Mastermind.fm

Selling digital products online, including WordPress plugins and themes, can be easy if you’ve got a small shop, but once your business starts to grow, it becomes harder to maintain. Spending time working on your self-hosted e-commerce setup rather than building and marketing your product starts to work against you. That is where Freemius comes in. It’s an e-commerce solution that take...

This week I was excited to speak with Christie Chirinos from CalderaWP. I had followed her WordCamp EU presentation on the topic of financial forecasting back in June of 2018 and it intrigued me. Christie has an M.B.A. in Management Information Systems from Florida State University and has been involved in the WordPress space for a few years now, currently being a partner in the CalderaWP team tha...

This week we’ve taken a look at the other side of running a WordPress business – the development. We were joined by Alain Schlesser and Anton Ukhanev, two great developers who believe that developing your plugins and themes (and WordPress core itself) to as high a standard as you can will only help your business and the WordPress community grow further. WordPress is growing in populari...

This week I’m joined by Donnacha MacGloinn , a long-time member of the WordPress community and guest host on a few past episodes, to discuss WordPress hosting with Thomas Audunhus from Servebolt. Servebolt is taking on the WordPress hosting space by claiming that they can beat any other host in terms of speed, and they don’t rely on caching for it. In fact, they believe in caching bein...

Brian Link started “The Plugin Economy” as an owner of a small WordPress plugin in order to get more feedback from other developers of small to medium-sized plugins. He wanted to share what he was learning from them with the community, so the interviews began. In this episode, I took the opportunity to ask Brian about what he has learned from the more than 30 interviews he has done so...

In episode 89 , Joe Casabona and I started a discussion on some of the alternative WordPress business out there, other than the usual plugin or theme development. In part 2 we continue that discussion, delving into the world of teaching WordPress and teaching others how to run a WordPress business. Our discussion ranges from our irritation with those who think building WordPress sites for clients...

In today’s episode, Jean and James discuss their retirement from Mastermind.fm and usher in a new era during which the show will be hosted by Mark Zahra. We discuss what’s been going on in our lives and businesses over the past year and how we arrived to the decision to stop hosting the show. It’s definitely been a great run however it is now time for someone else to take over, a...

In this episode, Mark Zahra from WP Mayor ,  WP RSS Aggregator and EDD Bookings continues his foray into podcasting through a long discussion with Joe Casabona. Joe Casabona  has been around WordPress for many years, starting off like many of us building small WordPress sites, to now coaching and teaching others about WordPress and how to run a business around it. Mark got in touch with Joe recent...

Mark Zahra takes over for the first episode of 2018 to discuss a topic he has grown passionate for; customer service. Having been involved in support for the WP RSS Aggregator plugin for around 3 years, growing from a support engineer to head of support, and now being part of the team preparing the EDD Bookings plugin for its re-launch, Mark strives to improve the customer service their team provi...

This week, our resident James Laws is joined by his Ninja Forms cofounder, Kevin Stover, and Phil Derksen, entrepreneur and founder of WP Simple Pay . Together they jump headlong in WordPress businesses, business models, and what it’s like to sell a business. So, sit back and enjoy this post holiday episode of Mastermind. FM! Topics Include: Mr. Derksen’s background. A brief on WP Simp...

This episode is hosted by Mark Zahra of WP RSS Aggregator and EDD Bookings, who talks with Marius Vetrivi of WPRiders. Marius is an entrepreneur who has worked his way from being a solo freelancer to running his own WordPress agency that currently has 6 full-time employees. The two discuss Marius’ background as well as that of his business, WPRiders, before going on to discuss various aspect...

This turbulent second half of the the Dumitru Brinzan interview revolves around his controversial blog post Inside WordPress.org Theme Review Team: Money, Abuse and Inconsistent Leadership . Donnacha and Dumitru discuss the series of events that led him to be the first member of the WordPress.org Theme Review Team to publicly call out the corruption that makes WordPress worse for users but, conven...

Dumitru’s first coding job was in 2005, at a travel agency where he did some internal websites using PHP. Dumitru’s first WordPress job was in 2010 with WPZOOM, where he made themes. There he learnt that a lot of time goes into support. At heart, he considers himself a PHP developer first, WordPress developer second. Dumitru explains the difference between Romanians and Moldavians. Dumitru reveals...

In today’s episode, we welcome back Mitchell McCallahan to the show. Jean previously discussed Bitcoin with Mitchell on episode 28 back in September last year, so do check that episode out especially if you’re new to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. In today’s episode, we discuss the evolution of Bitcoin over the past year, as well as some common questions and doubts that people hav...

In today’s episode Jean is joined by Daniel Dios , an entrepreneur in the sports field, specifically the fastest growing sport in the world: padel. Jean has been taking padel seriously during the past year, and this is the perfect opportunity to learn more about this sport if you haven’t yet heard about it. Beginning with a short introduction on when padel was founded, Daniel proceeds to outline t...

James Laws welcomes Dustin Stout as his co-host for the episode, kicking things off by measuring the size of their respective Twitter followings. Dustin won, and so he should, given that he is a social marketing consultant who now sells a successful social media product, Social Warfare. If we could combine James and Dustin, at a genetic level, into one man, he would be called Justin. Justin Lout....

In this episode, Mark takes over hosting duties from James and Jean to interview Ben Pines, the co-founder of the Elementor page builder plugin for WordPress; a plugin that is growing in popularity every week. Elementor has grown substantially in just over a year and currently has over 200,000 active installs and an 5-star average rating according to the WordPress.org stats . Given its sudden rise...

Well, this episode was a real monster, containing plenty of chewy insights and nutritious facts on the realities of running a WordPress marketplace with add-ons by third-party developers. James returns and explains the sad reason for his mysterious two month hiatus, putting Donnacha’s gripes about relationship squabbles and man-flu into rather stark relief. James has a plan to get back into shape,...

Mark Zahra of RebelCode and Donnacha MacGloinn of RedPen take a break from battling the forces of darkness and discuss the best steps to take if you want to make a living as a coder in the WordPress world. The hidden benefits of managing a plugin project, including the level of seniority at which it is acceptable to shout and call the developers “code monkeys”. The advantages and disadvantages of...

Jean Galea and Donnacha MacGloinn, standing in for James Laws this week, go deep into the fascinating story of Akshat Choudhary, founder and CEO of blogvault.net, a WordPress backup service and the most successful WordPress-related business in Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India. Among the topics covered in this free-wheeling, wide-ranging discussion: How Akshat started off in WordPress, what h...

In this episode we have Nirav Mehta on board as a guest. We talk about his experience in Indian startups as well as business analytics and how he runs things over at Putler.com. Furthermore we find out what are the 4 most important metrics for a WordPress plugin/theme development business, how to apply a data-driven approach to life and how to deal with cultural differences in practice. Shownotes...

In the first part of our discussion with Andrew Farrugia, we discussed nutrition and emphasised the fact that being healthy and fit depends very much on what you eat. However, that’s only part of the equation. You also need to be active and train. Training is divided into cardiovascular training (for example running or swimming) and resistance training (bodyweight exercies, weights). In this...

In this episode, Donnacha MacGloinn and Mark Zahra take over as guest hosts. Donnacha has been involved with WordPress since the early days while working on various projects, while Mark is the Project Manager for WP Mayor as well as the WP RSS Aggregator and EDD Bookings WordPress plugins. This week we delved into a current hot-topic in the WordPress community, the Gutenberg editor and what it mea...

In today’s episode we are joined by Andrew Farrugia from Mirror Friendly . Andrew is a former sprinter, and he is now a fitness athlete and personal trainer. He has helped countless people get back into shape, and has also helped other athletes who want to compete in their sport. Apart from being a fitness fanatic, Andrew has a demanding job as the CFO of a busy marina in Malta. We discuss w...