May 7, 2017 — In this business track session, James will share insights from his Ninja Forms history. His core message? No matter how talented you are, you shouldn’t do this thing called entrepreneurship alone. You need a co-founder.

March 16, 2017 — If you’re an Entrepreneur, chances are that you’ve had to work with Engineers. Best case scenario, they’ve created something that met your specifications in a semi-timely manner. Worst case scenario, they’ve kept you up all night stressing over a deadline, causing premature hair-loss.

If you’re an Engineer, chances are that you’ve had to work with Entrepreneurs. Best case scenario, they’ve given you well-written specifications and you can finish the project without a lot of back and forth. Worse case scenario, they keep making “simple” changes and call every fifteen minutes for status updates.

What if I told you that the tension between these opposites is the secret to a project’s success? Whether you partner with your opposite or simply work with them on a project, managing this tension is the difference between good and great. Join James and Kevin as they share how they’ve learned to appreciate each other’s personalities, create decent products, and become better at their respective roles in the process.

April 17, 2016 — The WordPress ecosystem is maturing every day as new businesses and products enter the market. There are many models that a business can adopt in this diverse market but there are also many challenges that need to be addressed if one wants to not only survive, but thrive.
This talk takes a “been there, tried that” look at the various business models that have been used when selling WordPress products, challenges that need to be considered, and some tried and tested solutions that have worked extremely well for us.

Presentation Slides »

July 5, 2015 — Being successful in business is challenging. When we started we were late to the party in a very saturated market. We weren’t getting very far and needed to find something that would differentiate us from the other players. Then we discovered the add-on business model and it fit beautifully with our product.
This add-on model allowed us to engage with the greater WordPress community like never before. It turned our struggling company into one that is well respected and growing almost faster than we can keep up with. In many ways, it has shaped our very ethos on how and why we give back to the WordPress community.

April 23, 2015 — This presentation covers both industry standards and my own professional experience to help you create a web form that does exactly what you want… get people to click submit.

Presentation Slides »

June 7, 2014 — There are many different options, or models, for selling premium plugins: one-time purchases, subscriptions, extensions, etc. If you are thinking about selling a plugin for profit, and you should, you’ll have to decide which of these pricing models is right for you. This session will walk through many of the lessons learned from the life of the Ninja Forms plugin, which follows the so-called “freemium” model. Hopefully, this session will leave you with the right sorts of questions to ask, and plenty of the pitfalls to avoid, when choosing to sell a WordPress plugin for profit.