A couple of weeks ago I joined the podcast WP Product Talk as a guest, on an episode called “Oops! How to (Accidentally) Become a Plugin Developer“, with hosts Ian Misner and Matt Cromwell. It was lots of fun to look back at the story of how I got my start in WordPress product development over a decade ago, and the journey that led to co-founding BerryPress!
If you build things for WordPress or WooCommerce, or you’re thinking about starting, here are some highlights from our chat. If you’d rather listen to the full conversation, check out the video above or listen to the audio here.
How One WooCommerce Report Turned Into a Plugin
Back around 2015, I was running a small web agency, building client websites, some of them on WooCommerce. One client asked for something simple: a report showing their sales grouped by product, so they could see what was selling and what wasn’t. At the time, WooCommerce (I think it was around version 2.3) didn’t have a clean way to do that.
So I told the client I’d build a plugin to solve it. I wouldn’t charge extra, but I’d release it so other people could use it too. I actually tried to sell it on a plugin marketplace first, and it got rejected – they said it was too simple, or something like that. So it went out as a free plugin on WordPress.org instead.
That was the whole plan. There wasn’t a bigger vision behind it. But people started using it, the user base grew, and feature requests started coming in. About six months later, I launched a store on my agency’s website to sell a paid “pro” version with the more advanced features people were asking for. From there, I built a some related reporting plugins, and once I realized how much I enjoyed working in this space, the product catalog kept growing.
What Changed Once We Became a Real Business
One thing I talked about on the show is how differently we approach new plugin ideas now compared to those early days. For that first plugin, I wasn’t too concerned about whether the idea made commercial sense, I just built what a client needed. Now that BerryPress is a team with bills to pay, we look at things like:
- Is there already a good solution on the market? If so, we’re usually better off spending our time somewhere else.
- How big is the need? A problem that affects most WooCommerce stores is worth more of our attention than a very narrow one.
- Can we do it meaningfully better, not just slightly better, if a competitor already exists?
That said, the “accidental” part of the story hasn’t fully gone away. Some of our plugin or feature ideas start as something we build to solve our own internal needs, such as reporting or e-commerce problems we run into ourselves, that we realize other people probably have too. And plenty of our new features come from users asking for something we hadn’t originally planned to build.
Where We Look for New Plugin Ideas
One habit I mentioned on the show: when I’ve been in search of a new concept, I have checked places where people complain about WooCommerce or WordPress not doing something they need. Looking at how many people have upvoted a feature request tells you a lot about whether it’s a real, shared problem. From there, the question becomes: can we solve this well, or better than whatever already exists?
Is There Still Room for New Plugin Developers, With AI in the Picture?
This came up directly from a listener question during the show: is it still worth becoming a commercial plugin developer now that people can “vibe code” a quick solution with AI? My honest take is “yes”, but the bar is higher.
A few things I think matter here:
- A genuinely useful free plugin is your best argument against vibe coding. If someone can get real value from your free version with no cost and no hassle, that’s often an easier path than building something from scratch, even with AI doing much of the heavy lifting. And once they’re used to your plugin’s workflow, upgrading to a paid version might be a smaller step than starting over.
- Maintenance is the part people forget. A plugin someone vibe codes for themselves still has to survive WooCommerce updates, security issues, and new WordPress versions. When you support a product long-term, that ongoing upkeep is part of the value you’re offering, not just the initial build.
- Trust increasingly comes from who’s behind a product, not just what it does. With AI making it easier to spin up something that looks like a solution, people are paying more attention to whether a plugin is backed by a real team that will still be around, and still be improving it, in a year.
We also talked about why BerryPress focuses on e-commerce specifically: store owners who are actively making money tend to be more willing to invest in tools that help the business run better.
The Best Advice From the Show
Near the end, each of us shared one piece of advice for someone trying to figure this out today.
Mine was somewhat of a departure from the main topic of the conversation so far, but I wanted to touch on something very significant that I was reminded of while thinking about my story before coming on the show: find a business partner whose skills are complementary to yours. I’m a developer, not a designer, and I’m not naturally drawn to the business side of things. My co-founder, Anna, is strong in exactly those areas (and just generally amazing!). You don’t need to be good at everything yourself, you need the right people (or person!) around you who are.
Matt’s advice was about visibility: make yourself available. Answer emails, join conversations, show up where the people who need what you build actually spend their time. Opportunity tends to come from being present, not from staying heads-down.
Ian’s take tied it together nicely: spend time in a community being genuinely helpful before you try to sell anything. Becoming known as “the person who solves this kind of problem” tends to make the business part easier later, not harder.
Catch Us Next
We’ll be out and about this fall: some of our team will be at WordCamp Wrocław in Poland on October 2-3, and I personally plan to attend WordCamp Canada in Vancouver on November 5-6. If you’re attending either one, come say hi.
I’d love to hear from you: how did you get started with WordPress or WooCommerce? Was it planned, or a bit of an accident too?