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The European investor's favorite podcast.

Episode 97 – Selling Digital Products using Freemius, with Vova Feldman

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Selling digital products online, including WordPress plugins and themes, can be easy if you’ve got a small shop, but once your business starts to grow, it becomes harder to maintain. Spending time working on your self-hosted e-commerce setup rather than building and marketing your product starts to work against you.

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

Freemius

Episode 96 – Financial Forecasting with Christie Chirinos

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This week I was excited to speak with Christie Chirinos from CalderaWP. I had followed her WordCamp EU presentation on the topic of financial forecasting back in June of 2018 and it intrigued me.

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:

Episode 95 – Can Better WordPress Development Standards Help Your Business?

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This week we’ve taken a look at the other side of running a WordPress business – the development.

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

Anton Ukhanev

Other Resources

Episode 94 – Challenging the Focus of WordPress Hosting, with Thomas from Servebolt

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This week I’m joined by Donnacha MacGloinn, a long-time member of the WordPress community and guest host on a few past episodes, to discuss WordPress hosting with Thomas Audunhus from Servebolt.

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:

 

Episode 93 – Pippin Williamson on the Why, When and How of Easy Digital Downloads 3.0

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As we ourselves approach the launch of a new version of the EDD Bookings plugin, we have invited Pippin Williamson to discuss the why, when and how of re-building an existing plugin.

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

EDD Bookings

Books

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