Grow Your Development and Marketing Skills with WordPress Products

WordPress, literally the world's most popular content management system, has a stigma in communities like Indie Hackers. There are plenty of fair criticisms about the platform. It can be slow, security can be an issue, and it's just not quite as cool or innovative as its competitors.

None of that means WordPress isn't worth investigating as an independent developer. I strongly recommend you consider WordPress if you are even slightly interested in creating your own software products. It's an excellent ecosystem for first-time developers and learners to get their feet wet.

Why do I believe that? The barrier to entry with WordPress is quite low. There are overwhelming amounts of documentation and tutorials to help you get started. The user base is absolutely gigantic. Finally, you can learn so much about developing and supporting a real product with actual users. Those lessons are what I want to focus on for this post.

The Lessons You Will Learn

How to Build and Maintain a Software Product

Creating a SaaS product is hard. How many of us have started an elaborate software project only to see it stall out and never be released? Creating a simple WordPress plugin is easy. A basic WordPress plugin can be a great weekend project for anyone who struggles to see an idea to completion.

Dealing with post-launch development is another very important aspect of software creation. Getting into the habit of building features, testing, and ultimately releasing them into the wild is something you can learn with a WordPress plugin. WordPress makes it possible to get updates into the hands of your users instantly. The distribution is handled for you so you don't need to worry about deployment or infrastructure.

How to Handle Support and Feature Requests

Figuring out how to manage support is something you can only really learn through experience. Support and feature requests are inevitable when a WordPress plugin gains any kind of traction. This is a great opportunity for developers who have never dealt with these kinds of issues before. You will learn how to directly interact with users, gauge the value of feature requests, and use feedback to improve a product.

WordPress.org has built-in feedback tools for plugins and themes. These aren't fully-featured solutions, and they come with their own drawbacks and issues, but for a first-timer it's a suitable setup to begin practicing support, collecting feedback, and learning how to interact with users.

How to Market and Grow a Product

The power of the plugin and theme repositories means that any product with a good idea behind it will attract at least some users. Growing a user base, once you have initial traction, is something you can learn with WordPress.

My very first plugin was used on over 10,000 sites by the time I sold it to another developer. Reaching that amount of users with a traditional application would have been quite a struggle. I achieved those thousands of installations with a focus on marketing directly through WordPress.org. Keyword optimization and writing actionable copy are two facets of marketing you can learn with WordPress products.

Grow Your Product Skills with WordPress

All three of those skills (building, supporting, and marketing) are the building blocks of successful software development. WordPress plugins give you the opportunity to learn and sharpen those talents in a simple and, most importantly, huge ecosystem.

If you are frustrated with your current product efforts, or maybe just looking for a change of pace, I recommend giving WordPress product development a try. It's not the perfect platform but anyone looking to grow their skills, or get started with a product for the first time, will find plenty of opportunities with WordPress.