Panel

Pippin Williamson (twitter github Pippins Plugins)
Curtis McHale (twitter github blog)
Eric Davis (twitter github blog)
Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up)

Discussion
01:28 - Pippin Williamson Introduction

Pippins Plugins
Easy Digital Downloads
Restrict Content Pro

01:53 - Making Money Making Plugins

Product Development
Custom Development

02:57 - GPLv2 Licensing

ThemeForest
Support
Disabling Features

11:45 - Building a business around open-source

Audience

12:48 - Transitioning from freelance to product work

Graduality
072 – Saying NO
Doing products during spare time
Brian Casel
The Bootstrapped Web Podcast

19:10 - Starting with products vs consulting
22:38 - Occasional Consulting
23:41 - Marketing Products

Personal Brand
Word-of-Mouth Referrals

25:42 - Customer Support
27:17 - Advice for people getting into commercial development

Go the extra mile for your first customers

28:01 - Deciding what products to build

Building what you need
Best Practices

31:30 - Pippin’s Plugins

CodeCanyon
Easy Digital Downloads

34:26 - Pippin’s Support Team
36:45 - Tools to Run the Business

Github
WordPress
Skype
WordPress-GitHub-Plugin-Updater
HALL
Ronin
Twitter

Picks

1Keyboard (Curtis)
Radium (Curtis)
Episode 148 | Online Marketing Trends with Special Guest Clay Collins (Eric)
The Online Marketing Makeover Training Course (Chuck)
Bloons Tower Defence 5 (Chuck)
SearchWP (Pippin)
FacetWP (Pippin)

Next Week
Our Stories
Transcript

[Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net.]

[You're fantastic at coding, but do you have an action plan to take it to the next level? The upcoming book, Next Level Freelance, will help you optimize your freelance business for happiness. The book is packed with actionable steps to make more money, case studies, tips to find more clients, and exercises for you to establish your desired lifestyle. Extras include: 9 interviews with freelancers who make great money while enjoying great work-life balance, videos on strategies to find quality subcontractors, and videos on making more free time by outsourcing your daily tasks. Check it out today at nextlevelfreelance.com!]

[This episode is sponsored by Planscope. Planscope is a project management and collaboration net built for freelancers in the way they work with clients. It makes it easy to price out new estimates and once you’re underway and help answer the question, these get done on time and under budget. I’ve been using Planscope to do my estimates and manage my projects and I really, really like it. It makes it really easy to keep things in order, and understand when things will get done. You can go check it out at Planscope.io.]

CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 79 of The Freelancers' Show! This week on our panel, we have Curtis McHale.

CURTIS: Hello!

CHUCK: Eric Davis.

ERIC: Hi!

CHUCK: I’m Charles Max Wood from DevChat.tv. We also have a special guest, and that is Pippin Williamson.

PIPPIN: Hi everybody!

CHUCK: Since you haven’t been on the show before, do you want to introduce yourself?

PIPPIN: Sure! As he said, my name is Pippin Williamson. I’m a WordPress plugin developer. I spend my days writing plugins, supporting plugins, and generally running a business around commercial plugins. I have a couple of large plugins out there. One called “Easy Digital Downloads” and another one called “Restrict Content Pro” that I’ve considered my main ones. That’s pretty much what I do day-to-day.

CHUCK: I’m a little curious, generally, when you’re making money writing plugins for WordPress, are you writing the kind that people pay for and then they download the code and stick it in the WordPress installation? Or, are you doing custom development for people? Or, both? How does that work?