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In today’s episode, we welcome back Mitchell McCallahan to the show. Jean previously discussed Bitcoin with Mitchell on episode 28 back in September last year, so do check that episode out especially if you’re new to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. In today’s episode, we discuss the evolution of Bitcoin over the past year, as well as some common questions and doubts that people have when they start looking at cryptocurrencies as an asset class.

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

 

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In today’s episode Jean is joined by Daniel Dios, an entrepreneur in the sports field, specifically the fastest growing sport in the world: padel.

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

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James Laws welcomes Dustin Stout as his co-host for the episode, kicking things off by measuring the size of their respective Twitter followings. Dustin won, and so he should, given that he is a social marketing consultant who now sells a successful social media product, Social Warfare. If we could combine James and Dustin, at a genetic level, into one man, he would be called Justin. Justin Lout.

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

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In this episode, Mark takes over hosting duties from James and Jean to interview Ben Pines, the co-founder of the Elementor page builder plugin for WordPress; a plugin that is growing in popularity every week.

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

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Well, this episode was a real monster, containing plenty of chewy insights and nutritious facts on the realities of running a WordPress marketplace with add-ons by third-party developers.

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