Normally I say great things about WooCommerce, not because I have to but because it's really awesome. Today though I found something that wasn't very awesome. Actually that's too nice – it sucks. Have you ever tried to create a membership site with WooCommerce? It doesn't seem like it would be that hard right?
Some people think that support is this giant black hole where you throw money to make sure customers don't hate you. That belief is why so many companies have such crappy support. They do the bare minimum to make sure their customers don't leave. I guess I understand this line of thinking but it rubs me the wrong way. While you can put in the bare minimum you could invest in your support and build resources and useful assets for future projects. With our upcoming WooCommerce 2.3 release we did just that.
One of the points that I keep coming back to over and over again is to give yourself space. You need space to think and process new information. If you're so busy with day to day work for 8 hours a day you're going to miss opportunities. Being a remote worker have given me a lot of freedom to create the schedule that works for me and today I thought I'd share it with you.
It's the day after Thanksgiving but I haven't quite finished thanking people yet. Yesterday I talked quite a bit about the awesome financial base my parents provided me today I want to focus on the people that inspire me. It took an army of people to get me fired up about life and simply put: without these people I wouldn't be where I am now.
At various points in my life I've felt like I'm on a conveyor belt.
And I think I've felt this because my life has been so… easy. It's weird to say that. It kind of makes it sound like I haven't done anything with my life. For most of your life you're in school. College is a thing people are doing now-a-days so I might as well go do that, and then after college I applied for a job and the manager graduated from the exact program several years earlier. Boom – first adult job just like that. It almost happened automatically. It feels like all I had to do was keep my arms and legs on the conveyor belt and I would have eventually wound up there.
A few years later I'm the product manager for WooCommerce, the most prolific e-commerce platform, holy shit – how did that happen!?
In the past year WooThemes has grown significantly. We've scaled up to the point where team members can focus on one aspect of the business and not have to pay attention to everything else going on. This brings some pretty huge advantages with a dedicated person pushing through projects that someone who's spread out on multiple projects could never do. But with it comes hyper-focus where someone will focus on their aspect of the business without knowing (or caring) how it affects other aspects of the business.
If you've been reading my blog for a while you might remember the Blogging for Benjamin challenge. It was a month long blogging competition organized by Daniel Espinoza to get you out of your comfort zone and I loved it. It was just challenging enough to post every day for an entire month and while it was a lot of work it was totally worth it. This year I'm participating in something slightly different. Our very own Bryce Adams set up Blogging for Hippo where we'll be blogging for an entire month leading up to the release of WooCommerce 2.3 – Handsome Hippo.
I'm just getting back into my groove after a wild time in San Francisco but before jumping back into the inbox I really want to share my thoughts on WooCommerce Conf. We had a wide variety of attendees, impressive speakers, the whole experience had a professional feel, and
The air is warm and the sun is shining as I'm writing this post on my last full day in San Francisco. I've had a wild ride the last sixteen days attending three conferences, meeting customers, and exploring San Francisco. While conferences and new cities are exciting it's not why we have the WooTrip. The best part of the WooTrip and the real value in it is meeting people that we work with everyday and learning to relate with each other. And that's pretty exciting.
Four months ago I joined the WooCommerce development team and I loved it. Lots of time to program cool extensions like Coupon Campaigns, Give Products, Ninja Forms Product Addons, updating the email functionality in WooCommerce, and auditing all of the extensions that go in the catalog. I loved every second of it. Working with awesome people, learning new things, and creating code that's used by hundreds of thousands of websites. My path however is changing a bit. Instead of a developer I'll be the WooCommerce Product Manager.