The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius. Today Jean is joined by Adrian Tobey in a chat recorded at the Collision conference in Toronto. We touch upon various topics like building a WordPress plugin business from scratch and what that entails, pitching to investors at big conferences, why WordPress people should attend conferences outside of the WP space, working with family members, and more. Links Groundhogg Collision
Jun 11, 2019•33 min
The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius. This week Jean is visiting his friends Dejan and Tina in Toronto, Canada. They are all attending the Collision conference that is happening in the city, so they take the opportunity to record an episode and talk about social network automation and management. Tina and Dejan are the cofounders of Social Web Suite, a WP-specific tool for social network management. We also delve into lessons learned within the WordPress, community, SAAS vs traditional...
May 28, 2019•54 min
The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius. Acquisitions have almost become the norm in the WordPress space in the past couple of years or so. Beyond WordPress, they're also a common occurrence. Big companies often acquire smaller companies (often start-ups), while some business owners find that it's time for them to move on to something new. In this episode, Mark had the opportunity of speaking with Anthony Presley and Craig Williams. They've gone through a few acquisitions over time and ha...
May 22, 2019•39 min
The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius. In today's episode, we welcome Lucas Radke from Plesk to give us a tour of Plesk and all the services they provide. Plesk can be used by many different target audiences, starting from single end users of WordPress right up to big cloud services like DigitalOcean. We discuss many interesting aspects of managing WordPress servers, including security, caching, managing multiple WordPress installations and their updates, backups, staging as well as Ple...
Apr 23, 2019•36 min
The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius. In this episode, James Laws is back and he has some catch-up time with Jean as they discuss what they've both been up to in recent months both on the personal side as well as the business side of things.
Apr 16, 2019•55 min
The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius. I have been following Matt Medeiros' work for a few years through Twitter, Youtube, podcasts and so on. Recently I got in touch with Matt and purchased one of his services, User Feedback Videos, for our WP RSS Aggregator plugin. I loved his take on things and we got talking from there. Matt accepted my invite to the Mastermind.FM podcast without any hesitation and we were on Skype just a few days later. To me this was a bit surreal as I was used to...
Mar 26, 2019•44 min
The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius. In this episode, Jean joins Asif on the show to have an informal chat between friends. We touch on some important topics such as: the current state of WordPress and thoughts about its future, what it means to retire in your mid-thirties, the impact of travel and living abroad on our lives, how our parents' lifestyles shaped our choices and motivations life in Bangladesh Asif is one of my favorite people in the WordPress community; I really respect ...
Mar 12, 2019•1 hr 13 min
The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius. SEO research may sound daunting to some, but there are some basic methods and tools that everyone should be using. The Ahrefs team recently got in touch with me when I published this article on WP Mayor discussing WordPress' performance in comparison to other CMS options. That led to discussions around Ahrefs, and eventually, this episode. I'm joined by Joshua Hardwick, the Head of Content at Ahrefs, to discuss SEO research techniques using tools f...
Nov 27, 2018•1 hr
The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius. This week I welcomed back Jean Galea to the podcast as we found some time to discuss the plugins we're using at the moment, and why we chose them. Although Jean and I work together, we rarely find the time to have discussions such as these since we tend to focus on different projects, so this was an opportunity to see what each of us was doing. At the same time, we're hoping to give you a better idea of how we run our websites and perhaps point out...
Nov 13, 2018•51 min
The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius. In episode 103 I am joined by Markus Schwingenschlögl, CTO of ThemeFusion, the company behind the Avada WordPress theme. Markus had recently answered a Q&A for us over on WP Mayor, hosted by David Scott, Envato's PR and Communications manager. This episode is a follow-up to that Q&A, so I recommend reading the Q&A before starting to listen to our conversation here. Marcus is an integral part of the Avada theme's incredible growth on Th...
Oct 30, 2018•50 min
This episode is sponsored by Plesk and EDD Bookings. In this episode, Jean and Mark were joined by Michiel Heijmans, the COO of Yoast and an all-around great guy, to discuss conversion optimization and a lot more. Michiel is much more than just a COO of one of the most well-known WordPress plugins around. He has been a part of the Yoast team from its infancy. In the years that have passed, he has contributed in many ways to its massive growth, especially through a focus on conversion optimizatio...
Oct 10, 2018•55 min
In this third episode with the man of many talents Kevin Muldoon, we discuss his experience with running YouTube channels and constantly creating content across several topics. We discuss what are the most common failures of prospective YouTubers as well as practical things like which hardware and software to use, as well as ways to earn money from YouTube. We also dwell on the effectiveness of the medium versus other channels such as blogging. Links YTtalk Streamlabs OBS OBS Project Screencast-...
Sep 25, 2018•51 min
In our second episode with Kevin Muldoon, we discuss how he got into cryptocurrencies and his experience with mining them. He also speaks of his involvement with the SafeCoin project. We draw a lot of parallels with the WordPress world too. Definitely a great listen for anyone entrepreneurial who is also interested in cryptocurrencies. Links Kev's Crypto Channel How to Build a Crypto mining rig Awesome Miner Discord SafeCoin Coinbase MiningRentals NiceHash
Sep 18, 2018•50 min
In this episode Jean makes a return to Mastermind.fm to chat with one of his longtime friends in the WordPress space; Kevin Muldoon. Kevin built one of the earliest big blogs about WordPress (WPmods.com) which he later sold off on Flippa for $80k, at that time the largest sale of a blog in the WordPress niche. He then continued blogging on his site KevinMuldoon.com, before venturing into YouTube video production. His latest project is cryptocurrency mining. We talk about many different facets of...
Sep 10, 2018•1 hr 10 min
A few weeks ago I was excited to receive a message from David Kelly, the General Manager at KingSumo, a sister-company of Sumo and AppSumo, all of which I encourage any business owners out there to look into. After a few discussions we set up a date and recorded this episode. David provides a ton of value to the discussion of guerrilla marketing given his experience in growing seven-figure companies. If you're not aware of what guerrilla marketing is, here's how David himself describes it: One o...
Aug 21, 2018•1 hr
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 takes care of all the nitty-gritty parts of running your e-commerce business while providing built-in marketing tool...
Jul 31, 2018•57 min
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 that is well-known for the Caldera Forms plugin. She enjoys sharing the knowledge she has gathered over...
Jul 17, 2018•46 min
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 popularity, exceeding the 30% mark for the number of websites running WordPress worldwide. However, it's also facing som...
Jul 03, 2018•54 min
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 being used only for scaling, as it was originally intended. Together we discuss what it is that Servebolt does, where...
Jun 19, 2018•54 min
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 far. We discuss a variety of topics, from choosing a niche to marketing the plugin, and the lessons learned from...
Mar 27, 2018•50 min
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 is easy, to the importance of finding the right name for a business, and why we need to educate the W...
Mar 13, 2018•40 min
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, and we are convinced that Mark will be doing a great job. You've already heard Mark on some of the last few episodes, a...
Mar 02, 2018•56 min
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 recently in the Post Status slack community and through their conversations, he learnt about how Joe transiti...
Feb 27, 2018•51 min
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 provides. As part of his research, he came across a Facebook live video hosted by HelpScout CEO Nick Fran...
Feb 06, 2018•51 min
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 Simple Pay. Phil's main focus. The how and why of selling a business. Plugins, plugins, plugins. Underestimating the a...
Dec 26, 2017•55 min
Dec 19, 2017•53 min
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 aspects of running a business. The discussion starts off with how to transition from being a freelancer to runni...
Dec 05, 2017•48 min
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, conveniently, hands a million dollar business advantage to leading volunteers. We talk about how Dumitru's ...
Nov 21, 2017•1 hr 12 min
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 why a country as small as Moldova has produced so many developers. Why Dumitru packed his bags in 2...
Nov 15, 2017•49 min
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 have when they start looking at cryptocurrencies as an asset class. We talk about the two different types of blockchain f...
Nov 09, 2017•36 min
