Morning everyone. So she said my name is Pippin. I'm a plugin developer. I work on a variety of projects and I have a team of about 15 people that work with me and we primarily build three main products. We work in the e-commerce space with easy digital downloads, the affiliate marketing with affiliate WP and then memberships with restrict content pro. When I was first putting this session together, I was originally thinking that I would just do any kind of question on any subject didn't matter what it was whether it's WordPress or development or life or health or or beer or anything and so I started soliciting questions and I asked people what do you want to know? What would you like to have what question would you like to have answered and as I started getting these questions in over the course of a few days, I kind of started to notice a trend and they were all about product development and building a product business on WordPress is what the majority of the questions were on. So my team and I have been in the WordPress product development space for six, eight years or so. I think our first projects, the restrict content pros are oldest and that one started almost six years ago and I was working in commercial products for probably two years before that just by myself and so anyway as we've been working on this these products for the last five to eight years we've had some pretty reasonable success and we've been around for a while. We were actually one of the very first companies inside of WordPress that went a hundred percent to commercial plugins and built our business on top of it. There's definitely a lot of others as well, but we were one of the early ones and we kind of got in early on and so we've had a lot of experience with it. We've had some pretty good success and I think people tend to ask us questions about it as they want to get into the same space. Maybe they're contractors and they want to move into products or they just want to build something on their own and they want to sell it. They want to get out of their day-to-day office job and they want to go do something else. Whatever they want to do they we get a lot of questions about that. I have an idea. I want to launch a product or set or what's your thoughts on this? What's your advice? What do you have? So that's what most of these questions ended up being around about. So I kind of compiled them and I found that they actually kind of followed each other pretty well. So we're just going to go through them and we'll jump around a little bit but we're going to try to address the question of building a product business on WordPress and how do you succeed with it? So the very first question that we start with is how do you assess the commercial viability for a product? A lot of people have ideas on something they want to build or they see something that they feel that needs to be built but it's difficult to figure out will somebody buy it? Will somebody pay me for this? So we get this question a lot of, hey I have an idea but I'm not sure if it's viable. What do you think? Would you buy it? Would you sell it? So there's a couple of tips that I think of ways that you should look at it if you have an idea. The very first thing is if you have an idea let it be known. The success of a product is not in the idea but it's in the implementation of the idea. And there's no such thing as an original idea. Our three products, membership, affiliates and e-commerce are three of the most unoriginal ideas in the online product space there are and yet we've done pretty well with them. So first of all if you have an idea don't think that you're the only person with this idea that you need to keep it secret. You've got to keep it safe because someone else is going to steal it. That's crazy but it's a mentality I think people have a lot. So if you want to do something commercially and you want to go and sell your product and sell your idea talk to people. Go talk to your local development group or whoever you have as an outreach whether it's local or online or in person or your family. Tell them about your idea and say here's this thing that I've been thinking about what do you think? Is this something that you need? Is this something that you like? And then from there if people respond to it and say yeah I really really like that okay maybe you have something good. If everybody responds I don't know about that. Keep thinking. The second thing is scratch your own itch. This is something that we've done pretty well and is one of the things that has led our team to be pretty successful is scratch your own itch. So five years ago I had built a membership plugin called restrict content pro and I was selling it on a marketplace called code canyon. But I really wanted to sell it myself. I wanted to move it onto my own sites. I wasn't happy with the current e-commerce systems available for my specific needs and so I said let's build what we need. So I built the tool that I wanted to use and that turned into easy digital downloads which is now our biggest project. That same thing happened with affiliate WP. We decided that we needed our own affiliate program and we didn't really like the options available so we built our own. And the restrict content pro the original project was started because I wanted to run a membership website and I didn't like the options I had so I built my own. Scratch your own itch because there's a couple of things it does. Number one it gives you a first-hand experience of what your customer's experience. If you use your product you understand where it sucks, where it's weak, the problems it has, the bugs it has, the things that it needs. You don't really know that if you don't ever use your product. You only know what customers tell you. So by scratching your own itch you do two things. Number one you put yourself in your customer's shoes as realistically as you possibly could because you are your own customer. And two you solve a need. So every time that we scratched your own itch we said we have a need, we have something that we want to do and something that we need to do. So let's solve it for us but I can almost guarantee you that if we have the problem someone else has it too and that's worked out pretty well for us. So those are the two first things I would do when assessing the commercial viability for a product. The next one is how would you build a successful theme business in scratch in 2016? So anybody who's been around in the WordPress world for the last five to eight years has probably seen the change in the WordPress theme industry. So maybe five to eight years ago there wasn't a whole lot of a commercial theme industry inside of WordPress. There was a little bit and then some big players came in and really made a name for themselves and were pretty successful and those would include companies like WooThemes and ThemeForrest and a lot of the main authors on ThemeForrest and I thought that was me for a second. So a long time ago it got started and those initial companies really started kind of a gold rush of the WordPress theme industry. If you try to start a theme business now you're going to have much harder time than say five or eight years ago because it used to be that you could throw up a theme. If it looked really nice people would buy it especially if you were a ThemeForrest author because there was so much traffic there. Now the competition is a whole lot, there's a lot greater competition, there's a lot more theme shops out there. And so I got this question of how would you build a successful theme business in scratch in 2016? Well first of all I wouldn't because I'm a terrible theme developer. But I do have some ideas on what would make a successful theme business and the first thing is don't try and build a general purpose theme. Just because you can make a blog pretty doesn't mean that your theme is going to sell. Focus very specifically in a niche and it could be a small niche or a big niche. I mean for example focus in e-commerce and you're going to have a huge market. But if you try to focus in a general, this is just a WordPress theme for any site whether it's company, personal, blog, etc. It's going to be a lot harder. The theme companies today that are more successful and that tend to have more success out of the gate are those that focus in very specific areas. Whether that is crowdfunding, job postings, e-commerce, or even much more specific than that. By being very specific in your focus you immediately stand out from the crowd and it's really hard to stand out from the crowd. And so try to focus. The next thing is don't try and build an all in one theme. Don't try and build a theme that has a thousand layouts, 5,000 buttons, all of the contact forms imaginable, don't do it. It might make you stand out, but you're going to regret it in two years. I'll tell you that. Okay, as a product creator how do you choose what not to build? A moment ago I said don't build an all in one theme. A lot of the all in one themes and by that I mean just the themes that allow, they advertise that you can build any layout imaginable, any kind of business, any kind of industry, etc. Those are theme authors that have fallen prey to the shiny object syndrome. Oh, I like that feature. Hey, that feature looks really fun. Let's build that. Somebody asked for that feature and all of a sudden you have 5,000 features in your theme or your product. It's very easy as a product creator whatever your product is to fall victim to that. There's a lot of features that we have built in our products that I wish we had never built because we fell victim to the shiny object syndrome of that looks really cool or yes, a lot of people are going to use that and either people didn't use it or it was just a really, really hard feature to support because either it was buggy, we didn't know how to use it well, we didn't build it all the way. So how do you choose what not to work on? I think this applies to both full products like how do you choose what products not to build and also what features not to build within a product or even which bugs to fix. It's okay to leave a bug in a product. Some people don't think it is but it really is, it's okay to leave a bug. So how do you decide what not to work on? We have a general rule that says if 80% of our customers are going to use this, we should seriously consider implementing it. If less than that are going to use it, say 10% or 20%, we're going to think really hard about whether we decide to implement this. I can tell you the features that we have built that we regret building now are the features that nobody uses or that a very small subset of users tend to use. So you have to try to focus and less is usually more. Almost always less is more. So when you're trying to decide what not to build, think about what people are actually going to use and how many of your users are going to use it. Now as you build products and as your customer base or your user base grows and grows and grows over the course of a few years, whether it's from two users to 50,000 or from 1,000 to 5 million, you run into a problem of how do you test products with huge user bases. This is kind of a tricky problem. Let's say that you have a project that has 50,000 active customers on it and you're going to push out a major update and it makes a whole lot of changes. How in the world do you test that to make sure that you're not breaking a ton of people's sites or that you are not removing a feature that a lot of people use or that you're not changing the behavior of it. How do you test this? This is a really, really tough problem and it's the reason why when you see plugins push out version 2.7 within three days around 2.7.1, 2.3.4, 5.7.8, our best record was 0.15 in three days. It was awesome, not really, but this is something that actually happens and you have to figure out how to deal with this. There's a variety of ways. Number one, obviously try to beta test. Send out whether you have an official beta system or you're just asking people to test it, beta test. Beyond that, you got to focus. You have to try to be very specific with what you change and you only learn it through experience and you have to break a lot of people's sites before you're going to figure out how to not break them. One of, I think, the best things that I ever figured out, I don't know if somebody told me this or whatever, or I just, I don't know, one day just realized it, but assume you know nothing about your user base. Assume that you know nothing about the way that they use your product, the ways that they have changed it, where they've installed it, how they've set it up, what are the things they're using. Assume that you know nothing about it and you can account for the unaccountable because you're already planning for something to go wrong. In development, we would often call this, well, I lost the term for it, defensive coding. Basically, you don't know what could be running on a site. You don't know what other plugins are using or what theme they're using and so you assume that you know nothing and you'd be very, very defensive about your changes and I think it's one of the best ways that you can avoid things going wrong on a user basis. Okay, as you build products or it doesn't have to be products, this applies to contract work for freelancers and agencies as well, you tend to work on the same thing for a long time. You work on it and you work on it and you see it every day and you get tired of it and you start to not even recognize your own code or your own features or your own UI and you just kind of stare blankly at the wall because you're tired of it, you're looking in tunnel vision and how do you and the team stay motivated with product work? I think this is anybody who's worked on a project for a long time knows that you get burned out. There was a time about six or eight months ago that I really wanted to leave some of the projects that we work on today because I was so tired of them. I was just burned out. I didn't really enjoy working on them now because I had been working on them for five years. How do you stay motivated to keep going, to keep fixing those bugs, to keep answering customer support tickets, to keep helping people? I love to help people, but I get tired of helping people. Everybody does. It's human nature. There's only so many times you can hear it's broken, it's not working, how do I do this? I don't understand.  There's no great answer to this other than side projects. Do other things. You'll have fun and have passion projects. It doesn't have to be in the same industry. It doesn't have to be in the same code. If you're a developer, have a passion project for gardening. Have a passion project for walking in the sunshine, sitting by the lake. Whatever you want to do, whatever makes you happy that is not work or is not the same work. I think that's one of the best ways to stay motivated is to stop working. Here's a challenge that somebody gave me one day and I've, for a long time, I was the person that would work 18 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days out of the year. Always. First thing, when I get up in the morning, I go to work. The last thing I do before I go to bed, I stop working and it's like, laptop closed, bed. Wake up, laptop open. Every single day for 365 days a year. And then somebody said, take Friday off.  Guess what? Everything was still there on Monday. It was great. So stop working every now and then. I think it's one of the best ways that you can stay motivated with your product work or any kind of work that you do. It doesn't matter what kind of work you do. That is probably the life lesson that I learn. I don't know if I learned myself or somebody taught me or whoever told me to take a Friday off one day. It kind of stuck with me because what I realized is that when you stop working, you go back to work and you're better. You're better at what you do. You're more focused at what you do and you get more done even though you work less time. So challenge, take a Friday off. Do it. See what happens. Okay, what's one of the biggest mistakes product developers make? A lack of focus? I think it's a huge one. I think a lack of focus and the shiny object syndrome are pretty large. This is how we get systems that have way too many features. Anybody love iTunes? Anybody used to love iTunes? Yeah, iTunes used to be awesome. It was great early on. But there's so much in it now. There's so much different stuff. Did you know I sell an app on the App Store and you access it through iTunes, the music app. This is silly. This is kind of crazy. I think iTunes is a great example of the product developers there not having enough focus on doing too much, chasing the shiny object. Now, obviously Apple's a very large company and they have a lot of data that says it's probably working just fine. But we have a lot of products that we use day to day or that we build or that we see built that just don't have a lot of focus. They really have a lost side of the less is more mentality which typically proves to be true over and over and over again. Ironically, that's one of Apple's main philosophies and yet iTunes is obviously not less is more. So I think that's one of the big mistakes we make. And maybe the second one is not pricing it high enough, making your prices too low. It used to be that Theme Forest and the other product under the other theme marketplaces charged $19.99 for a theme, I think. And it made it impossible for other people to charge $80 for a theme or $150. And we've slowly gotten away from this but the moment that you price yourself low it's very, very hard to price yourself realistically for what you deserve and what you should be priced at. If you make a product, don't sell it for $5. Sell it for $50. Or here's a crazy number, sell it for $500. I bet you people will buy it. Seriously, every time that we've raised prices, guess what's happened? We made more. But nobody stopped buying because we actually got closer and closer to a realistic price for what this thing is worth.  It's a little bit unfortunate that some of the large marketplaces out there, not just in WordPress, but for example at Android and Apple App Store are the worst offenders of all. Just how incredibly low. Can you imagine paying $2 for an app that took a thousand hours to make? We pay more for a latte at Starbucks than we pay for that. That's kind of crazy. So as a product developer, don't be afraid to price your products what they're worth. So with that, what are some of the biggest mistakes we have made, or that I have made, on our projects? There's two that I'm gonna tell you. There's a whole lot of mistakes that we've made. We've definitely learned from mistakes, but there's two big ones. They both focus on easy digital downloads. So a really quick primer for anybody that's not familiar with it. Easy Digital Downloads, or EDD, is a digital e-commerce plugin for selling digital products. Software, music, photos, whatever you want. And we started it about four years ago, and when we first built it, we decided that we were going to launch a marketplace and that we were gonna sell plugins or add-ons that other people made and that we would then take a commission. We're not familiar with any of the Envato marketplaces. It was basically following that, except specific to our little ecosystem, our EDD user base. So we decided we were gonna launch a marketplace. For the record, have no idea how to run a marketplace. Had no idea the things that were entailed, the responsibilities that we would have, how much time we'd have to spend moderating products, or taking care of bugs, or fixing things for other customers. We had no idea what a product...  And I'll tell you, that was easily one of the most challenging things that we've ever tried to get past, is once you have a marketplace that has 400 products in it from, say, two dozen vendors, or three dozen vendors, and then you want to shut that down, it's a little tough.  We realized that we wanted to sell our own code and not other people's code at a certain point. We just kind of one day woke up and realized, oh, oops, because now we have 300 products from other people and we're selling them and we don't know how to get rid of them. And it's not because we don't like them, it's just that we realize that we started this project to sell our code, not other people's code. That was the number one, that was the big one. And the next mistake really goes into the next question that we got. And I really regret making easy digital downloads with the freemium pricing model. The freemium pricing model is basically the idea that you have a core plugin that is free and then you have paid add-ons. And so you can buy additional features all a cart. I think that is possibly one of the worst things that we ever did. So the question is, does the freemium add-on model work? Yes, it does. I'll tell you that right now. WooCommerce, for example, is a huge example of the add-on model can work.  We kind of followed them and said, yeah, we're gonna do that as well. It makes sense, seems logical that if I want feature X and Y and Z, I should be able to buy each of those individually as opposed to having A, B, C, D, and E and F as well that I'm not using. So it's kind of a pick and choose. Well, there's a whole lot of issues it causes. And I don't have time to go in depth about all of the issues. The short answer is, does the freemium add-on model work? It can. It doesn't work for everybody. It worked for us. I would like to change it. I would like to go somewhere else. So I'm gonna give you a dollar value to think about or comparison. So we have three products. We have Easy Digital Downloads, Restrict Content Pro, and Affiliate WP. We did a Black Friday sale a couple of days ago, or two weeks ago. And after the sale was done, we were looking at revenue versus expenses, et cetera. For every dollar that Affiliate WP and Restrict Content Pro made, we paid out four cents. So we made 96 cents on a dollar. That was pretty good. For every single dollar that Edd made, largely because of the add-on model, we made 74 cents. That difference is huge when you extrapolate out to the sales volume for that weekend, for the month, for the year. Edd, because of the add-on model, largely is not a profitable project. And that surprises a lot of people. And it's because it's so expensive to run when you're running everybody else's code. So happy to talk about in-depth about it, anybody who wants to, but goes on to the next question of how do you make a product profitable? Well, you gotta sell it. You have to price it. It seems a little silly because it's so obvious, but you have to sell it. There's a lot of people, I think, a lot of mentality in the open-source world that says, I'm not sure that I can sell my product. I'm not sure I can sell things because it's open-source, so I'm gonna fund it by donations. Don't do it. Don't do it. Seriously. Donations are great. I have made 50 bucks in donations in five years. So don't do it. It's okay to sell your work. It's okay to put a price tag on it. It's okay to say my product cost $500 or $200 or $30, whatever you think is right, but price it. And don't be afraid to sell it and don't feel bad about pricing it what you believe is right. Now, do you ever sleep? This is actually something that I think is really, really important. I told you earlier that I used to work 18 hours a day, 24, 7, 7 days. That doesn't work. 7 days, you get the point. I used to work all the time and never sleep. And then I realized that sleep is important and that sleep is really, really important. So I get this question actually quite a bit, is do you ever sleep? And because our team is constantly seen as pushing out updates, making new products, pushing and driving and driving and driving and being leaders within the space. So do we ever sleep? I can't speak for everybody on my team because I know we have some insomniacs and they'll learn eventually, but yes, I sleep eight hours a night, every single night. And I think it's one of the best things I've ever done for myself, for my business, for my happiness and my family. Because I'm a better person for it. I'm a better developer. I'm a better leader. I'm a better everything because I choose to sleep. I choose quit working and actually give myself some rest. I think it's really, really important. Now, here's the silly one. What's better? Beer or WordPress? Okay. So this is kind of silly. This was a legitimate question that I got. And so at first I was like, I'm probably not going to include it, but then I actually realized that it covers a really important subject. So anybody who knows me well or sat down to dinner with me or had the unfortunate experience of sitting in a car for long hours with me knows that I really, really like beer. And I don't just mean drinking it and getting drunk every night. Not even remotely. I love the chemistry. I love the process. I love the ingredients. I love the science behind it. I love making it. I love everything about it and I love to go to breweries and go to other countries and new cities and go try it. It's really fun for me. It's a hobby. It's something I get a lot of pleasure out of. So the point is it's not which is better, beer or WordPress. I actually think they go quite well together. What's really important is having a passion that is not your work.  It doesn't matter what it is. One of them for me is beer. I have a brewery in my basement and I really enjoy brewing. So it's an escape for me.  Maybe I'm just, okay, I'm done for the day. Let's go do something else. Have something else that you do. It will make you better and it will make your work better. Okay. Back to WordPress. Do you think the WordPress economy will continue to grow or shrink over the next five years? I don't know the answer to this. I think it could very likely grow. It could very likely shrink. And that's really going to be determined by the people in this room and the people in the rest of the building and the overall WordPress economy. A few weeks ago, Matt Mullenweg made a comment that if WordPress is going to continue to grow, we have to address the ability to customize your site. And I think this is a very important point and I think it's very accurate. It's actually very difficult to customize a WordPress site. We like to think it's easy, especially the developers in the room really like to think that it's easy to customize. It's really not. I gave my sister a WordPress site recently and she just about broke down in tears because it was so hard for her to do. The products that she was using, the themes that she was using were so challenging. And we're going to have to address that for the entire user base. Not just for the users of one product or that theme or that plugin, but overall for WordPress. And there's been a lot of efforts made with things like the customizer and there's a lot of progress that's been made. But if we're going to continue to grow, that progress is going to have to keep going. And a lot of the people in this room are what's going to really define if that happens. So that goes on to the next question of what is going to shape the future of WordPress. And that's really kind of the same question. It's kind of the same answer and it's the people in this room. It's the people out there in the next room over. It is the builders, the creators, the users, the customers. Everybody here is going to shape the future of WordPress. Over the last five to eight years, one of the most fundamental driving forces behind the progress that WordPress has made is the commercial plugin business and the commercial theme businesses. Those are huge drivers for where WordPress is today. And so if you have an idea or you have a product that you want to create, go for it. Make it. See what you can do with it because that's what shapes the future of WordPress. That's what shapes the experience that we have in three years. Just think of the impact as a big example. Look at WooCommerce and look at their customer base. Look how huge they are. They are not a big chunk of the WordPress world. They are a huge chunk of the e-commerce world which is so much bigger than WordPress. And so are they influencing the future of WordPress? Oh, absolutely. Every single product in this room does. Every single product for WordPress influences the future of WordPress. And so go build it. Beyond that, I don't know what to tell you other than get started because today is better than tomorrow. And what's next? That is entirely up to you. I think I have a little bit of time to answer some questions. So the floor is open. There is a microphone up there and I'm not sure if there's one in the back or not. Ask me anything. It doesn't matter if it's product development or anything else. I really like answering questions and so go for it. Thanks very much, Pippin. My name is Shanta. I'm from Toronto, Canada. And I have a question about not being a developer and not being a designer. So I have an idea for a plugin slash theme slash all in one thing. Not being a developer and not being a designer how does one go about finding somebody or choosing somebody who can help you realize that thing? Well, so there's kind of two options. You can either find somebody that wants to partner with you or you can pay someone. And it really depends on your finances and whether that's something that's which option you go with. But I think number one is you have to try to reach out. So if you have a local WordPress meetup group, you're in Toronto so I know there is a pretty big one there. Reach out to the group and say, I'm looking for somebody to work on this with me. If you want to share your idea then, go for it. They can absolutely point you to people that are looking for work. There's a lot of people that are looking for projects to work on. And so I would start by just reaching out. Great. Thanks very much. Absolutely. Hey, thanks, Pippin. My name is Marcel. I come from Portugal. We have a similar situation in our agency where we found a specific problem to where people have their need. It's related to e-commerce. People wanted to maintain warehouses. We face with a problem. It's kind of a good problem to have that people are consciously giving us tips on how to improve the plugin and how to make features work better. How do you cope with that? We have a lot of people saying, this is the option that people are going to need and how do you decide whether to take this first? This is the exact reason why there's a lot of features built into products that should never be built into products. And it's because somebody suggested it and they're like, this is a feature that makes perfect sense for me and I'm sure that everyone else would use it and the reality is that most of the time that one person will use it. Now, that's not always true, but there's a couple of things that we do. Number one is that we take every request seriously. That doesn't mean that we're going to implement every request and that does not mean that we're going to necessarily log every single request on an issue tracker or any kind of planning board, but we're going to at least consider every single request. The next thing is that we try to, anything that we think has merit, we will log it and so that we have a record of it and then every now and then we'll choose, we can look at something and say, yes, that makes sense to build right now, let's build it. Other times we just say, okay, let's leave it here and if anybody else comes and asks for it, we'll log down the request and eventually you realize, hey, 15 people over three months have asked for this, maybe we should go ahead and build it. But do you like to make a math? Do you make a table where you say 15 people asked for this, but yourself think this isn't worth doing? How do you decide that? Sometimes you just got to trust your gut. There are certain features that I refuse to build even though a thousand people have asked for them, sometimes because I don't want to. It's okay. It's okay to be a little bit selfish. Thank you. Hey, Pippin, thanks for talking. My name is Tanner and I'm from Seattle, Washington. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit to your process of going from a solo developer and building out a team and any advice that you have for someone doing the same thing? Sure. So I started about eight years ago as just myself and then it took until about four years ago before I ever brought anybody else on to work with me. And I think that was probably a little bit of a mistake. I should have brought people on sooner than later. I got to a point where I was burning out every single day just trying to get everything done. I think the first thing that you should do is the moment you realize that you have too much to do, see if you can find somebody to help or offload some of that work, whether it's to somebody that you hire hourly, somebody you hire full-time, or even to another agency that just happens, like for example, customer support. There are customer support agencies that you can offload work to. Maybe not always a great idea, but try to get people involved, even if it's for one hour a week. It should become very apparent pretty quickly when you work with someone, if there's somebody that you want them to stick around. But the first thing you have to do is you have to bring somebody else in. There's no other way around it.  You want to work full-time? Because you're already way over full-time. I think the best advice is just ask for people. Say, hey, I need work with somebody. This is what we're doing. If you're interested, let me know. Or directly reach out to people. I think there are several members on our team that we reached out to them directly and said, hey, would you like a job? Thanks. Hey, Pippin, thanks so much for talking. Really take to heart everything you say. I'd love to hear a little bit more of your take on the GPL, specifically in product development, and how sometimes it is awesome and sometimes it can be a little bit problematic for plugin developers when they see their code flaunted around in different places. Sure. It's a little bit of a dangerous question. But not really. So everything that we sell is licensed under the GPL. And there's a lot of our products that are open on public GitHub repositories. So anybody who wants to, you can go explore them. You don't have to pay for them. You can just go look at them and download them and tweak them and do whatever you want with them. And sometimes that can be problematic because these GPL club sites or pro plugin clubs, these sites come together and they buy up a whole lot of plugins and then they resell them as part of a membership. And sometimes it's problematic simply because you lose customers to them. Sometimes it's problematic because these people have ulterior motives and they put malicious code into the plugins. There's a lot of different problems with it. But honestly, I don't care. It's not something that personally I think affects me. It does not affect our business. Maybe every now and then I can think of off the top of my head perhaps five people over five years that we have ever found out we're using one of our plugins that they downloaded from somebody else. And so over the course of, I don't know, 50,000 customers, I'm not too concerned about five. The other approach that I've always had is every hour I spend fighting piracy. It's not technically piracy if it's GPL, but whatever.  And so I just don't care. That's honestly my approach. Thanks. Hey, Piven. I'm Felix from Germany. So can you tell us a bit about when you initially started product development, how did you manage time and finances when you were, I assume, alone? And how did you work somewhere else? Or did you do client work? Or did you save money and then got all into it? So I started when I was a second year at the University of Kansas. And so I would have been 19 at the time, I think. Maybe 20. I had a fiance. And I worked part-time at a theater. I worked backstage setting up Broadway shows. And that was my day job. And I started building, I started doing client development, building sites for people in my free time. I took, I was doing a full course load, worked part-time there, worked part-time at a webdiv, or a department as a web developer, and then was trying to build this on the side. Eventually we just slowly cut out the side job at the campus department. And then one summer I said, okay, Molly, we're gonna see if we can make it full-time with this. It might be a little bit rough. If we can make it, we're gonna go for it. If we can pay our bills for three months, we're gonna go for it. If we can't, we'll think of something else. And so I pretty much quit cold turkey, everything else, and just did plug-ins, and it worked. It was a little close. Did we save money for it? Not really. We were, at the time, we had no expenses.  And that helped a lot. But really, we just kind of slowly eased into it. And then at one point, when we were kind of at the tipping point, just decided, let's go for it. Let's do it 100% and see what we can do. Thank you. Hi, Pip, and thank you very much. This is very valuable. I'd like to know what tools you have found most valuable for managing your business as well as for development? For development would be GitHub. Hands down. On top of that would probably be Trello, is a tool that we use every day for a lot of project organization. Communication on ongoing projects. And Slack would be our top three for just day-to-day team communication. For like finances, hiring my accountant and letting her do whatever she wants. Thank you. Trello, Slack, and GitHub. Hello, Pippin. My name is Alex Standefurt, and I just want to know, what do you read? If you could name one book. Right now, I'm reading Brewing Local, Brewing Beer with Indigenous Ingredients. Okay. Hey, Pippin. I wonder if you could elaborate a little bit more on why you don't think freemium always works. Maybe just for EDD or maybe just for plugins in general. Thanks, Patrick. As the previous product manager for WooCommerce, I think you have probably more experience than I do. Can I ask you? Why doesn't it work? Okay, so it does work. It can work. There is one major requirement in order for freemium to work. And that is whatever you choose to sell as add-ons, as a la carte add-ons, they have to be required features. Here's one quick little example. A lot of people get mad at us because the ability to manually create a purchase record in easy digital downloads is a paid upgrade. It is not included with the free plugin. And a lot of people say, well, this is an integral feature of EDD. Well, no, duh. That's why we sell it. The point being is that if you need something, you're willing to pay for it, usually. And we have a team to pay. We have bills to pay. And so we're going to sell certain features that we feel are important and that people will pay for. So it works in that way. I don't think it is a great experience for users now, especially when it comes to trying to install license keys and managing updates for plugins. I think it's just a little bit cumbersome. It's a little bit, it's a burden. The experience of installing one plugin is so much better than installing 20 plugins. Now, there's a lot of advantages that the Freemium model does give, but overall, okay, we sell three primary products. And between those, we've changed our sales model several times. And I can tell you the model that we settled on is by far my personal favorite, which is we sell our product, and if you buy a high-level license, we give you bonuses, basically. It's the best model that we've ever used. You might be more familiar with it if you think of the Gravity Forms model. The way that Gravity Forms is sold is the same model. It works really, really well. So my biggest beef with Freemium is simply that, yeah, it works, but it's definitely not the best, in my opinion. Yes, I'm wondering if you're happy with the state of APIs in WordPress and in terms of your APIs, can make it possible for other developers to extend existing plugins without hacking them? Overall, the APIs within WordPress are really, really nice. They're very flexible. I mean, the fact that we have a plugin ecosystem with, oh, 40,000 to 50,000 plugins on WordPress.org alone tells us, yeah, there's an API that's pretty solid there. I can tell you one API specifically in WordPress that is really terrible, and if you are a developer and you want something to work on, this is what I would love to see, and that is the menus API for customizing menus. It's really hard to work with. There are a lot of open issues on track for WordPress on how to fix it and how to improve it. So if you have attention to give, that's where I would love to see it. Overall, I think they're really good. I think they can be better. I think the place where the APIs tend to suffer the most are actually in plugins themselves running on top of WordPress and not WordPress's APIs.  Treat it as though you are writing WordPress itself because you are writing something that runs within the WordPress ecosystem, and so make it run the same way. Make it extendable, put in action hooks, put in filters, build out your APIs so that other people can extend it. Thank you, everyone.


As expected, Nigeria's inflation rates accelerated to a new 17-year high of 21.09% in October, and 0.32% points increased from 20.77% recorded in September, raising concerns for Nigerians already battling with the weak household incomes and impot pass through costs. Already, there are concerns that the country's inflation trend may not have reached its peak considering the triggers like intermittent fuel scarcity, witness during the review period, stubbornly high gas and energy prices, lingering currency pressures and, of course, a build-up of higher Naira liquidity as the campaign season starts. These are all the things that are yet to be addressed. According to the latest Consumer Price Index reports released by the National Bureau of Statistics yesterday, flawed food inflation, I beg your pardon, also surged to 23.72% in the review month, which is 0.38% higher than the 23.34% rates that was recorded in the previous month, and 5.38% higher compared to what we had, which was 18.34% in October of 2021. Now, indeed, higher inflation and exchange rate volatility are associated with higher pass through of exchange rates into import prices, lingering currency pressures, et cetera, et cetera, and these are a couple of the issues that we're going to be addressing this evening. Well, joining us to discuss this and break it down so that we can make sense of it all is Gospol Obeile, he's the chief economist at Street Onamics Ltd. Thank you so much, Gospol. Always a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much, Mary, and really great to be here. Yes. Anytime I see these numbers, my head just starts catching fire, so I'm just going to let you do the numbers thing, and I'll just ask the questions. How about that? No, great, great, great. Okay, but then it might not be funny for those who have to deal with the inflation in the country. Salaries are not being increased, prices of everything is going up. Sometimes, for some, it has not just doubled, it has tripled, and the average Nigerian is trying to make sense of it all. At some point, the dollar was almost edging towards 900 naira, but thank goodness, I think it's come down to about 600 plus. But break it down for us. Why is it still in the up and up? Most would say that, oh, it's the Ukrainian war, but then we're not in Europe, we're in Africa. COVID has come and gone, we're still trying to get back on our feet, but what could be solely responsible for how skyrocketing the prices of things are going and of course gas? Yes, thank you so much. Really great to be here again. It's pretty much a very interesting conversation, and to a very large extent I would be very much surprised if the average Nigerian is surprised at the growth of the inflation numbers. And what we see actually are the clear effects or results of how vulnerable the economy is rather, you know, interact with global changes and local shocks as it were. Yes, the Russian Ukraine was still on at a different level now. But you cannot also take out the lingering effect of that war on commodity prices. Most of the products like grain, sunflower oil and the rest are produced from those regions in context number one. Number two, you also have the climate change economics, which means that climate change also comes in the form of change in raw material production and supply. So, soya bean is now very much in high scarcity right now. And just to bring you home a bit to seeing how the recent flood in Nigeria has also brought up a lot of questions and scare. In fact, they've been a projection by the Food and Cultural Organization that the flood crisis may likely lead to a new event of food crisis. And that may likely also lead to some increased 17 to 23 million Nigerians caught in poverty as the case may be. And that's how inflation really works. Once prices of goods and services begin to increase, especially prices of basic necessities like food, energy, transport, housing and all that, it means that the average individual will have to pay more to get a life. The cost of living would increase over time. And when the cost of living increased over time, it means that the block of your income you have available for expenses will keep shrinking. And that would technically also mean that people would not be able to satisfy their needs or meet their needs. At the level of satisfaction they may desire over a period of time. As a result, tougher choices were kicking and for the lower block of income earners in some form of poverty trap would also kick it. So, we've seen a lot of these conversations. As we've just forced scarcity, blackouts and in a worsting situation of Naira, we've seen all of those dynamics permeate into core basic disaster items for the average Nigerian. And that's where the pressure is and that's where the pain points are. Country is like the United Kingdom. I mean, one of the reasons why Liz Tross was butted out of office was because her short-term plan to cushion the effects of inflation was not realistic. And they didn't think it was great. So, I mean, one of the reasons why she was butted out and then they brought back the present Rishi Sunak is because they thought that his ideas were better. In Nigeria's case, what are the cushioning effects that our government have come up with or are tinkering on because of course I'm sure that we have an economic council which the vice president sits on. We have a minister of finance. We have, I don't know if she still coordinates the economy and all of that. But what is it that we can actually say would be a cushioning effects strategy of sorts that we can come up with that will help the situation?  We all were here when they found a sudden vessel that leads all the way to the sea and then it was destroyed, no questions asked, no investigations. So, what is it that Nigerians can hold on to as a glimmer of hope while we go through what we're going through? Thank you so much for that great question. There are major low-hanging fruits that can be leveraged as some form of cushioning effect. But they still serve as potential or they still exist in a potential form. The ability to unlock that potential into mainstream mechanisms through which inflation can be reduced or the cost of living can be reduced or the average Nigerian is much more productive and prosperous and then looking forward to a brighter and more optimistic future. The ability to pull that mechanism into the mainstream economy is where you begin to talk about public leadership. I mean, when you started the question, you talked about least trust and which is SNAC and the likes. These are external leaders who are probably, in one way or the other, seeking to deploy the mechanisms to unlock that potential of the low-hanging fruits to manage the impact and all that. So, those shock absorbers really exist. But the leadership capacity to build the mechanism through which those shock absorbers will be executed and deployed to deliver the assignment is a big question. We are in the political tension season right now and Q1 2023 is going to be largely around politics and the politics of elections. So, what that technically means is that for Nigeria and the Nigerian economy is more around political correctness than what is economic priority to the average Nigerian. So, whatever would help the government of today to retain power or whatever would help the opposition party take over are the major lengths through which economic policy will be delivered and that's the political correctness bit of things. So, for now, I mean, I do not think any major strategic approach will be taking to unlocking, you know, the growth mechanisms required to help Nigerians really rise above this challenge in as much as those potentials really exist. So, it's quite unfortunate and really taking into account that the Christmas season is around the corner and with the flawed talent we have right now or we're dealing with right now there will be a cost to increase in form of inventory stock pricing by suppliers, you know, and suppliers intentionally hold back some product, meaningfully well that supply chains have been broken, you know, prices of products and goods and services will increase in the market and further increase down the line as suppliers also sort of gain control over the value chain to take products to market meaningfully well that supply has been tampered with due to the flood situation. So, the promises are there, the potential is there, but you need a strategic leadership to unlock potential to results. I know that you're not a politician, but it's incredible how we say, oh, we have the low hanging fruit, so everything that we need to survive, we have it, it's just that we need the brains and the people to do it. But then we have a government in place that asked us to, you know, elect them because they knew what to do to help us get out of the rots that we found ourselves in in 2015, but then we seem to have dug ourselves into a deeper rot as we speak. We have a central bank governor who's trying to change the notes, I'm wondering of what benefit that would be to the economy as we speak. There's also a drag and push and shove between Nigeria and the UAE because we're unable to repatriate certain funds in foreign currency, but then I go back again to the issue of oil.  So again, if we have a government in place and they're not strong enough, there's no political will to deal with this issue, are we ever really ever going to come out of where we are, and will the Naira ever be strengthened going forward? I don't think they've ever been in any political will to be very honest with you, Mary Ann. You've made me sure of the fact that the Government of Day had plans in 2015, and it's not just a current administration challenge. Over time, you know, our political economy hasn't been visionary enough and actually realistic again within the context of things, plus the will power to deliver. But you say you're going to deliver 30 million jobs when you come into power. The argument should not be 30 million jobs or 1 million jobs. The argument should be how do you plan to do that? What's the mechanism through which you plan to deploy it? Unfortunately, Nigerians are very carried away with emotional statements. There is no form of intelligence advocacy to interrogate manifestos. You know, the city, they are not organised citizens approach, or citizens organised agenda setting to engage politicians who are seeking to get into public offices as a result. When these guys get in there, they just move around, show around, and employers, the economy is worse off for it. However, it's also important to state that the normal sector has performed way better than the old sector in recent times. The normal sector made up more than almost 1.1 trillion Naira more in revenue than the old sector for H1 2022. And the numbers are there, anybody can go verify it, right? The normal sector is booming, but the problem is that the normal sector has made a critical two blocks of challenges. You have number one the fact that the markets are all organised and informal. You cannot compete, or you cannot, how will I put it, take a potential and unlock it for greatness when you are not organised and you are not in quotes in form of, you know, in form of formality to the process. So we need to further organise and formalise the normal sector. Take for instance now, Nigeria does not have a service industry policy. You know, do we have data on how many web developers we have in Nigeria? Do we have data on how many web developers are engaging in freelancing gigs and working from Nigeria and Lagos and earning in dollars? We don't have all that data, all right? We don't even have data on the critical manpower or the productivity dynamics around the young people that delivers growth and the real engine room for us. That's to say, you know, in essence, because service, the service economy contributes 57% to Nigerian GDP. There is a huge potential there. If the normal sector is contributing more to revenue, it means that the Nigerian economy is already diversified and holds the potential for foreign exchange receipts through the normal sector block. What we just need to do is to maximise, organise and formalise that market for regional and global competitiveness. So I do not think that we'll be going anywhere for that with this all sector conversation. I do not think we'll be going anywhere for that with the repatriation of funds. I also do not think that Nigeria will gain any value. Recently, some folks talked about Nigeria regaining value in the market. On the basis of what mechanism is what I would want to ask. The currency, any currency that yields any form of value over time yields value on two grounds. Number one, there is a productivity ground, meaning that your economy is productive, not consumption driven. You produce what you eat and then you produce it well enough that the chocolate you make in Nigeria can sell in Tesco in the UK, can sell in Zurich, Switzerland and it can scale foreign exchange in that order, which is not all. Secondly, there is a sufficient condition around the institutional management that has to do with protecting that currency. That's why I say that the Fed will do everything to protect the dollars. The Fed will strike alliances with other major central banks in the world to protect the dollars. And then for developing countries like Nigeria, who do not have the necessary conditions of productivity and the sufficient conditions of proper institutional management begin to, you know, they are literally at the mercy of the policies made by these, you know, world institutions as the case may be. So until we get down to the necessities, which is productivity and the sufficient blocks which are, you know, leading a coherent fiscal and monetary side protection and management of the currency, the Naira cannot truly get back on its value. Finally, before I let you go, like you mentioned earlier, we're in campaign season. We're having town halls. We're having debates here and there. And of course the candidates are going to different places and asking for people to vote for them. What should be the front and centre of the, you know, whatever these politicians have to offer us in a manner of speaking as opposed to the sloganarism that we see every other day that hope is here, business is here, blah, blah, blah. And of course we, the people, what should we strategically be asking for going forward? The big ticket questions, you know, to sort of interrogate politicians right now should be around the what, the how and the why. Especially the how and the why.  A lot of times it bothers having me on, you know, evidently driving advocacy, evidently using evidence to sort of like interrogate the manifesto process and the thinking behind that manifesto as it were. You know, also interrogating the capacity, the competence of people, you know, to be able to deliver that thing, the articulated, that mechanism they've shown to you on how to create one million jobs in one year. You know, we need to see it, we need to know it. This is where you expect a lot of non-governmental organisations who say they stand in representation, they represent the citizens. You know, these folks need to lead more intelligently, engaging data and interrogating more intelligently. Then the citizens themselves, the little critical blocks that they are in, awareness is very important, literacy is very important. And also it's very difficult, but the concept of vote buying as well is also very critical. Teaching people that you need to vote and ensure that your votes are counted and all of that. But much more importantly, positioning young Nigerians in the mainstream of party administration, which is where the choices, sorry, which is where the options emerge, you know, for the people, for the critical mass to make choices for them. You know, so I'm trying to say, so at the end of the day, it has brought heavily on intelligent representation by both the masses and the people who represent the masses, you know, both at the social enterprise business and NGO level. And positioning train interrogate the what, the how, and the why. It's very important. I think also that to a very large extent the political economy that we have in Nigeria today is largely extractive. You know, extractive institutions believe that they need to be in control of resources, you know, or economic access to retain them, to stay in power and all of that. And until Nigerians realize that there is need for them to begin to engage more intelligently to disrupt that extractive flow, there will be no future for inclusion in Nigeria. And once there is no future for inclusion, there is no future for prosperity. Let's also be clear, even in developed economies, people compromise at very high levels, but not at the expense of the major, most important, basic things that the citizens need to just get a life or to aspire for a brighter future. But right now in the context of Nigeria and even many other African nations, the ability to aspire or the hope to aspire has been eject by increasing cost pressure on the citizenry. And once you can keep the citizens, you know, poor and expect them, then you can take advantage of them in every election yet. That's the game. Well, Gospel, always a pleasure to have this kind of conversations with you because, you know, I leave here a bit more enlightened on how the economy works. Thank you. Gospel Obeire is the chief economist at Street Nomics Limited. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you very much for having me, Mary. We can only hope for the best from here on. Well, that's the show tonight. I hope that you all had a great time. We will be back tomorrow talking for development. On the biggest stories on the Nigerian political scene and sometimes we delve outside of Nigeria into Africa and, of course, the rest of the world. I'm Mary Anacor and I'll see you tomorrow at 7 p.m. Don't forget you can watch Plus Politics again on our YouTube pages, Plus TV Africa and Plus TV Africa lifestyle. And don't forget that we are also live streaming on our mobile app and, of course, on Linux. It's also an app so you can watch us wherever you are in the world. Have a beautiful evening. Don't forget to get your PVC and make sure that you know that that PVC is your passport to a new Nigeria. Have a good evening.