207 - Running a growing WordPress plugin company

Interview with Shahjahan Jewel and Nathan Wrigley

There are some companies in the WordPress space that are very much on the rise and today we're speaking to Shahjahan Jewel about his company WP Manage Ninja, and they certainly are rising!

I heard about WP Manage Ninja about a year ago, when they did a lifetime deal sale on their WP Fluent Forms plugin. After some research, I hopped on the deal and I"ve never looked back. It's become my go-to plugin for forms because of it's reliability and fast pace of development. The features that they've added have been useful and well executed.

Being 'on the rise' as I described it often means having one product and focussing on that - getting eyeballs on it. This, however, is not the approach that the team have taken. You see they have been releasing updates to their current suite of plugins, but also working on new products.

Their plugins now include:

• WP Fluent Forms
• WP Ninja Tables
• WP PayForm
• Fluent CRM

It's a mighty line up!

In the podcast Shahjahan Jewel and I spoke about how the compamy came to be and what their philosophy is. Why they decided to build out some plugins in areas of the market that already appear to saturated.

We get into the subject of Lifetime Deals and whether or not this was a good marketing mechanism, or something that saddled them with customers who they have for life but who will never pay again.

The structure of the teams get some attention too. We learn that they allocate specific people to work on specific products meaning that they really get to understand the product and all of the features as well as what the customers want to be added.

The speed of this company is really pretty remarkable and that is evidenced by the fact that we recorded this episode just a few months back. Normally this would be fine, but in this case, since the recording the team have launched a new product. We do get into this, but at the time of recording it did not have the name set in stone. It does now... Fluent CRM.

Fluent CRM enables you to segment people inside of WordPress for all sorts of reasons, and send them emails. It could be e-commerce, it could be the way they interact with WordPress, the amount of times they log in. The sky really is the limit. I know a few people who have been using it and have found it to be really effective, especially as it takes all of the interactions inside of your WordPress website as possible triggers for actions.

Finally wespent a little bit of time talking about why they are unique. This comes down to the code quality that Jewel thinks they bring to the table. That, and the fact that they're bringing a lot of new and innovative products to the market.

Keep your eyes wide open for WP Manage Ninja, I'm sure that we'll be hearing more about them in the months and years to come.

Mentioned in this podcast:

• WP Fluent Forms
• WP Ninja Tables
• WP PayForm
• Fluent CRM