Jason Schuller who was the previous owner of Press75.com, has published a great post detailing his experience of running a WordPress commercial theme business from 2008-2014. While Schuller describes a variety of ups and downs he encountered while running the business, I thought his reasoning for losing his way in 2010 was fascinating. As WordPress…
Sprout Apps will soon be launching a suite of business apps targeted at WordPress freelancers and small businesses. WordPress developer Daniel Cameron is behind the project, which is centered around creating plugins that help business owners work more efficiently with WordPress. Sprout Apps aims to bring tasks like invoicing, estimates, and client tracking into the…
Prestige is a new conference that is taking place October 3-5, 2014 in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota and is being organized by Josh Broton and Kiko Doran. Unlike WordCamps, Prestige only has one track and its devoted to the business of WordPress. Tickets are on sale and if you can’t make it to the event in…
Oli Dale has an article on WPLift that describes what subject matter he’d focus on if he started a site devoted to WordPress today. Throughout the article, he mentions niches that are already well covered such as WordPress news and tutorials. He concludes the article suggesting that new sites about WordPress be narrowly focused on…
East Meets Press is a business focused WordPress event organized by Ben Fox that will be held on September 17-21 (Wednesday to Sunday – 4 nights). Not to be outdone by BeachPress which was recently held on the West Coast of the US, East Meets Press will take place on the East Coast in Kure…
Dates have been announced for the third annual PressNomics conference. Organized by Joshua and Sally Strebel of Pagely, PressNomics is a conference similar to a WordCamp but focuses exclusively on the business of WordPress and the economy surrounding it. The conference will take place January 22nd – 24th, 2015 in Tempe, AZ. The venue is the…
When I discovered TeslaThemes last year, their unique looking designs really impressed me. Since so many other theme shops have tried the theme club model and failed, I didn’t have much hope for them. However, the company is celebrating their first year of being in business. The theme club model typically fails because it over…
One of the highlights of WordCamp Minneapolis 2014, was the panel discussion on commercial WordPress products. The panel was filled with successful business minds sharing their knowledge of running commercial WordPress products and services. Each of the panelists shared their story on how they started their business. One thing they all have in common is…
Held within the Business and Entrepreneurial Center on the Stark State College campus, WordCamp North Canton 2014 was a repeat success. Sessions ranged from Plugins 101 to the Science Of Design. I only attended two sessions throughout the day as I spent the majority of my time networking. The sessions I participated in only had…
Iain Poulson recently published a post that asks an important but easy question to answer. Will WordPress be a Plugin Business Killer? The post is based on the idea that features from a commercial plugin added to WordPress could kill the business based on that plugin. The short answer to Poulson’s question is no. Here’s…
WordPress development agency 10up has hired John Eckman to take on the role of CEO. Eckman will work closely with Goldman and team leaders on the day-to-day operations of the company. Jake Goldman will remain as president and will focus on the products, strategic investments, and business development side of the company. Eckman has spent…
In this episode, Marcus Couch and I sat down with Chris Wallace, co-founder of UpThemes and discussed in detail the reasons behind the open letter published by the company. We learned how Chris got involved with WordPress theme development and the circumstances leading to the creation of UpThemes. Chris explained how hard it was to…
How many times have you bought a theme that would look perfect for your next project only to discover it’s not the right fit? I have gone through this experience multiple times but the companies I dealt with didn’t have refund policies. Instead, I had to learn a $60-70 lesson with no recourse. Unfortunately, the…
The founders of UpThemes, a commercial WordPress theme business started in March of 2010 has published an open letter to their customers and to the wider WordPress community. It’s a fascinating look into how the company has evolved over the past four years. The letter is filled with lessons learned and contains what I consider…
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, we were joined by Jonathan Atkinson of Cr3ative.com and discussed what it’s like to make a living using ThemeForest. We dived into a number of topics including: Using ThemeForest as a launch platform The reputation of ThemeForest Can theme authors profit while coding themes the right way How theme…