Interview: Gareth Developer of Wisdom Plugin

Thanks, Maedah – I appreciate the invitation to take part.

I’m based in the UK, and I’ve been working with WordPress since around 2008/2009. I suppose I’d call myself a developer. Though, I’ve also designed a lot of themes for clients, both in WordPress and with a couple of the e-commerce platforms. Before I got involved with WordPress, I was working in online training, employed by a large company. But I had a young family, and I wanted to be able to spend more time with them – plus I very much wanted to work for myself (I’m not very good at people telling me what to do…).

Given that I had a technical background, web development seemed like a viable field to start a business in. When I started looking around at platforms, WordPress was the obvious choice. I can still remember the first time I loaded it in a local install and began to play around with the Kubrick theme. I felt genuinely excited to have found it.

Initially, my work was mainly creating custom sites for clients, and I continue to do this. A few years ago, I built an online training platform, using WordPress, which sells online health and safety courses. I’m still running this as a side business.

As time went on, I started to look more at plugins and themes and their commercial possibilities. I found that building bespoke client sites is time-consuming – and single-use. I might work full-time for a couple of weeks on a project without time to do anything much else. And once the site is built there’s not much more I can do with, whereas when you build a theme or plugin, you can sell it multiple times. When I started, I knew that I wanted to have several income streams rather than relying on a single source of income. But while doing a lot of client work, it’s difficult to find time to create longer-term opportunities for income. I’m still very much occupied in trying to get this balance right.

I’m not sure I ever used the word ‘discontent, ‘ but for certain I think there’s a disconnection for plugin developers once their product goes out into the wild, particularly if you are distributing via a platform like the WordPress.org directory. Having released several plugins through the directory, I often found myself scratching my head looking at the stats, wondering why some people continued to use a plugin and others didn’t. The amount of useful information for a developer there is zero.

For instance, it’s not possible to tell how many users have downloaded your plugin. The downloads figure provided based on updates, not installations. So, if a plugin has 20,000 downloads but only 1000 active installations, that might mean 19,000 users have deactivated it after installation, or it might mean that 1,000 users have updated it 20 times – but as a developer, you have no way of knowing.

I built Wisdom because I wanted to know more about what was happening after users installed one of my plugins. And I very much wanted to know about any problems so that I could fix them. When you consider the kind of industry that we’re in and the amount of data available to us for just about everything we touch, it’s incredible that necessary data like this isn’t more readily available.

The road to the first 100 customers is not an easy one. However, I think that the first customers are always the most difficult ones to acquire. Once you start building a customer base, then you can generate some momentum.

I released Wisdom at the start of March this year. I’ve spent the last five months using it on several of my plugins, collecting data so I could see how it was working in a live environment. I released a new version last week that improves the efficiency of the reporting system. I found that I collected enough data which was sufficient to improve performance. I’m now working on the next version, which will include integration with MailChimp so that every time someone installs one of your plugins, they can be automatically subscribed to a MailChimp list. This version should be out next week.