Hello again and welcome to another Themeisle interview! This month, our special guest is Vova Feldman – the CEO and founder of Freemius. We talked about efficient marketing techniques for a new business, WordPress, productivity, and more.
If you missed last month’s interview with Tom Zsomborgi from Kinsta, you can read it here. Also, if you’re interested in learning more about various topics and jobs that involve the web, you can check our full collection of interviews with experts from the WordPress community and beyond.
Vova Feldman is an entrepreneur who loves his job so much that he never feels like he’s working.
While most teenagers don’t have the slightest idea about their future careers, Vova was already committed to making a living as a professional web developer at the age of 14. Around the same time, he also flirted with the entrepreneurship world by co-starting his first company.
Fast-forward, after many experiences of founding several businesses ever since, he’s brought together a cool team and community to form Freemius – the company that makes selling premium WordPress plugins and themes hassle-free.
If you have a WordPress product that you want to bring to market, but you’re not particularly crazy about putting together your own checkout, licensing mechanism, payment processing, automatic updates, EU VAT handling, and other headache-inducing things, then Freemius might be for you.
Let’s hear it from Vova himself!
Vova Feldman Interview – “If an Influencer Promotes Your Product, There’s an Opportunity to Make a Lot of Money Quickly”
When and how did you start working with WordPress? Is there an interesting story here?
My WordPress origin story begins in 2010. Around then I was doing things related to Computer Vision, which is a field of AI focused on how computers can attain high-level understanding from digital images or videos.
The stuff is really interesting to me and I wanted to share my learnings with others and get their feedback. I wasn’t aware of WordPress or any other similar platforms back then, but I did know that my blog needed a mechanism to kickstart the feedback loop. Because it takes time to build traffic and all of that, my first thought was to find a rating solution that let people cast their votes with a click. When I couldn’t find one, I did what most devs would do: I built it myself. The result is a service called Rating-Widget.
In 2011, my previous business partner and I were accepted into a startup accelerator program called TechStars, and Rating-Widget was basically shelved. Even so, I still received support and feature requests for it, with many of them asking how they could add the service to their WordPress website. To make it easier, I eventually decided to wrap it into a plugin and put it on the WordPress.org repo.
Those were the initial steps — but I still wasn’t directly
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This article was written by Adelina Tuca and originally published on ThemeIsle Blog.