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This week, our resident James Laws is joined by his Ninja Forms cofounder, Kevin Stover, and Phil Derksen, entrepreneur and founder of WP Simple Pay. Together they jump headlong in WordPress businesses, business models, and what it’s like to sell a business. So, sit back and enjoy this post holiday episode of Mastermind.FM!

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

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This episode is hosted by Mark Zahra of WP RSS Aggregator and EDD Bookings, who talks with Marius Vetrivi of WPRiders. Marius is an entrepreneur who has worked his way from being a solo freelancer to running his own WordPress agency that currently has 6 full-time employees.

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

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This turbulent second half of the the Dumitru Brinzan interview revolves around his controversial blog post Inside WordPress.org Theme Review Team: Money, Abuse and Inconsistent Leadership.

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

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Dumitru’s first coding job was in 2005, at a travel agency where he did some internal websites using PHP.

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