Quite few years back my brother Spencer and I began having clients ask us if we had ever heard of WordPress. We said yes but only had minimal experience with it. We didn’t realize that soon we would be using this platform for more then 90% of our clients. It was a rapid transition coming from a world of building everything from scratch and spending countless hours of time designing and developing each and every aspect of a website.
We soon began exploring the core of WordPress. We spent days upon days feverishly digging into everything we could find on the internet about the platform and trying to get our hands on as many jobs as possible from Craigslist. Simply put, we were hooked.
During this transition we had been developing something for ourselves to allow our clients to approve the designs that Spencer was cranking out. We wanted to give our clients a streamlined experience but also keep them from coming back to us and saying things like “We told you about these changes but they never happened and know you have to do them for free”. Then it his us. We needed to share this with other people. We already had most of the system built but completely outside of WordPress. We thought “Well, lets give this WordPress plugin thing a shot.” This would be the groundwork for what we would call Design Approval System. We worked every extra free moment we had for months on end testing and building it.
It’s been two years now and 4 FREE plugins later we are nearing a huge milestone for us at SlickRemix. 100,000 Downloads. It’s funny to think that two years ago we only dreamt and hoped for this to happen. Sometimes we even laughing and joking “are we there yet?” or “100,000 downloads – thats no big deal”. The truth is though now when looking back, we feel that we have made a positive impact on many lives and businesses all over the world. We have had companies and users come to us and tell us how Design Approval System has changed the way their company works for the better or that they love using our Feed Them Social plugin to help connect people to their networks.
Please understand though that I am NOT telling you this to brag or boast about what we have done but rather to inspire you to find a problem and create simple solution with a plugin. With one small idea you could help save countless hours of people’s lives all over the world.
If you asked us, “What the most important thing to learn about building a plugin?” We will gladly tell you the secret “It is all about Support and Customer Service.” Your plugin and idea can be awesome but the number one key point to a successful plugin is helping people understand and work through the issues they have because they will create a ripple effect of other loyal customers.
In conclusion, we want to put out a HUGE thanks to all of our users/customers (a.k.a. SlickRemixers) for being there through the growth process! You all have and continue to make our dreams come true! We hope that our plugins have many more downloads to come but more importantly that we can continue to change more people’s lives all over the world for the better by using our plugins.
Thanks for taking the time to read,
– Justin Labadie