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I feel compelled to jump in and defend the platform I've spent most of my time on for the last 5+ years. Yup, it's not Laravel or some other new, beautiful fram

I feel compelled to jump in and defend the platform I've spent most of my time on for the last 5+ years. Yup, it's not Laravel or some other new, beautiful framework that has the luxury of standing on the shoulders of giants. But it's solid enough, it's constantly being updated... both those are technical considerations. We're talking about launching a product people pay for. WordPress powers 25% of the web. I challenge you to considier the potential market for a product for WordPress vs something like Laravel. Which market is bigger, has more eyes, is more established, and is known to spend money?

Rjevski 9y ago
You seem to be comparing apples and oranges - Wordpress is a CMS and Laravel is a web framework - two totally different products aimed at a totally different audience, but let's ignore that for a second. The fact that 25% of the web is powered by it doesn't mean 25% of the web will actually pay for your solution - they might pay for a third-world competitor's one that's 10x cheaper, or they may not pay for anything at all. I would also be skeptical about the amount of money you could make on WP vs Laravel or a similar framework. A WP plugin is relatively hard to sell at a good price (let's be honest, with a 100$ price which is pretty steep you're only recouping a little bit of the time spent developing the plugin, and I'm not even talking about mandatory tech support you'll have to provide). Excluding a few outlier plugins that have exploded in popularity, a PHP developer's job at a company or as a freelancer building quality products will earn you way more cash. Of course this assumes you want to do legitimate business - if we go down the scammy route you could pretty much sell anything - even an empty PHP file - there are a lot of idiots out there who'll happily buy your "magic" plugin based only on your (fake) sales pitch.
- coreymaass 9y ago
  Sorry, I jumped to a couple conclusions from your original post. When you said "the platform itself is just too crap" I just assumed you meant tech, so that's why I mentioned Laravel, which most PHP devs consider better, code-wise. But both could have products developed for them. > The fact that 25% of the web is powered by it doesn't mean 25% of the web will actually pay for your solution You're right, of course, that not everyone in any market might buy whatever my product is. But I'd rather have an opportunity to sell to a market that includes millions rather than thousands, purely so that I could write more beautiful code. And yes, a bigger market means that you're competing with more people, but I think the numbers still stand. > I would also be skeptical about the amount of money you could make on WP vs Laravel or a similar framework. As well you should. Developers are a notoriously cheap market, especially for software. Why buy it when I can build it? :-) But I'm skeptical that one could make a more financially successful product around another, better code-based product (and again, I think that's the scope of our debate, which is my assumption). Few code-based markets can compare to the size of WordPress, so even if you could charge 10x as much for a product, you still might make more selling at a lower price to a bigger market. And yes, I will probably always make more per hour as a contract developer, but the extra $1k/month buys me a lot of beer and pays for ever conference I want to go to (especially Wordcamps :-) ).

Rjevski 9y ago

You seem to be comparing apples and oranges - Wordpress is a CMS and Laravel is a web framework - two totally different products aimed at a totally different audience, but let's ignore that for a second. The fact that 25% of the web is powered by it doesn't mean 25% of the web will actually pay for your solution - they might pay for a third-world competitor's one that's 10x cheaper, or they may not pay for anything at all. I would also be skeptical about the amount of money you could make on WP vs Laravel or a similar framework. A WP plugin is relatively hard to sell at a good price (let's be honest, with a 100$ price which is pretty steep you're only recouping a little bit of the time spent developing the plugin, and I'm not even talking about mandatory tech support you'll have to provide). Excluding a few outlier plugins that have exploded in popularity, a PHP developer's job at a company or as a freelancer building quality products will earn you way more cash. Of course this assumes you want to do legitimate business - if we go down the scammy route you could pretty much sell anything - even an empty PHP file - there are a lot of idiots out there who'll happily buy your "magic" plugin based only on your (fake) sales pitch.

coreymaass 9y ago
Sorry, I jumped to a couple conclusions from your original post. When you said "the platform itself is just too crap" I just assumed you meant tech, so that's why I mentioned Laravel, which most PHP devs consider better, code-wise. But both could have products developed for them. > The fact that 25% of the web is powered by it doesn't mean 25% of the web will actually pay for your solution You're right, of course, that not everyone in any market might buy whatever my product is. But I'd rather have an opportunity to sell to a market that includes millions rather than thousands, purely so that I could write more beautiful code. And yes, a bigger market means that you're competing with more people, but I think the numbers still stand. > I would also be skeptical about the amount of money you could make on WP vs Laravel or a similar framework. As well you should. Developers are a notoriously cheap market, especially for software. Why buy it when I can build it? :-) But I'm skeptical that one could make a more financially successful product around another, better code-based product (and again, I think that's the scope of our debate, which is my assumption). Few code-based markets can compare to the size of WordPress, so even if you could charge 10x as much for a product, you still might make more selling at a lower price to a bigger market. And yes, I will probably always make more per hour as a contract developer, but the extra $1k/month buys me a lot of beer and pays for ever conference I want to go to (especially Wordcamps :-) ).