WPWeekly Episode 96 – Commercial Services

This episode of WordPress Weekly featured two individuals who are in the midst of running a successful service around WordPress while the other individual didn’t quite make it that far. The round-table consisted of Joshua Strebel of Page.ly, Daniel Bachhuber formerly of CoPress, and Raanan Bar-Cohen of Automattic. During this episode, we talked about the difficulties involved with running a service around WordPress. I was especially interested in the topic of Automattic running a commercial service along side free, open-source software. Daniel was able to offer a unique perspective as CoPress didn’t end up being successful in the long run and he tells us why. Joshua gave us some insight into the business strategies he thought of before launching the service. One thing Joshua mentions during the show is that if you’re going to run a service around WordPress, make sure you’re profitable from the first customer. Another theme that developed during this episode is the lack of trust in the Freemium model. If you are thinking about starting a commercial service around WordPress, this is the episode for you.

Smashing Book Contest:

Week Two Winner – jb510

Want to win a copy of the Smashing Book and a chance to participate in our wrap up episode on April 24th? Help us publicize the special WordPress Weekly series on commercialization! Just follow @WPTavern and guest co-host @jakemgold on Twitter, and Tweet a message mentioning us both with a link to the most recent episode. We’ll randomly pick one of our favorite tweets right before the next show.

We’ll be giving a book away for each of the episodes (excluding wrap up). You can participate each week. Each contest starts at 2pm on Saturday with the show’s recording, and ends the following Friday evening. You may participate if you’re outside of the contiguous United States, but will be asked to cover shipping expenses.

If we get over 500 participants in the contest, before the wrap up show, we’ll also give away one copy of Smashing WordPress to one participant after the last episode!

Ad Copy:

This episode is also sponsored by EnvironmentsForHumans.com This is an organization that brings together expert speakers on a given topic exploring that topic from different angles. While they recently had a WordPRess Workshop, the next event will be a UX Web Summit on Wednesday, April 21, 2010 from 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM (CT). This event will teach people how to improve their websites so that they are more responsive to visitors as well as making this more usable. If you’re interested in this summit, visit UXWebSummit.com

Stories Discussed:

The Pharma Hack
WordPress Not At Fault

Relevant Links:

Case Studies In Freemium
EditFlow
Edit Flow Project
A Case For Innovation In College Newsrooms
Eyeballs Still Don’t Pay The Bills
The Cost Of Support

Announcements:

The last part of the series will be held on Saturday, April 24th where we encourage everyone to send in their feedback or be part of the live show to discuss what you learned throughout this series.

WPWeekly Meta:

Next Episode: Saturday, April 24th 2P.M. EST

Subscribe To WPWeekly Via Itunes: Click here to subscribe

Length Of Episode: 2 Hours 13 Minutes

Download The Show: WordPressWeeklyEpisode96.mp3

Listen To Episode #96: