 Good morning, everybody. So Devin Walker is the creator of several highly rated and award winning WordPress plugins. His work is actively being used by millions of websites and has been featured in Product Hunt, WP Tavern, Torque, and several other widely regarded online publications. As an advocate for open source, Walker has given back extensively to the WordPress community in the form of code contributions, WordPress and media organization, as well as fostering and supporting popular online groups like Advanced WordPress and WordPress for Nonprofits. As a business owner, Walker founded his WordPress company Impress.org and has grown it to a team of more than 15 employed in two years of incorporation. Popular plugins include GiveWP, the top rated donation and fundraising platform for WordPress, WP Rollback, WP Business Reviews, and Max Builder Pro. In total, his plugins on WordPress.org have been downloaded more than one million times and have accumulated more than 355 star reviews. Outside of work, Devin enjoys traveling the world, going to concerts, and leisurely, round of golf. Please give a warm welcome to Devin Walker. Thank you. I wrote down myself, it was kind of awkward hearing it, but yeah, that sums me up pretty well. Today I'll be talking about, if you build it right, there will come. As you heard in the intro, I've had quite a bit of experience building products for WordPress, mainly plugins. I first started with WordPress in 2009 and it's been a great journey since then. Watching the platform grow and meeting a lot of great folks along the way. So I'm here to share a little bit of that insight. Here's a bit of what I'll be discussing, why WordPress, why it's a good market for you to build your product or service in. I started out doing quite a bit of services. I worked at an agency for two, three years and then stepped down and started doing some freelance work on my own and I think that's really common and then started doing some more client services before we moved more into products. So examples of successful businesses, we'll take a look at and highlight a couple of plugins and a couple of agencies from more boutique agencies to larger scale ones. And then building your business, you know, how do you do that? Kind of you got the bootstrap route to partner up, are you gonna be sold at the North, things like that. And then finally, the MVP approach, whether you're building a product or service or relatively small groups, so, you know, you're willing to, you know, if you have a question you're accessible, you know, you can interrupt me. So WordPress, this is kind of a graph that I pulled the other day, but you can see there all the way at the right, WordPress is the most widely used content management system out of all of them. I'm not sure if you can see this, but Drupal is very small up there on this site used by fewer sites. You can see WordPress is way up there on the right hand side on its own. This is from the 10th of November, so it's pretty relevant statistic here. You can also see here, this is out of content management usage worldwide, on all the internet, it's WordPress on the right side of this piece symbol-looking thing here. That's WordPress right there. And then Drupal is the green spot below that. So there's lots and lots of opportunity to build on WordPress. The other craze, other than might be, you know, customized CMS that maybe an agency is putting clients on or like a Laravel application built into a CMS, something like that. So some more interesting statistics about why WordPress is great and why, you know, if you create a good plugin, they will come. And if you support it properly and document it properly, people will find it on WordPress.org, but Plugin repo has lots of great opportunity for you on that. 30 plus percent of the internet runs on WordPress. Now this, I think might have ticked up a percentage or two within the last couple of weeks, but I saw that recently. And I think when I started, it was around 20 to 22% of the internet. So there's tons of websites that are running on WordPress. I think estimated 80 to 100 million sites run on WordPress. Lots and lots of opportunity there. 48% of Technoradi's top 100 blogs are managed with WordPress. Wired.com recently went back to WordPress after moving away for a little bit. And they also wrote up a nice blog piece about that and it got some good publicity. I believe time.com is another really popular one that's using it. And a lot of them are doing really interesting things now with WordPress REST API where they're kind of using WordPress in sort of like a headless mode. And you can really pipe the data where you need to do, where you need it to go and be really flexible with that. 56 language translations of WordPress, highly internationalized. Our plugin, GiveWP, has been translated into 15 other languages by volunteers on WordPress.org, the Polyglots team. And we didn't have to do anything except for make sure that all our streams were properly internationalized for them. And it's helped us grow from just the United States or English-speaking countries to other countries like Israel, for example. We've made sure that we have right to left compatibility so when you view WordPress in the right to left mode then our plugin is conformant to that. So those types of little tweaks really can make you go into other markets and help you grow your product or service whatever it might be. And then WordPress is most popular with businesses and nonprofits. So when we took a look at the space we did a lot of research first to decide what we wanted to do. And we saw that 48% of nonprofits are running on WordPress. And then we took a look at what solutions were out there for accepting donations, managing donors, getting reports on it, accepting recurring donations, doing that in a free and open source way. And there wasn't much. There was a couple plugins that did some okay forms and they were updated every six month by one individual. So we kind of identified that market and really went after it. And there's lots more opportunity to do that. 59% of small businesses still don't have a website. So that means that the well is not dry yet. There's definitely really full. You can, there's gonna be a whole lot of more opportunity. Whatever your opinion on Gutenberg is, React is coming into WordPress core. And there's not a lot of developers or agencies that are really doing WordPress in React. That could be a niche that somebody goes after. And there's a lot of other opportunities. WordPress is perfect for a small business that doesn't have a large budget and they don't want to pay a yearly license for let's say like a proprietary CMS or a monthly fee. Squarespace is really going after this hard. But that's still kind of do-it-yourself mode for like the solo business person. I mean, I don't want to take anything away from Squarespace, it serves its purpose, but we're here at WordPress conference. So it's definitely something, I gotta give WordPress the nod on that one. Moving along, many have and many will succeed in the WordPress market. Essentially that's what the gist of that is whether you want to start out on your own or you want to work with a big company, you can do that. What you need to do is really take a look at the space right now. Easy Digital Download is a product that I want to highlight because Pippin Williamson is the developer who started this. He had a number of different plugins that he was selling before, but this one really I think was his big break. He released it around like 2010, 2011. I had the chance to really talk with him and kind of pick his brand and we were in a mastermind together for about a year. And I learned so much from him and the way he goes out in the community, he writes a really great blog post. He runs his company very transparently and he doesn't put himself up in some ivory tower or a lot of other CEOs I guess you could call him do in other types of industries, especially software. So his product essentially took the e-commerce space and saw some opportunity there and said, okay, I'm going to trim it down and do digital downloads very well. And we sell our plugins through it. They have a software licensing extension and a bunch of other extensions and I really liked how he had a free core that was really well done on WordPress.org, highly rated and then sold extensions on top of it. It was a good add-on model. Yoast, everybody who's running Yoast on their sites, I think nearly everyone, right? I mean, all in one SEO is pretty good too, but I got to give Yoast a nod for that because he's an example of also another person who's highly successful, highly influential in the WordPress space and the majority of his revenue, I would say, this is not official, this is my speculation, comes from that premium version that he sells, but he also sells some services too. So if you're looking at the comparison of revenue, I would say that the services are a much smaller piece of the pie that you can do SEO audits on your site and they do some training courses and things like that and they also have partnerships with other SEO-type companies. They're based in the Netherlands and they have, I think, around 50 plus employees now. DG Savvy is a small agency in Los Angeles and it was started by this individual named Alex Vasquez and he does very good work as a freelancer and throughout the years he's grown into a team of, I think, around four to five people now and this is a good example of how you do good and you make really good money for yourself, you get past bigger business. About three months ago, we passed him some client work. I think he definitely won RFP in it. His bid was around 25K for that one RFP. So he's pretty happy with me at this time but I wouldn't pass it to him if I didn't know he did good work and he was well-known in the WordPress space. Skip one. Sprout Invoices, this is one individual in the Orange County area named Dan Cameron and he does the best Invoicing plugin for WordPress and he and I have also talked for a long time and we're part of just a little networking group and I've also, I've also said, why don't you grow past just yourself and it says, I'm really comfortable with doing it on my own and he doesn't really want to get to the next level and on the back page here, he has a great explanation about like, hey, it's just me doing this but guess what? Like this is all I do, it's something I'm dedicated to and he really likes that he can focus on this on day-to-day basis, help the customers and then also have a great time with his family and get that off time as well. So it's really about how you define your success in business. Just yourself, like Dan, or you could be a small number of folks like Alex or you could do a really large company and again, this is not gonna happen overnight and you have to work really hard at it but look at what happened to WP Engine for example. When I started in WordPress, they, I remember their first website, their old logo and the hosting was kind of really fast but it was like breaking but and now it's like very, 300 plus people, maybe even more than that, large funding, huge office in Austin and you know, a really well-recognized host and so that is something that you can definitely do. I mean, it's gonna take hard work but how do you define that success? And I would say, know your why, know why you're trying to do this. Why are your end goals, but start with maybe a bite-size like a year from now and then three years from now and these are gonna change and things change, doors open, doors closes as time goes on but things will work out. If you start with the why, who is familiar with Simon Sinek's book? Start with what? Yeah, perfect. That's a great book and he also does several others. There's another one called Leaders Eat Last which is a really informative book but most people don't start with this one. I know it's kind of small for you, some of you in the back but a lot of people start with what first? With Git, we really wanted to make it easy for anyone to set up funding for their cause without having to make payments to a SaaS platform to take a percentage of their donations. We came up with a motto, we want to democratize generosity, kind of a nod to WordPress, their motto is democratizing publishing. We want to do the same thing with online donations and then how we did that, various development efforts, design efforts, I'll show you a little bit of that there and then the what? Of course, the product and the add-ons and the suite and the support and the documentation after that. We set a lot of goals early on. We set financial goals, we set product development goals, we set hiring goals but what we did is we set smart goals. Have people heard of smart goals? Okay, perfect. There's a lot of great Google spread, or if you Google smart goals, there's some nice tools and sheets that will help you formulate these goals but essentially they're specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound and not really pie in the sky type of things like I want to make the next Adobe P Engine and have 300 million in revenue and buy it three years from now. That's like not the smart goal at all. But if you choke it down and make it fit into this timeline that is actually more relevant then you can definitely start seeing that success on a daily basis, weekly basis. And so on. So first you decide what you want to sell. Whether you're selling services, there's lots of opportunity there. Development, design, maintenance, security. Security was a great example of successful business that really started with focusing on WordPress kind of like their malware removal options and now they have a web application for firewall and they're recently acquired by GoDaddy and they made a great mark in the space there. Consulting, optimization and support. When I first started the WordPress there weren't any sites like WP side care or WP buff offering monthly maintenance and support plans. We'll keep your sites updated. We'll make sure they're backed up on a daily basis. If you need a little extra hand we'll do that. Nothing like that and there was an opportunity there. People saw it and it was a successful venture for a lot of folks. Another example of that on the services side are the consulting, they're kind of micro-consulting. If you need a custom widget in your sidebar you can go and you can pay somebody on Codable for example for that. I think it used to be called Tweaky or something like that. But they recently changed things. But then also on the left hand side themes, plug-ins, of course themes, everybody's heard of Envato and ThemeForce but there's so many great other theme companies outside that Divi is one of the most popular themes and massively tracked the website. I see their ads on YouTube all the time. They're really well done and great people over there. Plug-ins, that's the space we're in. SaaS software as a service. You're seeing this more and more as well. People building services around maybe reporting or metrics for WooCommerce or some other form of integration into WordPress. Co-schedule is another example of a SaaS that's well built into WordPress for managing your content and scheduling it and all sorts of social media integrations on top of that. SaaS is a really interesting marketplace because you can kind of control your code more but a lot of it depends on your server side skills as well, keeping things up to date. You can sort of charge more of a monthly fee for the SaaS space too whereas plug-ins is more of an annual payment. Tools and hosting, those are pretty self-explanatory. But find your niche. I've been saying that quite a bit. I think that's, I've given several examples of the ones that have been highly successful but there's plenty out there. I really like the kind of the react play coming in and I think we're going to see a lot more of that taking over the WordPress admin interface and going into the front end here in the next future, next year, next couple of years after 5.0 was out. So what's your idea? You've got to figure out your idea first and really kind of sell yourself on it first. This could come from a standpoint that you already know about. So for instance, the way that give was thought of was we were building lots and lots of nonprofit websites and we were using all sorts of tools to accept donations and then the clients, more than one client came back to us and said, well, we don't need a cart system for the donations. It's just awkward for them to go into a cart and then go to a separate checkout page like they're buying a product. And, oh, by the way, why does it say product here? And then why do I have a quantity for my donation? So like we got the name your price add on, we put it in the commerce, we got that to work but they still weren't happy. They were like, then they moved to the admin interface. And they said, okay, now it's just products here and all the reporting's based on e-commerce. They wanted something really custom in the admin interface that was built just for donations and donors. So we're like, hey, this could really be an opportunity here for something big. We know there's a market out there for this. We've seen it just from our own client experience and then, oh, by the way, 48% of nonprofits use WordPress. So we didn't let it just sit in our own private conversations, we went and we validated many work camps. So the first discussion was the last work camp in San Francisco in 2014. And we spent about three or four months after that just kind of tossing that year around to a couple of folks that we know and try to survive their feedback. All too many times I see a lot of people like, I have a great idea of like, can you sign this NDA first or something like that? And it's like, sure, but you know, how good is that NDA even worth and what, I mean, this idea of that would be really awesome for me to do that anyways. But the best is just to go pitch. I mean, there's like a great little speaker area over here and you're not trying to sell anybody and it's like, either you're gonna like it or you're not. I have a great body in NDA, his name's Minode. David, he's done a lot of great projects and he's like, he's known for engine at WP mostly but he just recently came up with a new product called WP Merge.io and he's really trying to solve the merge problem with databases on various sites but in WordPress. But he pitched that to me like several times and iterated on it before. I was like, okay, well now it works really well. And wow, that's surprising. You actually did kind of solve that problem really well. But you know, you'll have like buddies that you can really always trust and get these ideas. And validate that. So it's important to express that functionality well though, before you build it. I'm a big fan of functional specs, couple of the bar frames and concepts. It's a little small over here, I think I got time but I wanna just show you briefly a couple of functional specs I put together for a couple add-ons we released. So it starts with like a Google doc. Here's an example of an add-on forgive that we created and it's called fee recovery. So you're like, what's fee recovery? Well, we have a line right below ask your donors to cover the gateway processing fees. That's like the pitch, right? Then we go on to like, okay, what's the official plugin name, what's the text domain, wireframes, brief documentation here about it. And this really lets you kind of hash out your idea and then when you go to write the marketing for it, the marketing content for it, you can kind of pick it from here as well. It kind of goes into more of the pitch here about why donors would like it and then a bit about how some milestone setups like getting the global settings and perform settings working front end working, plugin activation checks, object oriented class structure and then the different options for it. And then we get into some more visuals here. Okay, here's like an animal shelter example and then I put this together really quickly to help cover the transaction fees. So this is a checkbox version, but if I'm an admin, maybe I want to force my donors to do that, so we have an option to do that. So this one doesn't have a checkbox and this is a gift version. You can see that we wanted the fee to update right there instantly when you're changing the amounts. Another one I want to briefly go over is called currency switcher, okay, what's that? It's pretty evident in the name, but provided your donors the ability to pass, they are given the currency of their choice, excuse me. Get a couple examples of how it works and then we comment a lot on it. So a lot of these go to the development team, go to somebody else, we share the Google doc around and then there's always like wireframe attached. So I created this wireframe and balsamic and then there's a couple of the tools out there. Balsamic's pretty good for basic wireframes, but it shows you sort of about how the admin interface works here. You can add little sticky nodes and things like that. And then here's a go to the front end and describe that function out further. Another one for a different product that's called WP Business Reviews and you can see this is much more, it's more than a wireframe, it's more like a concept. But this one's more interactive. I created this in vision app and you can see it has these hotspots here and this kind of simulates, okay, if I were to like add a review, what's that screen gonna look like? Now I go to the add a review screen. Okay, let me go to a collection and see what that looks like. Okay, now I have my platforms here. I'm gonna go back to all reviews here and then let's click on this one. Oh, this is an actual review that's been written and it gives you a much more visual representation of what the actual product looks like. When you're pitching it, it's not just words coming out in your mouth, it's like people looking at pretty screens and they really like that a lot better. I mean, at least most people do. Go back to my presentation here. So yeah, express that idea before you build it. Vision app had just mentioned that it's well integrated with my preferred design toolkit which is Sketch. I was using Photoshop for a long, long time but I've recently switched to Sketch and Vision app also integrates with Photoshop but I'm just a big fan of Sketch. It's Mac only but they have this great tool I'll show you in a second here. Let me just skip ahead. It's called SketchPress. It's by our friends 10 up, they're out there. It's a whole screen of the admin interfaces, symbols and icons and it also has Gutenberg screens. It makes it really, really easy to design admin interfaces using the component libraries and things like that within Sketch. It's all GitHub, you can easily check it out and contribute to it if you want as well. And they're keeping it up to date. The wire framing tool is my choice. I like Balsamut for quick and easy things. Things like 89 bucks, 99 bucks, something like that. And Auxier, I believe that's how you pronounce it. This is a San Diego based company and it's much more complex and interactive. They also have a WordPress toolkit that you can plug in and make this interactive wire frame but it's a much steeper learning curve. So once you've done all that, it's time to get started building the actual product. PHP Storm is my preferred IDE. I use this on a primary basis but I also use VS Code, Visual Studio Code. It's a great lightweight editor. It's a little more set it up and customized according to your liking. But whereas PHP Storm kind of has WordPress tools built in out of the box, if you're not a developer and you need help, you can get the help you need to succeed. I mean, it might cost some money to get it done but hiring is hard and hiring quality developers is difficult. If you're an agency, this is a great site for coaching, online training. It's from Mirren Direct and it has a lot of great online resources from going from that one person to growing it and having more competitive RFPs, all sorts of stuff. So check out Mirren Direct if you're more interested in services. If you're looking for development, Multidots has been critical for us. They've provided some really great WordPress developers for our GIF team. And my friend Anil over here is actually the CEO and he can help you set you up on that and they can even do things like help you create your wireframes and your functional specs all the way through development. So they're full service like that. If you don't have maybe the development skills or the design skills on your own, there's other companies that will definitely help you out on that. So other ways to get quality developers, quality designers, Facebook WordPress groups. Do we have any members of the Advanced WordPress Facebook Group? Awesome. If you're not in that group, I suggest you go online to Facebook and search AWP or Advanced WordPress. There's 35,000 plus members in there. Matt Mullen, web-regulated post in there. Yoast is a moderator of that. I'm also an admin of that group. There's lots and lots of good conversation always going on in there. And don't be afraid to post a question as long as it's not something you can easily Google. Local WordPress and PHP meetups have been really great. In San Diego, we run a number of meetups and also I helped organize the work camp that's connected me with a lot of folks. I've been wanting to make it up here to WorkCamp Seattle for quite a bit. This is my first one, super stoked. It's really great up here. But work camps like this one, that sponsor area over there is awesome. I love just going around and doing the sponsored track also going to the speaker area and just making my networking rounds. Dribble.com is awesome. If you can get an invite on there or you can just use freelancers. I think it's really affordable, like 20 bucks a year or a month. And you can't stop that. See who those quality designers. Envato Studio, I think they're recently changed names but be careful on there if some just depends. You have to do your own work. And then if you need to learn to code, you want to do it yourself. There's so many resources now. This is 71 of the best places to learn to code for free. I think Google has some courses out there. It's learn to code with.me and it has lots of great resources on there for you as well. Once you decide on what you're going to build you're going to need to brand in with it too. I'm really proud of our give logo and how we iterate it through that process. And I'll show you a little bit about that. I'm not really a logo designer but this is my first attempt at the give logo here. You can see we had a leaf as the eye. And that was like, I was like, I do want a leaf in there at some point because like giving and trees and all sorts of things like that feels good vibes. And then so we kind of went around with some hearts and some more plain text. I'm like, yeah it doesn't look good. What is that hand like holding the heart something strange like that. Lowercase letters didn't really fit my vibe. But we did like the green on that. So we kind of took the green from this and the leaf from the other one. And then we came up with version three. And so this is similar to their logo now. I wish I had an actual logo up here but I'll show you the next screen. This kind of looks like a bike helmet more than a leaf, I suppose to the cheek. But it's getting there, you know? Like the eye is kind of working its way in. The V and the loopiness, there's not much shading. But we knew we had something on this. We just needed to kind of like patch it up quite a bit. So after a couple more iterations, we went through, tossed it around, asked people what they like, yada yada. We came up with this logo. I'm really happy with the way this turned out. Somebody actually came up and they're like, is the eye a person holding their hand into the G? I was like, no, but I can see that now. It's pretty awesome actually. My main objective was getting the leaf in the G, correct, and then the shading and the nice, soft green color. So that's kind of the process we went through. We hired this out to an individual I found on Dribble. And I looked for quite some time on Dribble to come up with this guy, and he was very well, he was up in Orange County. We're in San Diego, I didn't mention that. And very communicative and willing to work through us with that iterative process. And we're really happy with the way it turned out. And that's the only work he's ever done for us. That's it. And this was like three or four years ago. And since then we've built a great company around it. So iterate on the design for a successful branding. Get feedback like I was saying, friends, mentors, advisors, and then pay close attention to that detail. You know, any type of pixelation that's off, it really matters, especially with like vector logos and branding. Minimal file product. So you've got some branding along lines, you're building it. What you're gonna do is you don't want to build the whole thing right away. Like you definitely don't want to start with a wheel with your ideas like a Maserati or something like that. Start with like a little skateboard, you know, and then move forward and iterate on each of that steps along the way. First version of Give, we didn't release with recurring donations. And what we learned from the market, they wanted it extremely bad. So we spent like months making the best first version of MVP of recurring donations that we could. And since then we've iterated upon it. I wouldn't say we're at that car level yet. I don't know if we'll ever be there, but we're getting closer to that. Focus on simple implementation of your product. Start with that minimal set of features and then release the survey and always get that feedback from your users. Validate it, products solve problems. Does your solve that problem? The initial problem doesn't have to solve all of them. Question everything. Taking account of the ROI now versus later and then of course iterate on everything. Just remember you can always do it. It's not gonna always be easy. After you launch the product, you know, you might get some bad feedback. Don't let that discourage you. There might be some one-star reviews on WordPress.org that make you kind of cringe, but for the most part, if you support your products while you have a good documentation, you'll succeed. And WordPress.org is a great market where if you build it really right and well, they will come, they will find it. Do you have to market it? I mean, go into marketing very much here. This is after you build it and you successfully launch it, they will start coming. Again, my name is Devon Walker. You can find me on Twitter at Interwebs and also on our Facebook Advanced Workpaths. GiveWP.com. I'm from San Diego, California. It was really great being able to give my talk today. Thank you very much.