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The European investor's favorite podcast.

Episode 27 – Interview with Zack Katz

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Welcome to Episode 27 of Mastermind.fm! Today masterminds Jean Galea and James Laws interview Zack Katz, author of the WordPress plugin GravityView! Hang out with us for a bit and have a listen!

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?

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Episode 26 – WordPress Hosting

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Welcome to Episode 26 of Mastermind.fm! This week our masterminds Jean Galea and James Laws tackle hosting! Hosting can be a nightmare of trial and error to find what works for you in the often weird world of WordPress hosting. Jean and James have been through the wringer on this one, and have come out on the other side ok. Come listen in to the decades of hosting experiences that they’ve racked up between the two of them and make your own hosting decisions better! As always, show notes are below.

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.

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Episode 25 – Podcasting

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Welcome to Episode 25 of Mastermind.fm! Join our hosts Jean Galea and James Laws today as they jam about podcasting- a topic they’re pretty familiar with! Check out their unique take! Whether you’re thinking about getting into it yourself or already have and are just looking for some unique ideas, you’ll find them right here. Pull up a chair (or put on your running shoes, whatever works for you!) and give Episode 25 a listen!

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

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Episode 24 – Development and Productivity Software

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Welcome to Episode 24 of mastermind.fm! This week our resident masterminds Jean Galea and James Laws look at the software that they use at work every day for productivity and development. They also mention Slack once or twice. There’s a lot of neat tools here, so be sure to check it out! Show notes are below as always, but catch the full audio podcast right here so that you don’t miss a thing!

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)

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Episode 23 – Interview with Pippin Williamson

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Welcome to Episode 23 of Mastermind.fm! We’re doing something a little different today as Jean and James interview Pippin Williamson, author of Easy Digital Downloads, Affiliate WP, and Restrict Content Pro. He’s a man that’s made the WordPress space a little more awesome for all of us, and a sharp mind to listen to for advice. You can find the questions we’re hitting him with from both ourselves and Mastermind listeners below, but tune it to the full episode to hear what he has to say!

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

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