Google probably knew exactly what they were doing, while Dumitru diplomatically demurs.

Dumitru reflects on whether the $200 price-point was a good move, and describes the breakdown on which types of customers actually required support.

Is the hotel theme niche still a good opportunity?

Why WordPress hotel themes should not have anything to do with reservations.

Why WordPress is not the right solution for many situations, and we should resist the temptation to shoehorn it into every scenario.

Why Drupal users have Post-traumatic stress disorder.

How, over the past decade, WordPress enthusiasts have failed to notice it slowly becoming too complicated for new users.

Dumitru Brinzan

@dumitru

https://www.Brinzan.com/

@hermesthemes

https://www.HermesThemes.com/

Donnacha

@WordSkill

https://www.WordSkill.com/

https://www.RedPen.com

https://www.facebook.com/donnacha

We talk about the two different types of blockchain forks – hard forks and soft forks. We touch on the forks we’ve had in Bitcoin this past year as well as the upcoming hard fork that has just been cancelled as I write up these shownotes (we didn’t know that while recording).

We also discuss whether one should pay attention to other cryptos apart from Bitcoin, and if so, why.

Mitchell explains how whales can influence the price of cryptocurrencies with some tricks. This price manipulation is also done by the exchanges with fake orders.

We also discuss why nations creating their own cryptocurrencies does not solve the same problem that Bitcoin aims to solve.

Another interesting topic that Mitchell tells us about is how to make big purchases of Bitcoin. You basically use brokers that will give you a better price compared to buying them off an exchange. You can find these brokers on localbitcoin or from your local meetup groups (if you live in a big city with excellent crypto penetration).

We also touch on some questions from the audience, such as the concern about mining’s electricity consumption, whether Bitcoin will always trump other alt coins, whether Bitcoin is in a bubble or not, which altcoins have any actual utility, and how to store your Bitcoin.

Useful links

• Jean’s collection of best cryptocurrency resources
• Should you buy Bitcoin?
• Vietnamese central bank bans cryptos
• UAE governor warns against cryptos as a medium of payment
• Are cryptocurrencies a fraud and a scam?
• Bitcoin mining and electricity consumption
• Why Bitcoin is different from other cryptos

Jean has been taking padel seriously during the past year, and this is the perfect opportunity to learn more about this sport if you haven’t yet heard about it.

Beginning with a short introduction on when padel was founded, Daniel proceeds to outline the growth and spread of the sport from its beginnings in Mexico up to its incredible popularity nowadays in Spain and other countries in Europe.

Jean and Daniel then discuss some of the things beginners typically struggle with, and Daniel gives a blueprint for attaining success in padel in the quickest way possible. As always a lot of hard work is involved to succeed, but the methodology employed in training is very important.

Following this technical discussion, it’s time to delve into the business side of padel. Being the world’s fastest growing sport means that there are a lot of business opportunities developing around it. Indeed, Daniel Dios describes the current situation as a gold rush. The importance of proper business fundamentals can never be understated, however, and Daniel shares his experience and challenges running London’s first ever padel club.

Although it seems easy to profit from a sport that is growing so fast, without the proper budgets and a healthy dose of passion and sacrifice, it is very hard to create a runway long enough to ensure success as a padel business.

Luckily, Daniel and his team have been honing their skills over a number of years, and in addition to their technical training, they also offer training for people who want to open their own padel clubs in their countries. They also help with hands-on consultancy. Daniel talks about the situation in Sweden, where he is very involved as national team coach but also as a close collaborator and consultant to many new clubs that are opening in this nordic country.

I’m sure you will find this episode to be very insightful, it’s great to have the opportunity to talk to someone who has fused both sports and business and now sails along this amazing entrepreneurial and sporting journey, hopefully to much more success in the coming years.

As a final note, Daniel was generous enough to offer one year’s membership to the padel trainer course on Vimeo. All you need to do to participate is to leave a comment and let us know what you think of padel, whether you have had the chance to play, and whether you have any questions. Daniel or Jean will be happy to answer all your questions about padel, the addictive sport that is changing many people’s lives.

Links

• Jean’s introduction to padel
• Padel Trainer
• Padel course on Vimeo

As a young adult, Dustin left small-town Pennsylvania and headed for the bright lights of Hollywood to become an actor but, after a few years, became disillusioned with how the industry actually works (no mention of whether he met Harvey Weinstein), so, he went to work as Youth Director for his church. Determined to connect with young people on their own terms, he learnt as much as he could about the newly emerging world of social media.

Inspired by meeting some of the leading lights in the social media space, he started blogging about what he was learning. This encouraged others to approach him for advice on how to expand their audiences and, after just a couple of years, he became known as one of the Ten most influential people in the space, opening the floodgates to work as a consultant, his own agency for a while and, now, his current product, Social Warfare.

How Dustin got into the product space by needing to certain functionality for his church. James observes that both their businesses are similar in the sense that their church activities played a key role in their journey. They talk about Jesus Christ for a bit, probably a good bet that they’ll both get a sweet spot in heaven, while the rest of us will spend eternity screaming down in Hell, being forced to use Joomla.

James shares his own minor acting experience, Dustin discusses how that sort of experience can help a lot in promoting your business.

Dustin discusses his surprise and delight at the acclaim his blog has received, James reveals that Dustin’s articles are considered required reading within the Ninja Forms marketing team.

They discuss the wondrous writings of Seth Godin. James, feeling guilty about the woefully neglected state of his own blog, begs Dustin to lay out his process for producing valuable content.

Dustin’s Writing Process:

1. Be cognizant of who you are writing for, and the questions that come up for them on a day-to-day basis.
2. Be on the lookout for problems that crop up for other people, and take notes.
3. You need a place to gather those notes, Dustin uses the ToDoist app.
4. When reviewing those notes, he starts writing around the ideas he feels most passionate about.
5. Write. Write as much as you can, don’t worry about editing, just cover as much ground as you can.
6. Write to someone. Dustin writes to his wife, who is not a social media person, so, which has the beneficial affect of forcing him to avoid jargon.
7. Then he walks away. Slowly. Like a cowboy.
8. He returns later to edit it, just to hone it and remove mistakes. He uses Grammarly to help with that.
9. He does some keyword research, using a tool called Ahrefs, and takes the time to look at other high-ranking posts covering the same subject, making changes to his own piece accordingly.
10. While writing, Dustin leaves placeholder words for images he’d like to later insert in various places, so, his final step is to go find those images and, also, create the promotional images for the post, usually around 4 or 6 images per article.
11. He uses the Coschedule marketing calendar to plan out 30 days of social media promotion, and he has written an article, link below, about how he uses it.

Dustin says that many SEO experts believe that the most effective length for an article is over 2000 words, so, Dustin aims for around 2,500. The whole process, as outlined above, takes between 8 and 10 hours. The thought of spending that much time on an article almost gives James an aneurysm.

James asks if Dustin himself losing interest half-way through, Dustin shares a tip given to him by an old Jedi knight: start by writing your conclusion.

Referring to how his product, Ninja Forms, entered the already over-crowded market of WordPress form plugins, James points out that Dustin entered possibly the most saturated of all markets, social media plugins. Dustin explains that this didn’t scare him, he was actually angry about the existing plugins: how slowly they loaded, how poorly they performed and how bad they looked. He found a technical friend, Nick, and asked how hard it would be, if Dustin designed elements that looked better, for him to make it work, and another friend Jason.

How another social media plugin, that was well-known even before Social Warfare entered the market, directly ripped off their code, how they found out, and how they exacted a revenge that the tears of multiple generations will never erase.

James mentions that his company, Ninja Forms, love using Social Warfare.

What Dustin is doing next: his first online course, about creating visual content for social media and blogs, is now in the pre-enrollment stage. He chose this subject because he is passionate about creating beautiful visuals.

Dustin discusses his other ventures, in varying stages of development, and they both discuss the frustration of not being able to do things faster.

Why Dustin needed to migrate from Woo Commerce to Easy Digital Downloads, and how he felt that Woo Commerce was holding his business back.

What are the biggest social media marketing mistakes Dustin sees product companies making, and how would he recommend they approach it?

The more value you can give away, the more your audience will trust you, and the more they’ll pay attention to you, and the more they’ll interact and engage with you

Why James has not bothered to create a presence for Ninja Forms on LinkedIn.

Dustin discusses the “paradox of choice” as it pertains to share buttons on your website.

How does a product company decide which social networks to focus upon?

Dustin Stout’s personal website:

https://dustinstout.com/

Dustin’s Twitter:

@DustinWStout

Dustin’s more business-oriented blog:

Dustn.tv

https://dustn.tv/ (note the missing “i”)

Dustin is also one of the 5 remaining people using Google+:

https://plus.google.com/+DustinStout

Dustin’s social media product, Social Warfare:
https://warfareplugins.com/

James Laws’ personal blog:

https://jameslaws.com/

James’ Twitter:

@jameslaws

James’ bread n’ butter gig, Ninja Forms:

https://ninjaforms.com/

The app Dustin uses to store his ideas and research notes while gestating articles:

https://todoist.com/

Ahrefs, the tool Dustin uses for keyword research:

https://ahrefs.com/

Dustin’s article about how he uses the Coschedule marketing calendar:

Why Coschedule is One of the Best Marketing Investment you can Make 

Dustin’s new venture, a course on Visual Content Mastery for your blogs and social media posts

https://VisualContentCourse.com/

The service Dustin uses to monitor where the keywords he is most interested in are being discussed on social networks and elsewhere online:

https://mention.com/

Jesus Christ:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus

Elementor has grown substantially in just over a year and currently has over 200,000 active installs and an 5-star average rating according to the WordPress.org stats. Given its sudden rise in popularity and the large community that is forming around it, Mark took the time to speak with Ben about its conception, how it works and why, as well as the plans for its future.

Among the topics discussed in this episode are:

• What page builders are, why they should be used, and by who.
• Mark asks Ben to address some concerns around page builder plugins, such as their preference over just using a theme, the ability to customise the generated code, and the type of end-user that it is meant for.
• The story behind Elementor’s team and the plugin’s creation, from conception till today.
• Why the Elementor team was not fazed by other page builder plugins already out there, as well as their thoughts on the Gutenberg editor that is being introduced into WordPress core.
• The reasons for the majority of the plugin’s features to be available for free on WordPress.org, versus the approach taken by other page builder plugins to be fully premium, along with the reasons this plugin differs from the more established competitors.
• The marketing channels being used by the Elementor team and why they chose them.
• The way the business was supported until the Pro version of the plugin started to bring in sales.
• The burden and the cost of supporting a page builder plugin, along with the most common queries.
• The future of Elementor and its Pro version.

Useful links:

Elementor Page Builder (Free Version)

Elementor Pro

Elementor Community (Facebook Group)

@Elemntor | Twitter

Elementor | Youtube Channel

James returns and explains the sad reason for his mysterious two month hiatus, putting Donnacha’s gripes about relationship squabbles and man-flu into rather stark relief.

James has a plan to get back into shape, because no-one who knows Jean is allowed to be out of shape. Donnacha agrees that having a friend like Jean, who possesses a perfect life, can be tough. James and Donnacha agree that a man who has no actual problems has no business being so wise. Fuck that guy.

Donnacha compliments James’ studio design by calling him a twelve-year-old. The psychological impact of design upon performance. Spending obscene amounts of money on a microphone while children in Puerto Rico don’t even have lapel mics.

Getting into the meat of the show, Donnacha refers back to last week’s episode in which he and Mark tore into the realities of WordPress add-on marketplaces, resulting in a decision to somehow trick James, who owns just such a marketplace, to spill the real dirt.

Where was James’ business, Ninja Forms, when he and his business partner decided to open up and sell add-ons by third-party developers?

How has that decision weathered the tests of time as the business has continued to grow?

What are James’ future plans with regard to third-party developers?

How Easy Digital Downloads inspired Ninja Forms original decision to embrace the add-on model.

How a tweet inviting developers to submit add-ons resulted in their first third-party add-on just two days later – the MailChimp add-on by Pippin.

How writing an add-on that ties into a third-party API, such as MailChimp, might actually be ridiculously easy, especially if you are already familiar with that API.

How that gesture, by a well-regarded developer such as Pippin, was a bit boost to Ninja Forms.

How a marketplace allows you to have third-party developers expand the functionality of your product in return for giving away that slice of your future potential profits, and why that makes sense for a small business striving to achieve big things.

Why it makes sense to integrate your product, as quickly as possible, with as many CRMs and other services as possible, because you get to tap into their audience, and how it would be near impossible to create that many add-ons without third-party developers.

Why you can’t just hire some junior developer and have them spend all-day, everyday, banging out your own add-ons for all those services, and keep 100% of all those future add-on sales.

The dangers of selling someone else’s code under your brand.

What Ninja Forms expect from third-party developers, how the money is split, what their responsibilities are, and the level to which they must be familiar with the nooks and crannies of the services that their add-ons integrate with.

The background of their most prolific third-party add-on developer.

What happens when a marketplace relationship goes sour, who gets to keep the kids?

The one add-on that James really wishes they had built themselves, but it is still a mutually beneficial relationship when you consider the bigger picture.

Donnacha’s favorite Ninja Forms add-on, Videomail, and why he thinks its current marketing is a big fat missed opportunity for both Videomail and Ninja Forms.

How Ninja Forms $499 Agency membership, which includes unlimited use of all add-ons, works out for their third-party developers.

The difference between Ninja Forms pricing and Gravity Forms pricing, and why James could not have aimed for the pricing he did if earlier WordPress products, in particular Gravity Forms, had not laid the foundation, and how future products by other developers will, in turn, use Ninja Forms as a step on the path to even higher pricing.

Donnacha’s experiment, comparing both Ninja Forms and Gravity Forms while producing a “minimum viable product”, a website that serves one very specific useful task: verifying that you, the website visitor, are a native English speaker.

Why James would love to sell more Agency memberships, and why that would be good even for his third-party developers because it grows the overall audience.

The difference between Amazon and Apple marketplaces, and how that impacts third-party developers.

James: “Marketplaces are a great way to either start or supplement, but they’re not the place to stay. I wouldn’t build my business in someone’s marketplace, I think that would be a bad move … as a marketplace owner, I think that would be a bad move”.

James reveals that some add-ons, such as Videomail, simply have not gained traction, prompting Donnacha’s evangelical response that forms combined with video add-ons give WordPress users the potential to create an entire startup, an entire business model, for under a hundred dollars.

The experience of the Ninja Forms team in working with Michael Heuberger, the owner of Videomail and the developer of the Videomail add-on for Ninja Forms.

Donnacha’s email chats with Michael Heuberger, about the ability of his Videomail server to cope with an unexpected surge in usage (Donnacha being inexplicably optimistic about his NativeEnglish idea).

How making a video site with Gravity Forms works out at the same amount per year, despite the higher cost of the necessary Ninja Forms add-ons, because the video service used by Gravity Forms, Pipe, costs at least $300 per year, while the ongoing cost of Videomail is free.

Can James predict, when he receives add-on proposals, which ones will be big sellers.

How low selling add-ons can become big sellers through careful marketing.

Why, as a marketplace owner, you have to resist the temptation to develop, yourself, all the add-ons that you know will be top sellers, because you have to keep your eco-system healthy and profitable if you want to attract and retain the best third-party developers.

Donnacha criticizes the Ninja Forms blog article about Videomail, “Unlock Sign Language Contact Forms Now with Videomail” as being praiseworthy but just about as niche as it is possible for anything to be, and entirely missing the huge wider potential of asynchronous video messaging.

James explains that the power and flexibility of forms means that you have to reach out and unlock the imaginations of your users, so, each add-on probably needs ten blog posts highlighting different ways in which it can be used.

How Ninja Forms now has a full-time content creator to produce blog posts, and another guy to make product videos, and that fancy new recording studio, all of which will help to expand the Ninja Forms eco-system and further justify their 30% of marketplace sales.

Donnacha cruelly mocks the name of James’ other podcast, Adventures in Businessing.

Donnacha mentions that he once spent a summer working as a barman in a dry county in North Carolina, meaning that the sale of alcohol was subject to ridiculous restrictions but everyone still got drunk out of their minds, James reveals that he too lives in a dry county. Donnacha wonders how the Hell he got there, so, James gives a quick rundown of his spectacularly complicated family tree.

They discuss their fathers, the shadow of mortality and how to re-assess your life in your forties. James’ multi-decade approach to his business and his staff. Donnacha’s multi-day approach to his life.

The pre-WordPress history of James and his business partner, Kevin Stover.

The importance of knowing what you want.

Why James has zero interest in running a more general marketplace for WordPress plugins.

James make a very bad pun that really only works if you are highly familiar with the WordPress Forms plugin industry.

Donnacha theorizes that James’ priority of keeping his company together for decades to come makes his marketplace an excellent bet for third-party developers.

What sort of add-on proposal would James be most excited to receive?

James reveals a possible major new addition to Ninja Forms, an equivalent to the third-party GravityView plugin which makes it easy to display your Gravity Forms entries. He points out that this alone, given the high price of GravityView, would close the price gap between Ninja Forms and Gravity Forms.

Turns out that both James and Donnacha are fans of Jonathan Mann, the “Song A Day” guy who did the excellent marketing song for GravityView. Donnacha’s evil brain suggests that it would be pretty funny if James commissioned him to write a song for his competing add-on.

Donnacha asks what the hands-down dumbest add-on proposal he has received was, James is far too nice to think of one.

James reveals that, not only are some add-ons extremely easy to make – in some cases, you can pretty much just swap out one mailing list provider’s API details with another one’s – but Ninja Forms actually provide, in their developer site, a generator into which you can enter details and receive a basic, boilerplate add-on to start working on.

James’ ingenious solution to the eternal problem of finding good WordPress developers: hire local people who know nothing about WordPress and train them.

Videomail:

https://videomail.io/

Binary Kitchen, the site of Videomail developer Michael Heuberger:

https://binarykitchen.com/

The Ninja Forms Videomail Add-on:

https://ninjaforms.com/extensions/videomail/

Blog post: “Unlock Sign Language Contact Forms Now with Videomail”

https://ninjaforms.com/sign-language-contact-forms-videomail/

Gravity Forms:

https://www.gravityforms.com/

Ninja Forms Developer Site:

https://developer.ninjaforms.com/

Collaborating Developers’ Guide:

https://ninjaforms.com/collaborating-developers-guide/

Jonathan Mann’s GravityView marketing video:

https://youtu.be/nmUWfA56TqA

The hidden benefits of managing a plugin project, including the level of seniority at which it is acceptable to shout and call the developers “code monkeys”.

The advantages and disadvantages of selling plugins through a marketplace.

Tectonic shifts in the world of WordPress marketplaces.

How a platform owner can play nice when deciding to close down their third-party marketplace.

Why acquisition feels a bit like pimping your own mother.

Reactions to the massive WordPress switch from React.

The best alternative Javascript frameworks, from the point of vue of Mark’s developers.

Why it might be a good idea to have Mark Zuckerberg on your side when you’re mugged by patent trolls.

Donnacha coerces Mark into making a big money bet with complicated terms.

ThemeForest and CodeCanyon are crack cocaine for WordPress beginners.

Trying to teach Web Design to a millennial.

What Envato teaches us about the importance of making your products shiny, rather than functional.

Why Mark, unlike the owners of Envato, is an idealist and will, as a result, die penniless.

Jean Galea’s advice to Donnacha to avoid creating a product that requires support, and why RebelCode are completely ignoring that insight with their upcoming blockbuster bookings plugin.

How, instead of making your own plugin, you could make more money by charging exorbitant amounts for customizations of someone else’s plugin.

How to approach an existing plugin owner and ask them to refer customization clients to you, and how that might actually land you a full-time lead developer job.

A sneak peak at an upcoming episode in which an actual owner will reveal THE INSIDE DIRT on running a marketplace, while flopping about as naked as the day he was born. Bring whiskey.

Among the topics covered in this free-wheeling, wide-ranging discussion:

• How Akshat started off in WordPress, what he did before and his future plans.
• How, as a lone founder with no previous experience of WordPress, he grew BlogVault to a company of 13.
• How he managed to juggle a demanding day job with working on his WordPress startup every evening.
• What he doesn’t like about the name of his company.
• How it felt when a massive competitor launched a very similarly-named product just a week after his, but how it turned out to be a good thing.
• How to deal with the pressure of being a small fish in a rapidly-changing business environment.
• Why it is worth doubling down on the WordPress market.
• The quality of Internet service in India.
• Is India a scary place to visit? Will a taxi driver punch you in the face and take your Macbook?
• What are the best Indian destinations for digital nomads?
• How Akshat’s new malware protection service, Malcare, grew naturally from BlogVault.
• What is the difference between Blogvault’s malware removal feature and Malcare, his new service.
• Why he should have released Malcare six months ago.
• Donnacha’s suggestions to improve the marketing of Malcare.
• How Jean met Akshat, and what most impressed him.
• The importance of traveling to meet your customers in person.
• Bringing the atmosphere of WordCamps back home to India.
• Gaining big customers such as WPEngine, Godaddy, LiquidWeb, Pantheon, FlyWheel, Cloudways, WPServeur and Savvii.nl.
• Advantages of running backup and malware-detection tasks through a service, rather than with WordPress plugins on your own hosting.
• Why continual, incremental backups are vital for eCommerce websites.
• Is it better to be good at tech or good at marketing?
• Finding good programmers in Bangalore, and how to retain them.
• Why, despite oversaturation in the WordPress market, there is always room for another good product.
• Why Akshat is pretty sure that one of your WordPress sites has malware that you are unaware of.

https://blogvault.net/

BlogVault

Malcare

Migrate Guru – Free WordPress plugin

blogVault (@blogVault) | Twitter

Akshat Choudhary (@akshatc) | Twitter

https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshatchoudhary/

Furthermore we find out what are the 4 most important metrics for a WordPress plugin/theme development business, how to apply a data-driven approach to life and how to deal with cultural differences in practice.

Shownotes

• Putler.com

• What are the typical body fat percentage ranges for a healthy man/woman.
• Should you eat more on training days? How much more?
• How to take body measurements and fat percentages.
• Training in a holistic manner across the three planes of motion.
• The importance of rest and sleep.
• Can you target fat loss in specific parts of the body?
• Macronutrients and the typical ways people under or overeat these macros.
• Good and bad carbs, good and bad fats.

A man competing in fitness competitions will typically have a body fat percentage of 6% or under, while a woman would have 15% or under. Under normal conditions though, the ranges for men are 7-15% and those of women are 18-25%.

Shownotes and Links

Nick Littlehales book on Sleep

Basics about macronutrients:
https://www.mirrorfriendly.com/nutrition/the-only-first-nutrition-lesson/

Basics about the importance of fats and different types of fats:
https://www.mirrorfriendly.com/nutrition/eat-your-fats/

Beginner workouts in three different planes of motion (sagittal, frontal and transverse planes):

Sagittal plane (forwards/backwards):

Frontal plane (right/left):

Tranverse (rotate right/rotate left):

Donnacha has been involved with WordPress since the early days while working on various projects, while Mark is the Project Manager for WP Mayor as well as the WP RSS Aggregator and EDD Bookings WordPress plugins.

This week we delved into a current hot-topic in the WordPress community, the Gutenberg editor and what it means for WordPress. We look at what Gutenberg is, where it’s going, and what brought it about. The discussion then delves deeper into the macro idea behind such projects as Gutenberg, WooCommerce and many others that Automattic and Matt Mullenweg are under-taking. While the community seems to be happy with the new, modern approach being taken in WordPress, there is a lot of uncertainty about its future.

Shownotes & Links

• Gutenberg Plugin
• Gutenberg on Github
• WordPress.com
• WordPress.com Plugins (for Business Plan)
• Automattic
• Matt Mullenweg

In today’s episode we are joined by Andrew Farrugia from Mirror Friendly. Andrew is a former sprinter, and he is now a fitness athlete and personal trainer. He has helped countless people get back into shape, and has also helped other athletes who want to compete in their sport.

Apart from being a fitness fanatic, Andrew has a demanding job as the CFO of a busy marina in Malta. We discuss work-life balance as we can all learn from Andrew on this topic. After a hard day’s work as CFO, Andrew always manages to find the time to hit the gym for around 2 hours to complete his training and help others.

In this episode, we discuss SMART goals, the importance of lifestyle and long-term changes rather than fads and diets. We talk about the importance of food when we embark on a transformative journey.

We also get into measurement and tracking, and how important that is to check that we are making progress every week.

Later in the episode we dig deeper into the question of food and its preparation. It turns out that food is way more important than training in building a healthy body, although the two go hand in hand. I think many people underestimate the role of food.

Another problem that we tackle is late night snacking. Jean manages to stay away from the bad stuff by simply not keeping any unhealthy foods in the cupboards at home.

We also talk about the fast food culture versus mindfulness. Jean gives the example of how he uses his morning coffee making routine as part of his meditation.

Shownotes and Links

• Jean’s breakfast yoghurt recipe
• Jean’s breakfast porridge recipe
• Andrew’s recipes
• Sleep and how it affects our health and fitness

David Henzel is well known in the WordPress community for being one of the co-founders of MaxCDN. He has been published in Inc., Venture Beat, Huffington Post, Fast Company and countless other large publications. He’s currently working on both a course and a book, called Managing Happiness.

What you might not know is that he recently made some important changes in his life. He moved out of the USA and has settled in Bodrum, Turkey. While he continues to advise and mentor start ups, he has sold his share of MaxCDN and now works on a course for managing happiness in your married life. This was the result of a realization that the same principles we learn when managing a business can be applied to our relationships.

In this episode, David talks about his early days in the business world up till the days of MaxCDN and what made him decide to sell it. We then talk about his decision to live his life with more meaning, and his quest to make a more positive impact in the world.

This is a very interesting episode for all those of you who don’t know David and his projects. For those of you who know him from his WordPress days, you might be unfamiliar with his current project and this is an ideal way to catch up with what David’s up to nowadays.

I’m impressed by David’s success and introspection, and I definitely learned a good number of lessons in this podcast.

Shownotes

• Managing Happiness Trello template
• David’s blog
• David Henzel on Twitter
• MaxCDN

Topics Included:

• Details about & the history of Beaver Builder.
  • Why use Beaver Builder?
• The makeup of the team as they celebrate 3 successful years together.
• Organizational structures and management styles.
• Defining what warrants a full-time employee versus a contractor.
• Knowing when to share a good idea, and when to act on them.
• Details on the new Beaver Themer.
• The power of the add-on model.
• How to increase value to your current customers.
• Marketing Strategies:
  • Marketing back to the base.
  • Getting the world to come to your site.
  • “You can’t be all things to all people.”
  • On working with a marketing agency.
  • The practically impractical – physical goodies to accompany a digital launch.
• Tension in the product space.
  • Determining how much to charge.
    • The price to value ratio.
    • “Who exactly is my customer?”
    • Finding the ‘no-brainer’ price point.
    • How reoccurring payments and discounts factor in.
  • Figuring out the strategy for extensions of your existing product.
• On Woocommerce’s recent changes.
  • A brief on grandfathering.
• Thoughts on Gutenburg.

Mentioned on the show:

• Beaver Builder
• Beaver Themer
• Gutenburg
• Robby McCullough on Twitter

If you’ve never heard of blockchains, you’ll probably have heard of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, which are all based on blockchain technology. Blockchains are the backbone of any crypto token. If you have any interest in this space, this is definitely one episode you don’t want to miss. Even if you have never heard of these topics and don’t really have an interest, I still recommend you give this a listen, as whether you like it or not this will be a big topic in the near future, so it’s best to know more about it.

Topics Included:

• Current and future applications of the blockchain
• Initial Coin Offerings
• Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
• Investing in cryptos

Giveaway

Alex is generously giving away a physical copy of his blockchain book (in Spanish). All you need to do is leave a comment on this post telling us what you like about blockchain technology or bitcoin, or ask Alex a question. We will then choose a random winner. Good luck!

Winner: Ibon Azkoitia!

Mentioned on the show:

• Alex’s Blockchain book
• Blockchain Spain
• Alex’s articles on El Economista
• PixelRockstar
• Bitcoin Comic (Spanish)
• Bitcoin Comic (English)
• Crypto by Steven Levi
• One from Many by Dee Hock
• The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman
• The Master Switch by Tim Wu

Mentioned on the show:

• WordCamp Europe 2017
• Carl Alexander’s blog
• Tesla themes
• Admin Columns plugin
• Webdevstudios
• Yithemes

We talk about the transitions in her own life and some of the several projects that she’s involved in, including one I’m pretty excited about, ZenTribes.

Grab the nearest couch and relax. This is a journey worth taking.

Topics Included:

• Getting to know Sherry and her entrepreneurial shift
• The high stress of entrepreneurship
• Caring for the whole person (mind and body)
• ZenTribes – removing isolation in the entrepreneurial community
  • So much great stuff here. Sherry touches on the importance of play, touch, and so much great insight
• Sherry’s coming book
• A ZenTribes couples retreat
• Staying healthy in a busy life
• Exploring the therapist relationship
  • Who needs this?
  • How to get started?

Mentioned on the show:

• https://zenfounder.com
• https://zenfounder.com/zentribes/
• https://zenfounder.com/posts/save-the-date-zentribes-couple-retreat/
• https://zenfounder.com/episodes/episode-94-why-you-might-want-to-find-a-therapist/

Topics Included:

• A brief backstory of Rich Tabor
• Marketing / Leadership as an academic path
• The theme market
• Themes AND/OR Plugins
• The evolution of the theme business space
• Theme Clubs
• Recurring Renewals (notice or no notice) that is the question
• Ava – A new WooCommerce integrated theme by ThemeBeans
• Mission statements for products

Mentioned on the show:

• https://themebeans.com
• https://richtabor.com
• https://themeforest.net/user/themebeans/portfolio

Topics Included:

• Transitioning from developer to marketer
• Suplementing marketplace sales (Theme Forrest) with your own shop
• Managing multiple support and distribution channels
• Marketing Expirements
  • Facebook Live
  • The struggle of ROI
  • A/B Testing
  • Customer Feedback
• Personal Brand, transparency, mental health
  • Connecting to the larger community
  • Invest with the right people
  • You are not alone and your situation is not unique
  • Taking care of yourself

• Primoz Cigler
• Proteus Themes
• Facebook Live Experiment
• Primoz T-Shirt and PressNomics review

Topics Include:

• A brief on TokenMarket and Ransu’s history with ICO.
  • Regulated and non-regulated markets.
  • Defining BitcoinETI
• Explaining ICO and Appcoin
• What is Mysterium?
• Understanding how ICO works from an investor’s point-of-view.
  • What are you actually buying and how can you profit from it?
• Comparing the value and potential of Bitcoin.
• Soft-cap & Hard-cap
• The five categories of application for Appcoin.
  • In-game Currencies
  • Loyalty Tokens
  • Closed Loop Payment Systems
  • Software Licenses
  • Donations
• Bitcoin’s performance compared to other cryptocurrency.
  • The six digital assets valued over one billion.
• Tips for investors.
  • Ins and outs of carrying out an investment through TokenMarket.
  • Rewarding early investors.
  • Leveling the investing playing field.
  • On ease of use.
• Discussing competitors.
• About American regulations.
• ICO success stories.

Mentioned on the Show:

• Tokenmarket’s token and cryptocurrency database
• ICO calendar
• Edgeless – a decentralised Casino with a successful ICO
• Edgeless coin listing on Coinmarketcap.com
• Monaco – world’s best cryptocurrency card, currently being crowdfunded via an ICO
• Civic – identify verification system launching an ICO in June 2017
• BitcoinETI – Europe’s first bitcoin-backed Exchange Traded Instrument
• RSK – the first open-source smart contract platform with a 2-way peg to Bitcoin

Topics Include:

• Describing Property Moose and services.
  • What is Property Crowd Funding?
  • The types of investments offered.
  • The difference between first and second charge.
  • Typical investments and strategies.
• Cautions for those unfamiliar with property crowd funding.
• Recommended timeframes.
• On international clientele.
• The misconception of low versus high capital investments.
• The advantage for those outside of the U.K.
• Advantages of diversified location investments.
• Plans to expand outside of the U.K.
• How to approach currency as an outside investor.
• Why American investors are not permitted, and how this may change in 2018.
• Returns on investments, in relation to time spent in research.
• Property Moose and project management.
• Regulations, security, and safety.
• Details of the secondary market and fee structures.
• Properly educating yourself in investment.

Mentioned on the Show:

• Property Moose
• Why Use Debt to Finance Property Investment 
• Multi-tiered Security Property Moose Mortgage
• A Beginner’s Guide to Property Moose Mortgage Lending
• Comparing Property Moose Mortgage to Other Platforms

Topics Include:

• Amir’s start and 10+ years experience in WordPress.
• The personal journey toward making WordPress Multilingual.
• A brief on Toolset.
• Remote Team Management of 90+ People
  • Team Size/s
  • Managing as a digital nomad.
    • Amir’s road to digital nomadism.
  • Letting go of tasks, delegating to employees.
  • Hiring the right people is more important than having the best procedures.
  • Set up a culture that allows your employees to succeed.
  • Come up with or adopt a simple project/person management system.
    • Fiddling with this system should not be a challenge of the business.
  • Measuring results only.
  • You hire good people.
    • Nobody wants to fail.
    • Nobody is being lazy.
    • Your people aren’t broken, something in the process is.
  • Ensure everyone is enthused about success.
    • Do so by making sure everyone is involved in the vital processes.
• Past time activities.
  • Absorbing books on psychology, HR, marketing.

Mentioned on the Show:

• WPML
• Toolset
• YouTrack
• Codeception
• blackfire.io
• Amir’s Facebook
• Amir on Twitter
• Amir’s WP Mayor Interview

Topics Include:

• James’s newest article.
  • Automatically Renewing Subscriptions
    • From business conference epiphany to reality.
    • On renewal rates.
    • The results; reaping the benefits.
    • The magic of forecasting and predictability.
• Article idea generation.
  • Where to start?
  • Maintaining momentum and enthusiasm.
  • Striking while the iron is hot on motivation.
    • Understanding your motivations.
  • Fighting imposter syndrome.
  • Defining why you are writing.
  • Measuring your audience.
  • Honing in on inspiration.

Mentioned on the Show:

• Seth Godin
• Automatically Renewing Subscriptions
• “I did it without getting on a list and so can you.”

Topics Include:

• Easily implemented blogging tips.
• Separating product or service updates from curated content.
  • Experiment with different types of content and capitalize on your strengths.
  • Set an example for your customers, lay an easy path for them to follow.
• Expanding your digital footprint.
  • “Create, connect, deploy.”
• Defining your product or service.
• The importance of proper email marketing.
  • Use your captured email addresses.
• Do you need funding?
• Depending on your end goal, stay bootstrapped if you can.
• Setting goals as a team determines the length and type of road ahead.
• Implementing affiliate revenue.
• Don’t get stuck believing the way everyone else has met success is the only way for you to succeed.
  • Constantly be testing and tweaking.

Mentioned on the Show:

• RunCloud.io
• DigitalOcean
• Linode
• Forge
• ServerPilot
• App Cloud
• Revue
• The End of the Web Hosting Industry

Topics Include:

• Introductions; how and why Laurence started Financial Thing.
• How cancer, in part, drove Laurence into the world of investing.
• The book that made investing just click.
• What is P2P Lending?
• The things that have lead to the success of, and need for, P2P.
• What interest look like on P2P platforms.
• Weighing risk of P2P.
  • Acknowledging the subjectivity of risk.
• Laurence’s experience based tips.
• Recommended platforms.
• Why Europe has a leg up in the P2P space.
• The difficulty with American money lending.
• Who is exactly lending to whom?
• Criticisms of P2P.
• Investing resources.
• Dividend investing.
• Calculating investment returns.

Mentioned on the Show:

• Financial Thing
• Investing Essentials Podcast
• The Little Book of Common Sense Investing
• LendingClub
• Prosper
• Bondora
• Mintos
• Twino
• WiseClerk.com
• 4th Way
• GoToMeeting
• Bogleheads
• Entrepreneurs on Fire Podcast
• Property Moves
• Property Partner
• Watch This Space
• Property Moose

• Agency Work
• Enterprise & Obstacles
• Multisite & SAAS
• SAAS Apps
  • Converting Plugins to SAAS Apps.
• Contributing to core.
  • WordPress precautions.
  • Predictions

Mentioned on the Show:

• How to Attract High Paying Clients for your WordPress Business
• Digital Growth
• 15 Obstacles That Enterprises Report in WordPress and Development Partners
• My Store Locator Plus
• DevRix – Software as a Service

Topics Include:

• James shares his 5 Year Pressnomics veteran experience.
  • Takeaways from this year’s conference.
  • The magic of the hallway track & after-party discussions.
• Switching things up: personal goal updates!
  • Jean keys us in on his progress toward being a professional Padel player.
  • James’s fitness check in.
  • A brief on diet and hobbies.
• Cautionary tales:
  • When to-do lists do more harm than good.
  • Limiting digital shopping can open up a surprising amount of free time.
  • Sleep vs actual rest.
    • Metrics for maximizing your time in dream land.
  • The benefits of routine and meditation.
  • Take advantage of your biological clock’s prime [functional] time.

Mentioned on the Show:

• Sleep by Nick Littlehales
• Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy

Topics Include:

• Starting in IT and account management.
• Learning to code and design.
  • Choosing a language and path.
  • Finding an outsourcing partner.
• Growing to a full-time business.
• The cost of living in Copenhagen.
• Multifaceted analysis of revenue numbers.
• One time fees versus renewals.
• The joys of a lifestyle business.
• The ins and outs of the Shopify ecosystem.
• The Shopify community.
• The state of the tech scene in Copenhagen.
• Reducing support.
• How to outsource to India successfully.
• Audience questions for Bjorn.

Mentioned on the Show:

• Bjorn’s hompage: www.forsbergplustwo.com
• Bjorn’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/FORSBERGtwo
• His partner in India: https://idyllic.co/
• Shopify Partner Program: https://www.shopify.com/partners
• Open Source Metrics app on Github: https://github.com/forsbergplustwo/partner-metrics-for-shopify
• Tyler Tringas’ book on building small SaaS businesses: https://tylertringas.com/micro-saas-ebook/

Topics Include:

• Bryce’s Journey
  • From Woothemes to Woocommerce.
  • Automattic’s Woo acquisition.
  • Digital Nomadism and Bryce’s favorite places.
    • Much travel, little work.
• WordPress in Japan.
• Why the SAS model?
  • The limitations of the plugin/product business model.
  • “Will doing this help my customers succeed?”
• How Metorik came about.
  • Weighing whether to stay with Woo or chase an alternative.
• Advice for those seeking validation to pursue their own side projects.
• Building your product or service to sustainability.
• Launching a bigger company off of a platform.
• Let your customer lifetime value be your guide.
• Adopting live chat support.
• “The future of WordPress is not in a ZIP file.”
• The technology behind building a SAS.

Mentioned on the Show:

• Metorik
• Bryce’s Twitter
• Calculating…Average Revenue per User
• What is Success for Metorik?
• Underestimating the Unknown

Topics Include:

• WP Ninjas history in hiring.
• The perspective of one who would trade mega-company stability for startup culture.
  • Lifestyle over pay rate.
• Letting growth influence your hiring.
• Hiring for attitude and aptitude.
  • Do they get it, do they want it, do they have the capacity to do it?
• Good onboarding is important.
• Don’t over engineer.

There are some many good talking point ‘deep dives’, that show notes just won’t do it justice. So, sit down as with this weeks crew as Mastermind.FM embodies its namesake.

Topics Include:

• All things WordPress.
• Through the eyes of developers.
  • Views on development and WordPress.
  • Frustrations and Challenges
  • Defining Standards
  • Rewriting in core.
• Looking forward.

In this laid back core episode, many laughs await. Our hosts lead in by jesting about Jean’s pajamas, as James elaborates on potentially getting into the physical product space, with playing cards no less.

Topics Include:

• Jean talks about his recent conference experiences.
  • AI, chat bots, customer and company ramifications.
  • Virtual Assistants
  • Self-driving Cars
  • Cryptocurrencies
  • Crowd Funding
  • James and Jean close out the topic with future conference plans.
• On Growth
  • Break points, James’s switch from team growth to revenue being the determining factor.
  • Implementing Processes
  • The consideration toward outsourcing support.
  • The Pros and cons of growth.
  • Past, present, and future challenges.
• Be aware of your product, processes, and revenue.
  • As you continue to grow, you have to be able to ensure things are being done appropriately, efficiency, and with care.

Featured on the Show:

• Help Scout
• Kustomer
• Prophet First Podcast

Topics Include:

• Getting to the top of Google search results
• On advanced SEO strategies.
• Becoming a SEO “hacker”.
• PR Outreach & Content
• What is Influencer Marketing?
• What to look for to rank higher.
• Finding holes in content.
• Addressing topical depth.
• Capitalizing on engagement.

Featured on the Show:

• Criminally Prolific 
• JustReachOut
• PR That Converts 
• On Page SEO: Anatomy
• Link Building Case Study
• SEMrush.com 

James and Jean are joined by Per Esbensen and Tomaž Zaman, cofounders of Codeable.

Topics Include:

• How Per and Tomaž met.
• Conceptualizing Codeable.
• How Codeable developed.
• Addressing startup challenges.
• Per on Elance and why he felt Tomaž was underselling himself.
  • Why paying your employees what they are worth is win-win.
• Explaining the process of signing up and/or working from Codeable.
• The ins and outs of the entire Codeable ecosystem.
• How and why outsourcing is bleeding.
  • Codeable’s solution and strategy to fight that.
• “Success is not determined by the projects you take on, but rather the projects you turn down.”
• “Quality comes at a price.”
• “Treat your business as a boutique.”
• Combating clients poaching experts & experts poaching clients.
• Coedable’s plans moving forward.

Featured on the Show:

Codeable

His methods of digital income are vast, a blogger of food & finance, Brian has worked with WordPress plugins, as a super seller on Flippa, and even as an eBay power seller.

Topics Include:

• Brian’s Journey
• How eBay introduced Brian to internet commerce.
  • CDs and DVDs were his gateway.
• From there he jumped into web-hosting & building computers.
  • “When you do things online, you quickly find out where your time is best spent.” – Brian
• How learning to outsource proved troublesome.
  • After selling the web-hosting company, Flippa was his gateway to flipping websites to make a living.
  • Followed by the creation of The IT Bros. blog, which was also sold through Flippa.
  • “The only way to learn on the internet, is by making mistakes.” – Brian
• How Brian is always blogging, and hasn’t stopped.
• On Brian’s cooperative business partnership with his brother.
  • Their philosophies and strategies.
• Outsourcing content.
  • The value of a good writer.
• Saving time on social media.
  • Tips to grow your traffic.
• The key to success is research, before posting.
• What drives Brian at Kinsta.
• On WordPress web performance audits.
• Brian’s favorite apps and plugins.
• Plans for the future.

Featured on the Show:

• Quuu
• Smarter Queue
• Gonzales WordPress plugin
• My Theme Shop
• WP Coupons
• perfmatters
• Penny Bros.
• woorkup
• No Gluten blog

Dave has been a developer for 20 years, and has been working in the WordPress ecosystem since 2009. He also cohosts the Rogue Startups Podcast with Craig Hewitt, the man behind Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin and Podcaster Motor.

Topics Include:

• James & Dave talk the how, when, and why of podcasting.
• Rogue Startups Podcast anticipates their 1 year anniversary.
• What makes a good podcast stand out against competition.
  • Why would you start/maintain multiple podcasts?
  • Weighing verbal communication vs written.
  • Why Dave believes podcasting has made him a “better business person.”
• James and his mischief bringing.
• Dave’s acquisition of Recaptured.io
  • Moving outside of WordPress.
  • Brief talk on Magento.
• Comparing and contrasting running a WordPress business and running a SAAS (Software as a Service).
  • What lead Dave to the SAAS model.
• How the search and acquisition process happened for Dave.
• How dealing with legacy customers can be tricky.
• Playing the numbers game, and veritably gambling on business.
  • Business is always risky.
  • Be smart about making the financial decisions that set you up for success.
• How Dave balances managing plugins and his SAAS.
  • Spoiler: Believe it, or not, he’s not a wizard.
  • The key: a great team with diverse capabilities and tasks.
• “As support goes, so does sales.” – James
• Making sure your team isn’t bottled-necked by something they need from you, or someone else.
  • Juggling…in the literal and business sense.
  • Adjusting for when things go awry.
• “As a CEO, I ask myself, how do I set my team up for success?” – James
• Looking forward, Dave’s short-mid term focuses.

You can find Dave on Twitter @daverodenbaugh.

Featured on the Show:

• Business Directory Plugin
• AWPCP
• Recapture.io
• Rogue Startups Podcast
• Seriously Simple Podcasting
• Podcaster Motor
• Magento

Jean and James are joined by Danny Donchev for professional advice, myths, tips, tricks, and proven strategies that are bound to help you fight and befriend the necessary evil that is SEO.

So be sure and join Mastermind.fm for this great episode, and absolutely have your notepads at the ready!

Topics Include:

• A briefing on Danny’s experience and over 10 years working with SEO.
• An aside on why to avoid Udemy.
• The importance of choosing your keywords carefully.
• How to raise in the rankings.
• How readable does your URL need to be?
• Competing for unique titles.
• Why descriptions are, and can be your saving grace.
• All about slugs.
• Observing the power of star ratings and click-through rate.
• Will your post to be a featured snippet?
• Creating better content.
• Convincing Google that your site is the best search result.
• On theme content & duplicate content.
• Categories & tags.
• Are banners hurting you?
• Updating old posts, the how and why of the resurrection technique.
• Room to grow; SEO guided tips for any website.

Featured on the Show:

• Fortunelords.com
• WordPress SEO – The Definitive Guide 2017
• Keyword Finder – Keyword Research and Analysis Tool

Bring a notepad and get ready to jot down some great advice, as James and Jean are joined by Jason Cohen of WP Engine.

Get ready for a guest host who will leave you greedy for more and more of his awesome “knowledge bombs”.

Topics Include:

• Jason’s 20 years of startups.
• The Story of WP Engine
• Why Entrepreneurship
  • “Start with what you want and optimize for that.”
  • “The best form of advice is to help someone think for themselves…” – Jason
• The commonality between having children and running a business.
• Picking your battles.
  • Choosing which problems to solve in what order.
• What statistics say about startups.
  • “You have to ask yourself, do you want a cofounder?” – Jason
  • Answer what feels right to you.
• Jason’s experience as a stay-at-home dad.
• Growing your community.
• Importance of point-of-view, purpose, & where the market is going.
  • Prepare for your ideas to be wrong.
    • “Strong opinions weakly held.”
• On changing your own role within your company.
  • “Why build a company if you don’t like what you do everyday?” -Jason
  • Be excited, don’t get burnt out.
  • “The state of mind you are in doesn’t have to be terminal, you can change it.” -James
  • On “The tour of duty.”
• Defining superpowers!
  • The difference between a superpower and excellence.
    • You CAN be burnt out by things you are excellent at.
    • However, a superpower will never wear you down.
  • Hiring for a superpower is one of the best things you can do.
• Be mindful of the ‘ego’ component of being a CEO, or equivalent.
  • Have a big ego, but don’t let that drive major decisions.
• How do you go about evaluating all of the above, systematically?
• Being smart about 1-on-1 meetings.
• Keeping a journal and tracking when you are most productive and happy.
• What is ‘Coach mode’?
  • How to approach it.
  • How to hone it.
• Is it more valuable to obtain new customers, or add a feature?
• What is the one thing that will impact your business the most, that you need?
  • Focus on THAT.
• Do you have employees who can be better utilized in other areas?
• Try asking, “If you had a magic wand, what would you do?”

Featured on the Show:

• SmartBear
• WP Engine
• 37 Signals (Which is now Basecamp)
• Jason’s Blog
• Jason’s Twitter

Topics Include:

• What Mastermind.FM has done for James and Jean on a personal level.
• James’s “obsessive” revamp of his recording office, now turned full studio.
• Jean “Hurricane Fighter” Galea on his U.S. trip.
• The joy of podcasting.
  • The dynamic of personalization.
  • Staying on schedule consistently.
  • The struggle for engagement.
  • Surprising analytics.
  • Upcoming plans for the podcast.
  • Plug for James’s “Adventures in Businessing” podcast.
• Lessons learned from 2016, as business owners.
  • Personal growth.
  • Jean’s newfound interest in bitcoin.
  • James’s experience in launching a product.
• Goals Met
• Thanks to the sponsors.
• Aims for 2017, keyword: Focus

Karim exudes charisma; being a service focused individual, he provides a unique perspective away from the usual product focused interviews Mastermind.FM has had in the past.

Topics Include:

• How Karim’s upbringing, heritage, and travels played a role in shaping his business philosophies.
• His history with architecture and studies in Rome.
• How a curious phone call, while working for an ISP,  lead Karim into helping build a website for Nissan.
• Selling METNET to USWeb.
  • How USWeb turned Karim’s life upside-down.
• Website Production vs Strategy
• Bridging the gap between American, European, and Asian culture.
• How Karim’s architecture roots fortified his need to build things that last.
• His small business experience.
  • “If you are going to fail, fail fast.” – Karim
• Testing the waters of agency work.
  • Services: Cultural vs Institutional
  • Cultivating a small agency.
• How running a lifestyle business allowed Karim to step away from his company for the year leading up to his father’s death.
  • Mourning and moving on.
• The dynamics of exiting & acquisition.
  • Adapting/transitioning client culture.
• On closing Veloware.
  • Which lead to Karim finding his business partner.
• “Finding the right companies that aren’t exiting for the wrong reasons.”
• The value of partnering with a company you have no intention of acquiring.
• Structure & having the right team.
• Be an icebreaker; striking up a conversation with those you don’t know, be it in your business or personal life.
  • A philosophy that lead to Karim having a pleasant random conversation with the lead guitarist of Los Lobos.
• Attending conferences outside of the WordPress community.
• “Have fun!” & “Partner and hire for your weaknesses.” – Karim
• Looking forward, and the intent to return for a round 2 interview with Mastermind.FM!

Featured on the Show:

• Karim’s website
• Crowd Favorite
• The Bureau of Digital

Topics Include:

• Analysis of Malta’s digital community.
• Jean’s goals for the New Year and his love of the sport, Padel.
• Lifestyle Business vs “Business-Business”
  • Defining Priorities & Pursuits
• Building a Team
  • Becoming a hands-off owner for the benefit of the team.
  • Growing the individual.
  • The continued exploration into the key differences of a local & remote team.
    • Conclusion: Established Team Culture.
  • “Be willing to take the bullet and always pass the praise.” – James
• How WordPress has “opened the door” to entrepreneurial diversity.
  • Acknowledging the average developer turnover.
  • Experiment, take risks, seize opportunities.
• What is success for You?
  • How defining your own success does a wonderful job of laying your path before you.
  • Should age affect perception of success?
    • Regret is natural, but don’t let it consume you.
• How status and anxiety are tied, and why you should work to mentally separate them.

Featured on the Show:

• The Malta Digital Nomads Facebook Group
• Status Anxiety by Alain De Bottom

(Nope, not THAT Chris Wallace.)

This is the Chris of Lift UX, Faithmade, ChurchThemes, Remote Jobs, etc…who is just as good, if not better than THAT  Chris Wallace.

(No offense to the Fox News anchor.)

Topics Include:

• James inquires about Andy Wilkerson’s recent acquisition of UpThemes and Chris’s branding.
• Chris talks faith, in correlation to his businesses.
• Chris talks about working with AMC and developing their second screen experiences.
  • Pioneering a new way to watch and interact with TV.
• What’s next in line for Chris and team.
• James talks plans for his own team at WP Ninjas come 2017.
• Working with a small team
  • Team Culture
  • Personal Challenges
  • “I’m not building a business. I’m building a team, and THEY’RE building a business.” – James
  • Chris on functioning as a remote team.
  • James on having local office oriented team.
  • What is culture?
    • “What you allow, what you disallow, what you celebrate, what you discipline.”
    • “You can’t over communicate.” – Chris

Featured on the Show:

• UpThemes
• Lift UX
• Faithmade
• Remote Jobs
• ChurchThemes
• Pagely
• You can follow Chris on his Twitter @chriswallace
• …or at his personal blog, here!

Blogger, consultant, motivational speaker, etc., Chris brings his experience and perspective to Mastermind.fm for your listening pleasure.

No matter your business, you’d be hard pressed to walk away from a talk with Chris and not learn something of value.

Topics Include:

• Chris’s take on CaboPress.
  • Motivations
  • Intention
  • Fruits of the Conference
    • Takeaways
• Pricing
  • Geographic Pricing
• Segmentation
• SAAS (Software as a Service)
  • Chris teases an upcoming solution.

Featured on the Show:

• CaboPress
• Chris’s Professional Website

Jean attended Web Summit in Portugal, James went to Cabo for CaboPress!

So, for your listening pleasure, the two of them sit down and jive about what they learned, big takeaways, and critiques of the conferences themselves.

Topics Include:

• Thorough CaboPress Overview
  • The unique approach to the session-less vacation conference.
  • Very Exclusive, with around 50 attendees.
  • Takeaways are applicable to any business.
  • Discussions on:
    • Branding
    • Hiring
    • Founder issues
    • Running/Building a SAAS (Software as a Service)
    • Acquisitions
    • Pricing
• Brief Web Summit Overview
  • Multi-conference approach
    • 1 ticket = access to 21 conferences
    • Over 50, 000 attendees!
  • Forward looking, all inclusive conference.
  • Featured something for virtually everyone, be it entrepreneur, big business, the tech savvy, analysts, etc.

Featured on the Show:

CaboPress

Web Summit

LifterLMS

PressNomics

Other Impressions on CaboPress:

Robby McCullough

Steph Wells

David Payette

James and Jean are back at it dialogue style, as you, the listener, are treated to pro-tips that are simple, often overlooked, and immensely beneficial.

In this episode, Mastermind.FM asks and elaborates on, “What’s your vision?”
“What’s the purpose of your company, and you as a business owner?”

Topics Include:

• The difference between a vision and a mission.
  • Defining both.
  • What you should be doing to promote each.
  • Finding values in the mission, or mission statement.
• Uniting your team by demonstrating your values.
  • “It’s good to be good.” Live it.
• Helping others be successful
  • Proving the best products, resources, and services available.
• How all of the above is ultimately cyclical.
• Tips on how to proceed in finding your mission and vision.
  • Determine what’s important.
  • What do you want to accomplish?
  • “Don’t be boring.”
  • “Be a cheerleader.”
• If you have a good team, you will be surrounded by good ideas.
• Correlating values and accountability.
• Just because a mission statement may sound generic, doesn’t mean it lacks heart.
  • Personalize your mission.
• Positivity, optimism, James’ essential core & how that drives him.
• Being organic.
• The Decision Matrix & why it’s awesome.

Switching things up in closing, both our hosts let loose some candid humor, letting their hair down, humbly requesting your continued feedback and input.
You, the listeners, have made this possible.
So too it is indeed, that you all continue to be the true drive behind Mastermind.FM.

Featured on the Show:

Apply Filters Podcast

Decision Matrix (further iteration)

Robert is a major player in advocacy for WordPress security, and owns the No. 1 WordPress Monitoring & Audit Trail Plugin. Additionally, aside from his own security blog, Robert is also a guest blogger on many web-security blogs and websites.

Topics Include:

• Robert’s journey with WordPress.
  • It all started as a hobby.
  • Robert developed on the side, but never considered himself a developer.
  • At the same time he had a WordPress security consultancy business.
  • He began working with a friend, but development was sporadic.
  • After searching on a shoestring budget, Robert started working with a part-time dev.
  • Started his premium add-on model.
  • A multitude of competitor plugins were launched.
    • His developer saw this as a sign of defeat and jumped ship.
    • To make things worse, competitors knew popular people in the community and received a lot of coverage.
  • Down but not out, Robert considered pulling the plug.
    • Unstable sales resulted in a personal lost of $8,000 in the first year.
    • Obligated to increase the sales – Robert sought to expose the add-ons without “in your face” advertising.
    • His execution resulted in increased revenue, sales, and popularity. $30+k revenue this year.
  • WP Security Audit Log is now the Number 1 plugin amongst its competitors (in terms of active downloads).
• Lessons learned:
  • Never give up, but be realistic!
  • Numbers/statistics are a good indication of how successful your product will be.
  • Keep an eye on the competition, though don’t let that hold back a good idea or plan.
  • It’s important to be first on the market, but it’s not the end of the world if you’re not.
  • Success is not easy! If it were easy, everyone would be successful.
• The Plugin/Security:
  • Hardening
  • Blocking (firewalls, etc.)
  • Control (privileges/permissions)
  • Logging
    • Keeping a watchful eye.
    • Easing the process of troubleshooting.
    • Detecting possible attack attempts.
    • Doing forensics work in the unfortunate case of a hack cleanup.

Featured on the Show:

• WP WhiteSecurity
• WP Security Audit Log
• Ninja Demo

With Marco at hand, they discuss stock, dividends, and profits from a business, as they answer tough questions, like, “Should you reinvest, buy other WordPress businesses, or diversify?”

Topics Include:

• Marco’s story, his travels, his studies, how he found success.
• How Marco maintains revenue with his books & video courses, which all started with self-publishing.
• Environment matters; using your destination to aid your business and productivity.
• Lifestyle Design, and how it fosters a simplistic & positive philosophy.
  • Defining what you want out of life.
• Try biting off more than you can chew, when making a life plan, pushing yourself to work harder.
• Why you should invest money as an entrepreneur.
• The difference between investing on a shorter term, versus long term.
• Marco’s style of investing: defining The Online Empire model.
• Explaining and simplifying stocks.
• Why diversifying your stock options is one of the best things you can do.
• The reason Marco only invests in dividend paying stocks.
• Weighing higher risk against higher returns.
• The best Peer-to-Peer lending sites in Europe.
• Bit Coin, and what it has in common with Peer-to-Peer lending.
  • High risk, yet higher yields.
• Marco’s recommended platforms.
• Jean inquires about Marco’s negative experiences with investing.
• Real Estate, and why it really is the best and most basic investment.
  • Real Estate crowd funding in Europe.
• On selling your investment.
• The most recent addition to Marco’s investment portfolio: Profitable Websites.
• Marco elaborates and explains all of his sources of revenue, his lifestyle.
  • Why he keeps 3 months in physical currency.
• Marco’s wisdom regarding Hong Kong.
• Abiding by CFC (Controlled Foreign Corporation) Rules.
• Lastly, the benefits of having a podcast, why Marco started his own.

Featured on the Show:

• Marco’s Portfolio & Revenue
• Marco’s Video Courses & Books
• Digital Empire Podcast
• The Lending Club
• Prosper
• Bondora
• Saving Stream
• Mintos
• The House Crowd
• Property Moose
• Flippa
• Empire Flippers
• FE International
• Quiet Light Brokerage

That’s right everyone, in this episode of Mastermind.fm, James and Jean interview professional consultant, Curtis McHale.

Curtis is a man of many mottos, but one that undoubtedly personifies is, “Help people run the business they want, so they can live the life they want to live.”

Specializing in ecommerce and membership sites, the crew dives into what this gentleman knows best:

• The one-to-many business model.
• The importance of personal mission statements to achieve success.
• Measure your opportunities and business potential based off what you want for yourself.
• Just because you aren’t online, doesn’t mean you can’t be productive.
• Software Curtis uses for running his consulting business.
• Addressing and weighing whether you are the right “fit” for your client, and vice versa.
• Taking the extra time to develop a interpersonal dialogue with your clients can go a long way.
• Managing work and hobbies.
• Why taking care of yourself mentally, by optimizing “wind down” time, is vital.
• On Curtis’ books and generating income in the info space.
• Trust: quantifying the “trust scale”, and how to rise on it.
• How trust guarantees clients.
• Jean has Curtis detail some of the offline work he does with his clients.
• A creative use for text expander.
• Curtis’ philosophy of “write it down, or it didn’t happen”.
• How “personal and awesome” reaching out to someone in the physical realm can be.
• Taking advantage of opportunities to commune with peers and other professionals.

End of show giveaway! Mastermind.fm is giving away one copy of each of Curtis’ books. To participate in your chance to win, just send us an email podcast@mastermind.fm (it can be a question, comment, what-have-you), and we will choose lucky individuals randomly.

Featured on the Show:

• Curtis McHale’s website
• Contactually
• Calendly
• WP-Tonic
• WP Site Care
• Philip Morgan Consulting
• Text Expander
• Affiliate WP
• Easy Digital Downloads
• Starting a Mastermind
• BeachPress
• Big Snow Tiny Conf 

Since Jean’s conference was cut short, the WP Ninjas crew shows Jean and his wife their Southern hospitality, and their lovably cheesy sense of humor.

So be sure and join the whole team in this very special episode, as they “let their hair down”, have some fun, and even bare their souls.

Topics Include:

• WP Ninjas team introduction.
• James has Jean describe his perception of what the WP Ninjas “day-to-day” is like.
  • Table tennis, LOTS of table tennis.
• Jean wonders how the office layout was determined or assigned.
  • The benefits and challenges of working as a team in one large room.
  • How the team combats distractions and/or interruptions.
  • Plans for their setup as the team continues to grow.
• On considering a hybrid model of distributed and in-office team members.
• WordCamps and deciding who attends.
  • Why attending and speaking at WordCamps is important.
  • The origin of the official/unofficial WordCamp Atlanta 2016 mascot: The Kenatee.
• How the team accomplishes 8 hours of support work in 1 hour every morning.
  • On keeping consistency in writing across documentation written by the whole team.
  • The benefits of having the development team work support and write documentation.
• How working for WP Ninjas has changed each members’ life and perspective.

Featured on the Show:

• WP Ninjas
• Ninja Forms
• Ping Pong/Table Tennis!
• LoopConf
• WordCamp Atlanta 2016
• The Kenatee
• 30 Rock

As such, James gets quite candid about launching WP Ninjas’ tremendously challenging work on Ninja Forms, with the release of their very own Ninja Forms 3.0.

Covered are things like: the successes, stepping stones, marketing, feedback, the competition, and fear itself.

Topics include:

• The epiphany that innovation is key.
• How rebranding & reimagining form building has led to WP Ninjas’ sizeable achievement.
• Jean has James detail the time and monetary investment that went into 3.0 before release.
  • The hefty and worthwhile expense of hiring a professional UI company.
    • How to get in touch with people who provide such a service.
    • How a mutual love of the classic comedian/actor/singer Danny Kaye sealed the deal on James’ chosen UI company.
  • The development & opportunity cost.
    • Keeping existing users happy during 3.0’s lengthy development.
  • Predicting optimum sales “seasons” in the plugin community.
  • Preparing for low income months.
  • Fighting to battle toward continued growth in user base.
• How James made his peace with the anxiety of working toward something so important.
• James’ hindsight clarifies the value of preparing a budget.
• Contrasting product revamps as an entrepreneur vs. the process of doing so under an investor facing potentially exponential loss.
• Understanding and quantifying support costs.
• How transparency can save face.
• The lengths James and team went to, to include others in the celebration of launching Ninja Forms 3.0.
  • Building and harnessing anticipation.
  • Timing is everything.
• The results of all the hard work
  • The issue of having 50+ add-ons that had to work on the new schema.
  • The positives of users being able to roll back to a previous build, should problems arise.
  • Managing the inevitable increase in support load & prioritizing paid users.
  • Defining and admitting failures.
  • The fruits of their labor.
• James’ advice for those going through a similar process.
  • Seize an adventurous outlook and take risks.
  • Never be afraid to ask “What if?”

Featured on the Show:

• Ninja Forms
• WP Ninjas
• Dribbble
• Danny Kaye

Additionally, the technical side of the Ninja Forms rewrite can found here in Episode 14.

Andy is the president of Parallelus, UpThemes, and creator of the Runway framework for WordPress.

So, join Mastermind.fm as we walk through all that which has led to Andy’s acquisition of UpThemes, and any trials, lessons, or ordeals along the way.

Topics Include:

• Venting support frustrations via James’ “patented” company communication technique that can help defuse a bad situation.
• Andy’s history and experience with Theme Forest and Envato.
• Hot tips for inclusion of unique features to make your theme stand out and attract users to your product.
  • Which may not be as difficult as your think!
• Andy’s personal account of the transition and acquisition of UpThemes.
  • Insight into his mindset going into the process of leveraging value.
  • The critical role of planning stages when moving forward.
  • Deciding on a  plan of action to make the acquisition worth the investment.

• Also discussed is Andy’s objective consideration in striving to harness potential and maximize the grow of his opportunity.
• Being aware of the need to foster direction.
  • Both amongst employees eager to move into the next task, or a project in general.

• The importance of analyzing what you are as a company.
  • Your goal/s for the near and distant future.

• The deceptive comfort of “an easy acquisition.”
• Topic on security and handling users properly.
• Advice for budding theme developers on what to expect from their endeavors.
  • Requirements
  • Submission Times
  • Turnover rate in the Envato & WordPress.com marketplace.
    • How long does it take to develop a theme on average?
    • What defines a monetarily successful theme?
    • Expect to be pulled away from starting a new project, simply from the obligation to work support.
    • Don’t let a sales dip lead to discouragement.

• The importance and necessity of a backup plan!

Featured on the Show:

• Parallelus
• UpThemes
• Runway framework
• WordPress.com
• Theme Forest
• Envato

David and Jean both consider themselves to be digital nomads, while James prefers to keep his feet in one place for the most part. Listen up and we’ll dive into what digital nomadism means , how David and Jean got started with the nomad lifestyle, resources for others that want to travel themselves, and more! Shownotes are below but as always, tune in to hear the full story and all the exotic places these guys have been, and meet the shark that bit the internet (no really, you need to listen to this one)!

What is Digital Nomadism?

David defines a digital nomad as any digital worker who doesn’t have a home base or headquarters. The digital nomad travels from place to place, often living out of a suitcase, going wherever their business takes them and working remotely the whole way. James compares it to the spirit of entrepreneurism itself, moving from place to place as an entrepreneur moves from idea to idea.

Questions for David (& Jean!)

Getting Started as a Nomad

• How did you get started on WordPress, development, and the nomad lifestyle?
  • (David started out in Austria and, after completing an obligatory stint in the military, hopped on a plane for Thailand one day)
• Jean, how did you get started being a nomad yourself?
  • (Jean made his first move from Malta, sick of living on an island as a young man, to Spain)
• Are there resources that either of you (David or Jean) would recommend to anyone thinking about taking up the traveling lifestyle?
• Where are you right now David? Where are some of the other places you’ve traveled recently?
• Jean where are some of the places you’ve been in your travels?

The Nomad Lifestyle

• What are the best places for this kind of lifestyle?
• Is there space in digital nomadism for family? Can you do this with children?
• How to you remain productive without the typical daily 9-5 routine?
• Does it take some “settling in time” each time you arrive in a new location to become productive?
• How does the type of city you’re in affect productivity? Is it tough to work full time in a popular vacation destination, for example?
• This lifestyle sounds very expensive- is it as expensive as it sounds and if so how do you deal with that?

Working Nomads

• What kind of work are you doing right now, David?
• What do you think makes WordPress so well suited for the digital nomad lifestyle?
• Does the community that has grown up around WordPress make fitting in as you travel easier or harder?
• Is access to internet while traveling problematic?
• What is the experience like working with other people while traveling, finding partners to work with?
• How do you go through the hiring process as you travel?
• How do you put the word out that you’re hiring as you travel?
• What does “typical” office culture look like for a nomad team?
• How do you handle paying your team?
• What are some of your favorite productivity apps?

Featured on the Show:

• Fatcat Apps
• Zapier for Ninja Forms
• Nomad List
• Greenback Expat Tax Services
• Quiz Cat
• WP Migrate DB Pro
• Authentic Jobs
• Paypal
• Bitcoin
• Trello
• Slack
• Github
• Headspace
• Microsoft Outlook
• Calm

Updates

• James talks WordCamp Nashville
• Jean talks LoopConf in Fort Lauderdale & WordCamp Orlando

Onboarding

James was inspired by observations at WordCamp Nashville. Seeing users meet a product for the first time, use it, feel it, experience it for themselves, he realized they’re much more motivated to give something new a try. That’s the essence of onboarding- not just getting a new team member oriented or as pertains to a product, but a broader sense of the term that involves phases of a user’s experience.

How do you make sure people get to know about your product and get that initial experience? James and Jean cover:

What is onboarding?

• Just what is onboarding? How do we think about it?
• How does onboarding look from the outside with marketing and advertising?
• What can user onboarding look like?

WordPress.org as onboarding

• The importance of visuals- screenshots and videos
• Breaking away from the boilerplate
• WordPress.org support as onboarding into larger support system/documentation

5 steps for thinking through the onboarding process

1. Starting with the end goal in mind- what are we doing here?
2. Learning to think like the people you’re trying to reach.
3. Being guided by user feedback- ask questions and challenge what you think you already know.
4. Testing and refining
5. Listen, listen, listen! Customers, support team, reviews, social media, listen to everything you can find!

Featured on the Show:

• WordCamp Nashville
• LoopConf

Talking Business

If you’ve been with us for the last couple weeks, you’ve noticed that James hasn’t been. He’s been off monitoring the launch of the newest iteration of Ninja Forms, Ninja Forms THREE. It was a massive overhaul, a complete rewriting of the codebase, and required his hands-on attention during the launch period. Welcome back, James!

On Jean’s end of things, he’s just released a major update to the EDD Bookings extension, adding compatibility to Easy Digital Downloads’ own Front End Submissions extension.

Both Jean and James give their take on the Apple Conference. Listen in to hear what they think!

WordPress News

GoDaddy Acquisition of ManageWP

The buzz around the WordPress community right now is the GoDaddy purchase of Manage WP. The news has been met with a lot of mixed reviews both from people very excited about the acquisition and, on the polar opposite side, quite a bit of venom. GoDaddy of course is a major webhost that has recently broken into managed WordPress hosting. ManageWP is a smaller, focused managed WordPress hosting company.

Both Jean and James see some real upside to the acquisition with modest internal reservation. Listen in to hear their thoughts and rationale, and what they feel the acquisition means for WordPress!

Headway Themes

News has been buzzing out of Headway Themes in the last couple of weeks about rumors of staff not getting paid and an uncertain future. While no one is absolutely certain about the circumstances, James’ take here is a lesson in clear communication. The silence out of the company is breathing life to rumors.

Hear the rest of the story, and more, in the podcast!

Featured on the Show:

• Ninja Forms THREE
• EDD Bookings
• EDD Front End Submissions
• GoDaddy
• ManageWP
• Headway Themes

The whole team behind these projects works in one office. They are based in Chisinau, Moldova, and strive to have a family atmosphere based on an open communication policy where everybody’s contribution is welcome.

In our discussion we discuss various topics such as:

• Scaling by starting complementary businesses
• The advantages of having everyone in one office
• Attending WordCamps
• Audience and revenue stats
• The myth of the “overnight success”
• Challenges for affiliates promoting Envato marketplace products
• Traffic sources (they don’t host any themes on WordPress.com)

As an addendum to the podcast itself, here’s the answer to a question I didn’t have time to ask. I was curious about how they came up with the names of their businesses, so here’s Eugeniu’s answer:

TeslaThemes – in honor of Nikola Tesla. He made a great impact on the world, his ideas resonate with us even nowadays.

Greedeals – Comes from Greedy, deals for greedy people.

WPMatic – comes from 4matic, a Mercedes invention. It keeps you stable on the road. We make sure you have a wonderful and stable experience with WordPress.

Here are some photos from the office of Tesla Themes in Moldova:

I thoroughly enjoyed this episode and am positively impressed with what they’ve managed to achieve and the way they’ve done.

Mastermind.fm is proudly sponsored by

Marcel and Eugeniu also have a special offer for us. They are offering 50% on any TeslaThemes product and 50% off the first month on WPmatic. Customisations will cost $30 instead of $57.

Thanks for this special offer for Mastermind.fm’s audience! To get the discounts all you need to do is leave a comment at the end of this post. You can ask Marcel and Eugeniu questions or just let us know how you enjoyed this episode, and we’ll send you a special coupon code that will enable you to unlock these discounts.

To your success,

Jean

“You never change something by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” – Buckminster Fuller

“In a mad world, only the mad are sane.”  ― Akira Kurosawa

Until I met Mitchell I only knew about Bitcoin in general terms. He persuaded me to set up a Bitcoin wallet and use it for an international funds transfer. I was very impressed and wrote about the experience on my blog. From there onwards I have kept close tabs on Bitcoin and have been reading up on things gradually to widen my knowledge on this very interesting subject and all the fields it affects (banking, governance, money, cryptography, states etc.).

I highly encourage you to check out our recommended resources below as well as listening to the episode till the very end of course (we also have a great giveaway from CyberChimps in this episode).

Mastermind.fm is proudly sponsored by

In today’s episode, Cyberchimps are giving away one year of free access to the CyberChimps Club (worth $97). There will be 3 giveaway winners so make sure you enter to have a good chance of winning. All you need to do is leave a comment at the end of this post. Let us know if you enjoyed the discussion and fire away any questions about Bitcoin. You will have the chance to win the Cyberchimps club membership that includes:

1. 42 Themes and Plugins.
2. New releases as well for that one year
3. Access to Downloads, Updates and Support – for as long as you are an active Club Member.
4. Exclusive bonuses like 1 month Plus support, stock images and much more.

Here are some popular CyberChimps themes:

• Responsive Pro – https://cyberchimps.com/store/responsivepro/
• iFeaturePro – https://cyberchimps.com/store/ifeaturepro/
• eShopper Pro – https://cyberchimps.com/store/e-shopper-pro/
• MyHome – https://cyberchimps.com/store/myhome/
• Parallax Pro – https://cyberchimps.com/store/parallax-pro/

Mentioned on today’s episode

• Kraken 
• Coindesk
• Bitpay

Mitchell’s recommended resources:

• Making a wallet: https://www.contravex.com/2014/03/14/on-making-high-entropy-bitcoin-paper-wallets/
• Bitcoin wiki: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page

More advanced:

• Bitcoin assets (community): https://bitcoin-assets.com/
  Bitcoin foundation: https://thebitcoin.foundation/
• Video documentary: The Money Masters

Jean’s recommended resources

• Book: Digital Gold
• Book: A History of Money
• Book: Money: An Authorized Biography

I hope you enjoy learning about Bitcoin as much as I did. As usual, if you have any feedback, please get in touch with us, we love to hear from our audience!

To your success,

Jean

This was a super fun and interesting interview and Zack has lots of great advice. He’s experimented with several marketing and advertising strategies and we can all learn from his experiences to take some smart shortcuts in choosing the best promotional methods for our plugins.

Zack also talks about his favourite WordPress conferences. We both met Zack at Pressnomics earlier this year and this interview is a follow-up based on the great discussions we had there.

Questions we asked Zack

• How did you get into WordPress and full-time development?
• How do you select projects to monetize?
• You build Gravity related plugins, but Gravity Forms doesn’t have an “official” community development model around Gravity products. How does that work out with the Gravity team?
• How was the transition as your work began to be noticed by Gravity?
• How do you feel affiliate links being removed from the WordPress repo affected the WordPress ecosystem?
• How do you feel about the lack of an official WordPress market for premium products? Should WordPress have an official monetization model?
• What can you tell us about the progress of GravityView as a product?
• What does the structure of development look like for moving GravityView forward?
• What can you tell us about your website and promotional ideas?
• What has been the most effective method of content marketing for you?
• You’ve had success with Google Adwords pay-per-click. Can you expand on your methods?
• Do you have any good resources for folks who would like to learn Google Adwords?
• Do you manage the campaigns yourself or do you have someone do that for you?
• Do you have specific marketing techniques to guide customer interaction?
• What is the one piece of advice you would give to someone who is thinking about starting their own business?
• What would you do differently before starting your own business if you had it to do over again?
• What is the most exciting thing about your business right now?
• What’s you favorite tool that you think our listeners might not have heard of that they could benefit from?
• Do you have any books you’d recommend our listeners read?
• What’s your favorite conference?

Featured On The Show:

• Gravity Forms
• GravityView
• Easy Digital Downloads
• WP Rocket
• Envato
• Math by GravityView
• Jonathan Mann
• Appleworld.today
• CartHook.com
• Getdrip.com
• Segment.com
• Waffle.io
• PressNomics
• CaboPress
• Google Analytics Academy

Types of Hosting

• Basic hosting
• Managed hosting
• Managed WordPress hosting

What’s the difference? Typically, basic hosting simply gives you a place to run your website from, and leaves everything else to you. Managed hosting takes the responsibility of maintenance, security, updates, etc on their shoulders.  Managed WordPress does all of that too, but they specialize in WordPress hosting management.

Some Tips to Keep in Mind

• Research your host! Make sure they are actually the people running the hosting software, not just someone reskinning a control panel with their own branding!
• A good host doesn’t always have to manage their own hardware, but they should definitely be in charge of their own hosting software, database management, etc.

Is Managed Hosting Expensive?

It can be, but it isn’t always. It’s often done in tiers just like regular hosting. You can get managed WordPress hosting within almost any budget, you just have to shop around.

What Host is Best?

There isn’t an answer to this question that isn’t unique to your needs. Jean uses Digital Ocean because they fit his unique needs. James uses Pagely because they meet his unique needs. What host you want should also be based on your needs.

How About a Shared Host?

On a shared host, you share hardware resources with other websites on the same hardware. It is a great way to start and is really cheap. You should consider it a starting point only for any business though, something that you’re going to grow out of. As your traffic grows, you’re going to quickly outgrow the shared hardware resources. There’s also a security risk, as other websites that share the hardware with you can potentially compromise your own security.

Email

Email often is either not covered in a hosting plan or not reliable through the host, but is an essential consideration for your website. Jean prefers Gmail, Zoho Mail, and Sendgrid as alternatives. James mentions Mandrill and Mailgun. Essentially, if you’re looking for a service that will allow you to send bulk email, you need to find a transactional email service. If you’re not sending in bulk, WordPress SMTP plugins are a good alternative.

Backups?

Yes. Do them. Jean strongly recommends you take responsibility of website backups for yourself. Even with a very reliable host, disasters can happen. Make regular high quality backups on your own and in addition to your host. Do be mindful that some hosts ban backup plugins that make whole site backups and store them on their servers.

Featured On The Show:

• WP Engine
• Pagely
• SiteGround
• DigitalOcean
• GoDaddy
• Zoho Mail
• SendGrid
• Mandrill
• Mailgun
• BlueHost
• GravityView

Podcasting Style/Theme Ideas

• Solo, two-person, three-person shows?
• Interviews
• Question-Answer
• Leadership oriented
• Business oriented
• WordPress oriented
• Gaming
• History
• Investment

Mastermind Production Cycle

• Meet once a week to talk shop
• Audio recorded separately
• Ad spots for sponsors recorded separately
• Separate audio tracks are put together & finished by Jean’s wife

Benefits of Having a Podcast

• Getting in touch with people on a deeper level (Jean)
• Great way to build personal brand (James)
• Allows users to get to know the people behind the business (Jean)
• Learn how to make segways (ha, ha… Jean)

Hardware Setup

Jean: an Audio Technica ATR 2100 mic on stand + Bose QC 20 noise cancelling headphones

James: RODE Podcaster mic w/ built in popfilter on desk arm attachment + Apple earbuds

Software

• Audacity for audio recording
• Skype for video
• Garageband for editing

Featured On The Show:

• Hardly Casual Podcast
• Leadership Podcast by Andy Stanley
• Current HardCore History by Dan Carlin
• InvestED: The Rule #1 Podcast
• Ask Pat Podcast
• Audio Technica ATR 2100 Microphone
• RODE Podcaster Microphone
• Bose QC 20 Noise Cancelling Headphones
• Audacity
• Hindenburg
• EO Fire Podcast by John Lee Dumas
• Podcasters’ Paradise
• WP in 1 Month

Software for Development

• Slack: Jean and James both use Slack in their development workflow. It’s also a mainstay of general communication as well. Check out the audio for a breakdown of how Slack channels are set up for Jean and James’ teams!
• Github: for storing code (James)
• Source Tree: for interacting with Git (James)
• Atlassian Suit: Jean’s team uses a lot of Atlassian software, some of which are listed below.
• Bitbucket: for storing code (Jean)
• Jira: managing development issues (Jean)
• Confluence: company notice board and on-boarding (Jean)
• KinHR: team management and on-boarding (James)
• PHP Storm and Sublime Text: writing code (James)

Team Slack Channels We Follow

• Post Status (Jean and James)
• Advanced WP (Jean)
• Official WordPress Dev Chat (Jean)
• WP Nashville (James)
• WP Chattanooga (James)

Productivity Software

• Trello: for project workflow management  (Jean and James)
• Skype: remote voice communication (Jean)
• Appear.in: new alternative for remote voice communication (Jean and James)
• Zapier: automation for integrating other services together (Jean and James)
• If This Then That: more automated integration! (Jean and James)
• Transmit: FTP (Jean)
  
• FileZilla: FTP (Jean and James)
• Wunderlist: interactive to-do software with notifications (James)
• Google Inbox: email management (James)
• Mailplane: Gmail in an App! (Jean)
• Airmail: email app that handles multi-service integration (Jean)
• Google Drive: file sharing (James)
• Dropbox: file sharing (Jean and James)

Featured On The Show:

• WP Ninjas
• WP Mayor
• WP RSS Aggregator
• My Software Toolbox – 2016 Edition
• Source Tree
• GitHub
• Bitbucket
• Atlassian
• Jira
• Confluence
• Trello
• PHP Storm
• Sublime Text 3
• Sequel Pro
• PinPon
• PlusPlus
• WP News Desk
• Post Status
• WP Nashville
• WP Developers Club
• MatterMost
• Appear.in
• If This then That
• FileZilla
• WonderList
• Zoho Mail
• Followupthen
• DropBox
• Evernote

Mastermind Questions for Pippin

1) How did you get into PHP programming and then into WordPress?

2) What was the first product that you actually sold as you moved away from freelance work? What inspired you to make the product and make the move away from freelance?

3) How much did you sell your first product for? Where did you market it? Did it sell well in the beginning?

4) When did it hit you that “Hey, I can make a living doing this!”? How long did it take you to decide that this was going to be a full time pursuit?

5) How important were mentors along the way? How important were these people in influencing you to go full time?

6) How many people are you working with at the moment? What does your team look like?

7) What does support look like for you? How do you onboard and what kind of resources do you devote to it?

8) Is there a point where you will “release” a customer? i.e. are there certain situations where you realize a customer just can’t be supported anymore? What factors play into a decision like that?

9) You’ve become successful with a number of different plugins. How do you manage your time and effort between these and where do you draw the line and say ‘enough is enough’?

10) How do you divide your team among the different projects and products that you have?

11) What is the most important piece of advice you’d give to someone starting or wanting to start their own business?

12) If you had it to do all over again (starting a business), what one thing would you change?

13) What would you say is the most challenging thing in your business today?

14) What is the most exciting thing going on in your business right now?

Featured On The Show:

WP Ninjas

WP Mayor

WP RSS Aggregator

Easy Digital Downloads

Affiliate WP

Restrict Content Pro

Pro Blog Design

Easy Content Types

How do you break into the WordPress space and carve out a niche of your own? Listen in! As always, show notes are below but catch it all in the audio!

Community

Jean and James open up talking about the close-knit, unique nature of the WordPress community. The sense of community is strong in WordPress and coming in with an attitude that projects humility and an open mindedness to learn the terrain means a lot for your success within the community. Engage with members, get involved, and be respectful to be successful.

It’s an industry with a value system, which is something fairly unique in larger industry settings. Learn the community and be willing to merge with it, don’t come in swinging or trying to reshape the ecosystem in your own image right off the bat.

Starting From Scratch

Acquire a Brand

If you have the capital up front, finding an established WordPress business that already has an established brand and team behind it is one option for entering the WordPress space. What you’re getting in this scenario:

• Brand
• Customers
• Talent behind the brand

Understand that you’re not buying the code. WordPress plugins operate under General Public License (GPL), meaning code is open and available to the public. This is an important point to remember. Don’t look for a product first- look for an established brand with a positive, well established reputation in the community and a stable customer base.

If you’re a technical person coming into the space…

So you can build something awesome yourself and want to join the community? Great! This is how Jean got his start. How long is it going to take to make this a replacement for your full time job? How much can you make how fast? This is very variable.

For James and the WP Ninjas, it took him one year to feel comfortable leaving his previous full time job. He recommends getting started with your business side by side with your full time job first, closely following your monthly growth, and saving all of it until you get a year’s salary saved. If growth is sufficient and stable at that point, you can consider replacing your previous full time income with your WordPress income.

Jean recommends planning for a year to two years, but notes that the time and effort you are able to devote to it is going to affect that timeline considerably. Regular checkups are important- don’t just set out a 6 month or 12 month income goal. Look to the customer base, market penetration, and other growth factor metrics outside of just revenue.

Partnering with someone with technical skills

If you can’t build a product on your own but have good business chops, consider partnering with someone who does. It’s important to choose someone you trust and who will be around to support your product wholeheartedly.

It’s not enough to hire someone to build a product and then hire a developer to support it. You need someone with a vested interest who won’t bat an eye at responding to a 2 am crisis if something goes wrong.

Even if you’re a technically talented person that can build a product on your own, a vested business partner can be a huge boon. Someone to bounce ideas off of, brainstorm, share the down times with you, etc can be a huge advantage unless you’re someone who is just hardwired to go it solo!

Featured On The Show:

• Ninja Forms
• WP Mayor
• WP RSS Aggregator
• Jigoshop
• WooCommerce
• Automattic
• WordPress.com
• Flippa
• Empire Flippers
• FEInternational
• WPMods
• WP Lift
• Sliced Invoices

Engaging Your Users

What are people saying about your product? There are a few good places you can test the pulse of your product from and use to draw more interest with your own feedback to users.

• WordPress.org
  • Support Forums
  • Reviews
• Social Media
  • Facebook
  • Twitter

In the early days of any product, there are bound to be bugs and a shifting of focus/use cases from your original intent. Pay close attention your first customers, engage them, make fans and cheerleaders of them. Word of mouth in the early days is critical! Build a great reputation as an engaged developer right out of the gates.

Content Marketing

Building a foundation of great content surrounding your community and product is a great way to draw attention while contributing back to your community. Delicious Brains is a great example of blogged content built up around products. Offering content via email is another great way to reach people.

Affiliate Marketing

Joining in with others raises visibility and lends credibility to your product. You’re essentially paying people to promote your product, but in James’ words: if you believe in your product, what does it matter how people discover you? Get it out there to them however you can if you’ve got something that’s going to make their life better.

Plugin Partnerships

If possible, team up! Partnering with theme companies can be great promotion and ensure that your product looks great in popular themes. Hosts are another good potential partner. GoDaddy for example is moving to a heavy focus on the WordPress ecosystem, partnering with popular plugin developers to offer a great experience to WordPress users. Attend business conferences like Pressnomics and be prepared to lay out how your product can be a solution to a company’s needs.

Translate

WordPress reaches a much greater audience than just the English speaking world. Provide a translated readme.txt and work towards getting translated into as many languages as possible. This not only gives you a wider potential audience, it gives you a huge advantage over non-translated competing plugins. Even if you can’t afford to hire a translator, there are other incentives you can offer, such as free licensing.

Featured On The Show:

• Ninja Forms
• WP Mayor
• WP RSS Aggregator
• Post Status
• WP Tavern
• Delicious Brains
• Optin Monster
• Envato
• Astoundify
• UpThemes
• Parallelus
• GoDaddy
• PressNomics
• SiteKick Pro
• WPML
• MailPoet

This will be a multi-part discussion, so be sure to tune in next week for a follow-up episode. As always, show notes are below but treat yourself to the whole show with the audio!

Successfully launching a product

Assumptions: Starting a premium product to launch from ground zero. What do we need to get off the ground and where do we start?

Get a website/landing page live

This doesn’t have to be a big elaborate affair. Just lay out the basic value proposition for your product if nothing else. What is it? What does it do? Why do you need this product? Have a basic landing page so that you can, if nothing else, hand someone a url and say: check this out!

Having a landing page also gives you more control over how you talk about the product. Sales copy, product pages on other marketplaces, etc may not say everything you want to be said as you don’t have full control of the messaging. Your own landing page accomplishes this in exactly the way you want.

Some things to consider for your website/landing page:

• Professionally designed or professional theme
• Introduction to the product
• Screen shots
• Demo
• Reviews and testimonials from people in your industry
• Email subscription option

Build a mailing list

You need to keep people in the loop, especially prior to launch. Building a mailing list gets you an audience that knows what the product is and that are ready to get more info when it launches. It gives you an interested, engaged audience that’s ready and willing to use your product. Build intrigue and interest by showing components of what you’re about to release, features, what it will do for people, etc.

Build a social media presence

Email isn’t the only vehicle for getting the word out about your product and getting people engaged. A growing number of people are more easily engaged via social media, especially twitter. Be a cheerleader for others, share their work, and actively engage with others. They’re likely to want to return the favor when you launch your product. Build relationships!

If you’re starting completely from scratch, follow great people inside your industry. Share their work  frequently, comment, engage. Don’t just retweet, but talk about why the product you’re retweeting is awesome. It’s about being a good neighbor and building good will. People will see you, see that you’re a positive presence, and engage back. It takes time to build- don’t be discouraged and engage regularly in real time!

Support

You need a dedicated support channel if there’s not already a suitable solution in your marketplace (if you’re launching in an existing marketplace). Groove and Helpscout are great examples of support solutions you can look into and implement before launch. For the user, all that’s required is sending an email. For you, there’s a dedicated, organized queue that you can easily log into even on the go!

Ecommerce

Easy Digital Downloads +Software Licensing (premium addon) for digital products or WooCommerce for physical products both provide great mechanisms for making your product accessible. There is role crossover between the two, but they definitely specialize in their digital or physical spheres.

Paypal Standard comes packaged in Easy Digital Downloads, but you’ll need Paypal Express for recurring payment options. Recurring payments are a good thing for you. Check into and consider this option. Stripe will allow for credit card payments if you want to give customers greater payment flexibility.

Also: do your research on taxes early. Consult a lawyer or accountant if needed. There are often factors like out of state or VAT taxes that are easy to overlook in the beginning. There are easy solutions for tax considerations, but you need to plan for them in advance!

Featured On The Show:

• Ninja Forms
• WP Mayor
• WP RSS Aggregator
• EDD Bookings
• Easy Digital Downloads
• Ninja Demo
• Helpscout
• Stripe
• Brain Tree Payments
• PayPal Express

Mastermind.fm is proudly sponsored by

&

Publishing Plugins on WordPress.org

Benefits

1) Feedback

You can get great feedback on your work from users. With both a support forum and a review section, you can hear what your target audience feels about your product, and get a sense of where else you can go with it- share with a greater community and see how it gets used! It’s great material for considering premium features and testing the market.

2) Motivation

There’s nothing quite like watching your plugin grow. The first notification that your repo is available, committing the first release and seeing your plugin go live – it’s exhilarating. The WordPress community is great, and getting involved in the positive feedback loop of the community can really drive you to do your best.

Pain Points

1) Support

When you have multiple plugins listed on the repo, it can be very difficult to manage support through the .org support forums. Also, even when you’re just posting something for fun or as a side project, support expectations from users can be very demanding in the forums.

2) Reviews

There is no accountability for the rating system in the repo. Users can leave very poor reviews with no substantiation and there is no way to challenge that type of review. The moderators do an outstanding job of moderating and read every single review, but there is not a system in place to deal with unfair or flippant reviews.

3) Search Results

There are known problems with the keyword search functionality in the repo. For example, searching for keywords related to RSS Aggregator or Ninja Forms such as “RSS” or “Forms” does not bring the most relevant results related to either product. This is an issue that is being addressed but still currently impacts the searchability of products. There is also very little rhyme or reason to the ranking of returned search results.

4) Measurables

Active install data is very poor for giving you a picture of how many active installs you actually have. The reported intervals are too broad for accurate assessments, and there is no other data such as version number or type of installed sites available. An almost complete lack of measurable statistics in the repo means a 3rd party system is necessary for actionable data.

Alternatives to WordPress.org Repo

1) For a paid product, Code Canyon is an excellent option. Pippin Williamson’s first products, for example, were released through CodeCanyon. They have a huge audience and it is a great place to test your market.

2) Another product’s marketplace. For example, Easy Digital Downloads and Ninja Forms both offer marketplaces for premium add-ons to their products. With this option you don’t have to worry about coming up with your own ecommerce solution.

3) Managewp.org/plugins – same type of setup as the .org repo, but displayed in a visual manner with better search parameters. Also features new and trending plugins.

4) The Periodic Table of WordPress Plugins (plugintable.com) features the top 100 most popular WordPress plugins. This is something that you have to break into over time as opposed to listing yourself on initially, but is fantastic to have around when you get there.

Featured On The Show:

• WP Mayor
• WP RSS Aggregator
• Ninja Forms
• Freemius
• WordPress.org
• Ninja Pages
• Nike plus
• Tag <Modlook>
• Search WP
• Codecanyon.net
• Easy Digital Downloads
• Managewp.org/plugins
• Plugintable.com
• Wpscoop.com
• Proplugindirectory.com

As always, the shownotes are below for your convenience, but tune in so that you don’t miss a thing!

Keyboards

Jean swears by his wireless Apple keyboard. It’s slim, lightweight, and you don’t have to fool with batteries on the newest model- you just charge it with a USB cable. It’s perfect for traveling and hauling around in general. It’s also rechargeable and holds its charge for a long time.

James concurs here: the newest model Apple keyboard is his bread and butter. He does point out that there are a handful of different keyboards around his office, though. The WP Ninjas dev team prefers mechanical keyboards with lots of tactile feedback, for example.

Mice

Jean is using a Logitech MX Master and feels it’s one of the best on the market currently. It can be connected via USB or Bluetooth, has a number of programmable buttons, and is comfortably ergonomic. He also uses an Apple trackpad for gesture navigation at his left hand.

James prefers the Apple Magic Mouse. The native functionality means a lot to him for navigation. While he concedes that it’s not terribly ergonomic, his use case finds his hands on his keyboard much more frequently than on his mouse, so it’s not that big of a deal for him.

Headphones

James uses three different headphones for the different tasks he takes on from day to day. The basic Apple headphones serve for common tasks, Bluetooth Beats headphones come into play for exercising, and V-Moda Bluetooth headphones for traveling and noise reduction.

Jean uses B&O Play and Bose headphones. He uses his B&O Play primarily for watching movies and relaxing to music. The Bose headphones are work headphones that reduce office noise nicely. Several other bluetooth headphones get use when he’s moving around or at the gym.

Kindle

Jean and James both emphasize the importance of continuing education in business. Both of them appreciate the Kindle for reading and staying up on news and industry movements. Jean swears by the Kindle exclusively for reading, while James oscillates back and forth between that and his iPad. They both agree that nothing really beats the Kindle for reading, though.

Backups

James primarily backs up to the cloud, which is a practice he’ll tell you quickly that he doesn’t recommend. Physical backups are important. Jean uses BackBlaze and Apple Time Capsule. Photo backups and cross-device photo management is an area that they both find a lack of solutions for. Suggestions are welcome!

Featured On The Show:

• Magic Keyboard Apple
• Logitech MX Master Wireless Mouse
• Magic Mouse Apple
• Magic TrackPad Apple
• Apple EarPods
• Beats Headphones
• V-Moda Crossfade Headphones
• MyHeadphoneCollection by Chris Lema
• The Wirecutter
• BeoPlay H6 Headphones
• Bose Quiet Comfort 20 Headphones
• Monster iSport Wireless Headphones
• Klipsch S4 In-ear Headphones
• Aftershokz Bluez 2S Wireless Headphones
• Kindle Voyage
• BackBlaze
• AirPort Time Capsule Apple
• Transcend StoreJet External Drive
• Sony RX 100 Mark III Camera
• Go PRO 3 +
• Joby Gorilla Pod
• DxO One
• MomentLens

Stay on the lookout through this episode for a free Mastermind.fm giveaway you won’t want to miss!

Standing Desks

• Next Desk
• Up Desk
• Evo Desk
• IKEA

James swears by these and loves them for their ability to get you up and moving while you work. Jean concurs. Getting up and moving (dancing?) can be inspirational! Next Desk tends to be the top of the line ($2k+) while Up Desk better fits the budget range of $400-500. Apparently Jean has found one that can order food for you? Who knew. Jean recommends Ikea standing desks that run around $500.

Ergonomic Office Chairs

• IKEA

Jean likes IKEA here as well, and you can pick up a nice one for around $150. James can’t remember the name of his chair, but I, your anonymous writer of shownotes, can vouch for their awesomeness as well. Unfortunately they don’t have any branding on them. They’re a cloth mesh seat and back with adjustable lumbar support and adjustable just about everything. The extra lumbar support is amazing.

Monitors

• Thunderbolt displays
• Macbook Air, Macbook Pro Retina

James’ office uses 100% Thunderbolt displays, which works because it’s a 100% Mac environment. Jean has tried his both Macbook Air and Pro, and likes the 15” screen of the Pro. He’s also experimented with using his iPad as an alternate second monitor connected by a USB cable. It takes an app to connect them, but is a perfect second monitor on the go. He also uses a 27” monitor on his work desk.

Look for Jean and James’ discussion of hardware to continue next week!

Featured On The Show:

• WP Ninjas
• WP Mayor
• WP RSS Aggregator
• NextDesks
• UpDesk
• Evodesk
• Indiegogo
• Silicon Valley (TV series)
• Ikea
• My Hardware Setup 2016 – Jean Galea
• Toggl
• Roost Laptop Stand
• Griffin Stand
• WP All Import
• WP All Export PRO
• JeanGalea.com
• JamesLaws.com

How Can We Offer Great Support for a WordPress Plugin or Business?

James kicks things off by laying out his philosophy on support: instead of looking at support as the inevitable thing we have to do because we have a product, look at it as an opportunity to engage with your customers. The goal of support shouldn’t be to close a ticket or end one conversation so you can move on to another one, but to build trust and relationships.

Jean addresses logistics. As a beginning business, how much of your small team’s time do you devote to support and development? You have to manage setting priorities and scaling as your company grows. What’s the factors to consider in managing this aspect of your growth? It’s a reality for almost everyone. The ‘passive income’ of a plugin that doesn’t need support is a reality to varying degrees, but it’s tantamount to chasing unicorns. You need to plan for support!

How Can You Plan for Support?

In a nutshell, target and address top issues for your customers proactively.

• Look for gaps in your product: specific problem areas that users struggle with. Address these proactively.
• Implement a series of steps/troubleshooting guide/faq inside the support form prior to submitting it. “Intelligent forms” so to speak.

Team Structure

Support can, in Jean’s words, “quickly take over your life”. How do you handle it within your team?

For James and Ninja Forms, a key quality in a support team is to act as customer advocates. People that can show empathy and relate to the customer. Someone who can solve a problem for the customer and, when warranted, come back to the development team and suggest changes. They’re not just ‘question answerers’, but team members that are actively engaged in shaping the direction of product growth. They are support-first hires rather than developers that handle support too.

For Jean, the nature of his team’s work require developers in the support role. That’s a common arrangement shared by other organizations like Delicious Brains and MailPoet. This brings a high degree of technical know-how to the support aspect of the business. Jean’s team uses a three-tiered system for support where tickets are delegated based on the nature of the individual ticket and which developers are best suited to address them.

Find a Help Desk Solution

Email or form support may work ok in the very early days, but both Jean and James strongly recommend adopting a help desk solution early. Even a homebrew support method is going to be overwhelmed quickly by your evolving needs. Don’t be afraid to research and experiment with different systems, but look into a professional solution early.

Featured On The Show:

• WooCommerce
• Easy Digital Downloads
• HelpScout
• Desk.com
• Delicious Brains
• ZenDesk

Nobody wants to use your plugin. They use it to solve a problem!

Attributes of a successful plugin business:

1. Solve a problem
2. Ooze quality in the way your plugin is built and coded
3. Timing
4. Team
5. Get the word out
6. Reviews & Relationships
7. Extensibility

Point 1 and 2: Solve a problem, but make it as pleasurable of an experience for the user as you can. Nobody wakes up in the morning excited to build a form for their website, but they shouldn’t dread having to do it either! Style your plugin so that it is tasteful and comfortable within WordPress. It doesn’t have to be a WordPress UI clone though- sometimes you have to think outside the box to solve your users’ problems.

Point 3: Is there a need to fill, and is there anyone filling the need in the way you are intending on doing it? A saturated market is a proven market with a clear need, so don’t be afraid to wade in with other large, successful competitors. The fact that the market is saturated indicates a clear need, just find your niche and fill it in an awesome and unique way.

Point 4: Don’t be afraid to strategically add people to your team to help you grow and mature.

Point 5: People have to know you’re there. The WordPress repo is a great tool for this. Build relationships whenever possible also.

Point 6: The vote of confidence of other users and high profile community members is huge for growth. The role of Pippin Williamson in supporting Ninja Forms early on was enormous for the growth of Ninja Forms, for example. His vote of confidence added a lot of fuel to the business. You don’t necessarily want the biggest names (though Pippin is a pretty huge name in WordPress), but just well respected, honest members of the community

Point 7: Build for potential growth. Build better and bigger will follow. Make your plugin extensible and easy to add to for collaborating developers.

Featured On The Show:

• Ninja Forms
• WP RSS Aggregator
• WP Mayor
• Easy Digital Downloads
• Pippins Plugins
• Restrict Content PRO
• Affiliate WP
• Tom McFarlin
• PostStatus
• WP Tavern
• iThemes Exchange
• WooCommerce
• WP eCommerce
• Jigoshop
• Give
• Cris Lema
• Fatcat Apps
• WP Explorer

Total Plugin Rewrites!

Jean is currently discussing with his team whether they will be rewriting their plugin, WP RSS Aggregator. James and his team have been in the process of a complete rewrite of their plugin, Ninja Forms, for around a year now.

The first thing to ask yourself before you begin: When should a rewrite be undertaken? Some things to consider:

• Can you still iterate on your current architecture?
• Is there new technology or new developments coming in that changes the landscape of your market?
• Recurring user problems
• Want to open the plugin to 3rd party developers (if not initially built to be extensible)

Driving forces behind rewriting Ninja Forms:

• Mechanism by which we built the plugin simply didn’t allow for any other way of doing things. It was inflexible and the UI was starting to get cluttered.
• We wanted a new UI and new functionalities for our customers and users.

Ninja Forms has handled the transition from the old plugin (2.9.x) to the new plugin (3.0) using a slow transition phase-in to select groups of users. The most current version of the 2.9.x has the new 3.0 code base, but it only unlocks under certain conditions. Certain checks are in place to make sure that a user with non-compatible extensions isn’t able to roll forward before they’re ready. There are also multiple channels for user testing and reporting without actually having dedicated beta testers.

Reflections on the Ninja Forms Three process:

• Work as much behind the scenes as you can until you are ready to market
• Don’t put out timelines
• Don’t make promises too early
• Plan your marketing early but don’t start too early

Particular challenges in the process

• Settings name changes and changing how they’re stored
• Addons need the same changes that core does, multiplying the work and adding challenges to upgrade routines used in core
• Handling customization in functions.php without breaking post-upgrade
• Handling user analytics in the transition from old to new

Parting thoughts from James: Think about your user base, think about your code base, think about your team. What’s best for everyone involved? Consider all the different pieces, all the moving parts, everything involved. Don’t come to the decision lightly. Ultimately, do what is best for your users.

There’s much more in the audio from marketing to support, so sit back, grab your favorite frosty beverage, and lend us an ear! After you’re finished, check out the latest post on Pippin Williamson’s blog. He discusses monsters and databases: The monster that is a poor database schema. It’s very much related and we bet you’ll love it!

Jean & James Mastermind Q&A Questions

~Health & Fitness: What do you do to stay fit at a job where you sit all day? What do you eat?

~Business: How you can choose the right market for your product and target a special niche within that market?

~Pricing and Billing: How do you handle pricing and billing for work done? Do you recommend an ad hoc, upfront, or payment plan with milestones approach? Something unique?

~Business models: How did you make the jump from an agency to a product business? What were your expectations prior to the change and how did your experiences differ? What was your motivation for the shift?

~Financial Management: In Episode 4 you mentioned looking at your numbers and business plans with an accountant. What plans do you have in place, ambitions, etc?

Featured On The Show:

• Ninja Forms
• WP Mayor
• WP RSS Aggregator
• Popular Plugins on WordPress.org
• Avada Theme
• Beaver Builder
• Profit First Book
• Personal MBA Book

We not only define what the GPL stands for but also go into some practical issues surrounding it and what prospective WordPress product owners/developers should be aware of. For example, people like Pippin Williamson have taken advantage of the GPL to encourage 3rd party contributions and improvements by putting all premium addons of his plugin AffiliateWP up on GitHub. Others have probably been impacted in a negative way by the GPL, such as the e-commerce plugin Jigoshop, although that case can be debated either way. We also talk about our own plugins, Ninja Forms and WP RSS Aggregator, and our own experiences with people forking our plugins or reselling them, and how this has affected our businesses.

Featured On The Show:

• Is the WordPress GPL Being Abused?
• WPMUDev
• AffiliateWP
• Ninja Forms
• WP RSS Aggregator
• WooCommerce
• Jigoshop

SaaS Business Model

In the SaaS business model, the processing side of rendering the service is handled by you on your own server(s), and the customer or client accesses your service there. Sometimes the customer or client connects directly to the service, sometimes they install a product or plugin that connects, sometimes they build everything on your site then implement it on their website via a javascript snippet or similar for the service to work.

Examples:

• Optimizely
• Akismet
• Optin Monster
• WordFence
• Manage WP
• iTheme Sync

Advantages:

The key advantage to a SaaS model is that it is not confined to a single space in the market such as only WordPress sites; it can be implemented anywhere, meaning you have reach into 100% of the possible market.

With a SaaS model you have full control of your code base. Since WordPress plugins by nature are open source, anyone can take your code, relabel it, and sell it as a competing product. With the SaaS model your code is fully proprietary.

Also with a SaaS model, you retain full control of your server environment. With a plugin, you don’t control the environment that your plugin is installed on. With SaaS, you control your own server environment and can optimize that environment to your service’s needs.

FInally, gives you greater insight into how users are using your product: because everything is handled on your own site, you have full flexibility for A/B testing and observing how your product is being implemented.

Disadvantages:

Complexity, responsibility, and scalability. You need to maintain your own server infrastructure and ensure as close to 100% uptime as possible. Handling this task means you’re going to need a team behind it and likely a more expensive managed hosting plan.

Marketing. You must be able to market outside of your own community. You have to be a great marketer or willing to invest heavily into marketing.

Background: The SaaS model’s nature lends itself best to businesses with an already established team, knowledge base, support system, and hosting service. You can jump in new, but it is much harder than if you’re already established.

Which of These Models Should You Begin With?

There’s not a one-size-fits-all answer to that question, though it’s a question every fledgling business must answer. Jean and James have some good advice to help guide you into finding your own answer to that question:

• Consider beginning by building for an existing product (like Ninja Forms or EDD) or marketplace (ThemeForest, CodeCanyon) to see if the product idea will be well received by consumers.
• Be flexible and be ready to change models on the fly
• What are your goals? What kind of lifestyle do you want? Ask yourself this and the select the business model that will support the lifestyle you want to lead.
• What kind of initial funding do you have?

Featured On The Show:

• Akismet
• Optimizely
• OptinMonster
• VaultPress
• BlogVault
• Wordfence
• Nelio A/B Testing
• iTheme Sync
• Manage WP
• BackupBuddy
• Shark Tank TV Show
• Ninja Forms
• Gravity Forms
• WP RSS Aggregator
• WP Mayor
• Freemius
• Pagely