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WPWeekly Episode 96 – Commercial Services

WPWeekly Episode 96 – Commercial Services

By Jeffro on April 19, 2010

wordpressweekly1This episode of WordPress Weekly featured two individuals who are in the midst of running a successful service around WordPress while the other individual didn’t quite make it that far. The round-table consisted of Joshua Strebel of Page.ly, Daniel Bachhuber formerly of CoPress, and Raanan Bar-Cohen of Automattic. During this episode, we talked about the difficulties involved with running a service around WordPress. I was especially interested in the topic of Automattic running a commercial service along side free, open-source software. Daniel was able to offer a unique perspective as CoPress didn’t end up being successful in the long run and he tells us why. Joshua gave us some insight into the business strategies he thought of before launching the service. One thing Joshua mentions during the show is that if you’re going to run a service around WordPress, make sure you’re profitable from the first customer. Another theme that developed during this episode is the lack of trust in the Freemium model. If you are thinking about starting a commercial service around WordPress, this is the episode for you.

Smashing Book Contest:

Week Two Winner - jb510

Want to win a copy of the Smashing Book and a chance to participate in our wrap up episode on April 24th? Help us publicize the special WordPress Weekly series on commercialization! Just follow @WPTavern and guest co-host @jakemgold on Twitter, and Tweet a message mentioning us both with a link to the most recent episode. We’ll randomly pick one of our favorite tweets right before the next show.

We’ll be giving a book away for each of the episodes (excluding wrap up). You can participate each week. Each contest starts at 2pm on Saturday with the show’s recording, and ends the following Friday evening. You may participate if you’re outside of the contiguous United States, but will be asked to cover shipping expenses.

If we get over 500 participants in the contest, before the wrap up show, we’ll also give away one copy of Smashing WordPress to one participant after the last episode!

Ad Copy:

This episode is also sponsored by EnvironmentsForHumans.com This is an organization that brings together expert speakers on a given topic exploring that topic from different angles. While they recently had a WordPRess Workshop, the next event will be a UX Web Summit on Wednesday, April 21, 2010 from 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM (CT). This event will teach people how to improve their websites so that they are more responsive to visitors as well as making this more usable. If you’re interested in this summit, visit UXWebSummit.com

Stories Discussed:

The Pharma Hack
WordPress Not At Fault

Relevant Links:

Case Studies In Freemium
EditFlow
Edit Flow Project
A Case For Innovation In College Newsrooms
Eyeballs Still Don’t Pay The Bills
The Cost Of Support

Announcements:

The last part of the series will be held on Saturday, April 24th where we encourage everyone to send in their feedback or be part of the live show to discuss what you learned throughout this series.

WPWeekly Meta:

Next Episode: Saturday, April 24th 2P.M. EST

Subscribe To WPWeekly Via Itunes: Click here to subscribe

Length Of Episode: 2 Hours 13 Minutes

Download The Show: WordPressWeeklyEpisode96.mp3

Listen To Episode #96:

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CoPress Co-Founder Explains Why The Service Shut Down

CoPress Co-Founder Explains Why The Service Shut Down

By Jeffro on March 12, 2010

Mallary Jean Tenore of Poynter Online has published an interview she conducted with Daniel Bachhuber, co-founder of CoPress which announced they were closing their doors a few weeks ago. It’s apparent from the interview that a lack of motivation on the part of student organizations as well as having CoPress be easily accessible created the conditions where the support system could not scale.

There’s so much you can learn on the Internet if a) you have the motivation and b) you know how to look and ask the right questions and participate responsibly,” Bachhuber said, noting that he’d like to see all student news organizations have developers on staff. “There’s a little bit of hand-holding that can be done, but what it requires most importantly is initiative

Definitely some interesting business lessons to be learned from Daniels experience at CoPress. Furthermore, Daniel will be one of the panelists featured in April when I produce an episode of WordPress Weekly with a round table of guests that are currently or have in the past, offered services around WordPress as their business model only in this case, Daniel will be providing insight from the other side of the business coin.

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CoPress Shutting Down

CoPress Shutting Down

By Jeffro on February 18, 2010

Back in episode 78 of WordPress Weekly, I had the chance to interview Daniel Bachhuber of CoPress to talk about their work with college publishing. Unfortunately, news has come out today that CoPress is shutting down operations. The two major reasons cited for the closure are lack of financial sustainability and a support system that didn’t scale well.

What this ultimately meant was a rapidly growing number of emails for us to answer. Needless to say, it’s become difficult to make this scale in any meaningful way. Our eventual goal was to build software for distributed support, but the resources required for hosting and support severely challenged our ability to make headway on the project.

One of the biggest perks that CoPress offered was a conversion mechanism to take sites that were using College Publisher and convert them to WordPress. CoPress will be be publishing their conversion script as open-source allowing other individuals to pick up where they left off.

I wish the owners of CoPress the best of luck in future endeavors.

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WPWeekly Episode 78 – CoPress And The FairField Mirror

WPWeekly Episode 78 – CoPress And The FairField Mirror

By Jeffro on November 4, 2009

wordpressweekly1In this sleepy edition of WordPress Weekly, (since I was awake for 20+hours) I had a chat with Joseph Cefoli who is the guy in charge of The FairFieldMirror.com and Daniel Bachhuber of CoPress, a company specializing in the migration from College Publisher while also providing managed hosting. During the interview, we discussed a number of topics including the trials and tribulations of migrating 7,000+ articles from College Publisher into WordPress, the manual labor involved, the various plugins in use on the site and much more. I find the stories of migrations such as these to be interesting since they usually consist of painful experiences that were overcome.

Ad Copy:

This episode of WordPress Weekly is sponsored by WPClassroom.com. They have announced their next class called WordPress For Beginners will be held on Wednesday November 11th @ 6-9pm EST use the coupon code wptavern to take $5.00 off the price.

WordPress Tavern Listener Poll:

This Weeks Poll Question Is: Should WordPress Change The Blog Nomenclature Within The Backend?

Picks Of The Week:

Jeff – WPWorldMap.net – WPWorldMap.net is a cool website where WordPress users from all across the world can register an account and place a marker above their general location since the site is made up of an embedded google map. It’s a great way to see if their are any awesome WordPress folks in your neighborhood.

This Weeks Trivia Question

Which forum software was the first to use CSS based layouts rather than tables?

WPWeekly Meta:

Next Episode: Tuesday, November 10th 2009 8P.M. EST

Subscribe To WPWeekly Via Itunes: Click here to subscribe

Length Of Episode: 1 Hour 3 Minutes

Download The Show: WordPressWeeklyEpisode78.mp3

Listen To Episode #78:

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