Show Takeaways!
Keep your products lean as it reduces the support load.
Treat your new products seriously and write a pitch deck! (Read the entire show notes to get access to Matt’s pitch decks!)
Today’s topic is the business side of plugin development. Jason and I ask Matt Medeiros all the burning questions that developers need to consider when launching a premium plugin. Matt is a Co-Founder of Slocum Studio, WordPress design and development agency based in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. Slocum Studios already has had great success in building and selling themes and has now released their first commercial plugin, Conductor. If you’re a WordPress podcast fanatic then you’ll know Matt from The Matt Report!
Show Notes
Matts’ IT Background
- Matt grew up with a fascination with computers and played around with them as a kid using DOS. A few years later Matt learned Linux environments and gained a job in an ISP. From there Matt helped setup shared hosting using cPanel so they could add that to their service offering.
Agency and theming
- Matt’s agency runs from an old…school building, not to be mistaken with an “old school” building :). Matt believes that having an office helps maintain culture.
- Slocum Studio service clients, maintain and develop themes for WordPress.org as well as premium themes and the Conductor WordPress plugin.
- Theme support is very low because the themes have been built with simplicity in mind and keeping options lean.
- Matt recommends reading Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works.
Plugin Development
- Conductor was built over 12 months and was originally created to service the requirements of their clients.
- Matt has a group of Advisors for Conductor to help shape it’s evolution and UI.
- Focus groups have been used to gain true user feedback about the product.
- Matt has used pitch decks to maintain the feature base the development of the plugin and keep focus of what they have been building. Matt has iterated on his pitch decks over time. Here’s a link to his first pitch deck and here’s a link to his most recent pitch deck. (Please note that there are gifs which don’t work in the pdfs).