Finding Focus

Posted on June 2, 2014

In late December we were wrapping up our biggest quarter to date as a company. As we all took some time off for the holidays, it gave us time to take a serious look at the product side of our business. We had a small number of premium plugins that we made available for sale, and several other free plugins that we were also maintaining. As we headed in to the new year, we wanted to make sure that our time and energy was being spent wisely. As I’m sure you can relate to, when we pulled back the curtains, we realized that we were definitely spread thin.

When you’re evaluating what projects to keep and which to kill, you have to take a lot in to consideration. Income, potential income, investments in both time and money, and one of the most important elements that I think we lost sight of, personal interest in the project. Even though we were working hard one of our projects, our passion for the product itself, just like Elvis, had left the building.

Throwing away a lot of work
In early February we made a decision that should have been made much earlier. We decided to stop developing the WP Event Ticketing plugin. The finial decision was easy to make. Getting to the point of making the decision wasn’t as easy.

We had spent countless hours over the previous 2-3 years building the plugin, including a complete rewrite that we’d been working on for much of the past year. The thought of throwing that all away was painful. So painful that it kept us from making the final decision for more than a month after we already knew what the right thing to do was. But then…

Revelation time
Have you ever gone to bed thinking about a problem and had the answer hit you so hard at 3 in the morning that you sit bolt upright in bed and shout, “Booya, Bitches!” OK, maybe that’s not what you shouted, but I’m pretty sure that’s what I shouted.

I was forced awake with a single thought:

Every minute we spend writing code, answering a support ticket or even thinking about the Event Ticketing plugin is one more minute that we are not focusing on our clients or the other products.

That was it. The switch had been flipped. When I got to my desk I made the, now very easy, call to shut it all down. It felt like a weight had been lifted.

You’re never done cleaning house
That moment of clarity has come in handy a few times since then. But none more so than when we received an email asking if we would be interested in selling the WP Affiliate Manager plugin. Honestly, it wasn’t something we had given much thought to. But here we were faced with an opportunity to narrow our focus once again.

Previous to 9seeds, I spent a decade working for a company that made the bulk of it’s income from affiliate marketing. The affiliate plugin seemed like a natural fit for us to build. But, affiliate marketing isn’t something we do much of these days, so there has been a decline in the amount of energy we’ve put in to the affiliate plugin recently. After some serious consideration, we came to the conclusion that selling WP Affiliate Manager was too good an opportunity for everybody involved that we simply couldn’t pass it up.

The new owners have a list of short and long term goals for the product that will breath new life in to it. We are excited to see where they take it.

Time to focus
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, Time Tracker is a product that I use literally every single day. It’s a tool we use internally for tracking time we spend working on client projects. We have a nice long list of features and enhancements that we want to add to the plugin. With the sale and transfer of Affiliate Manager complete, I’m thrilled for the additional time that we’ll be able to dedicate to it.

One question we get asked a lot regarding Time Tracker is if there is a demo of the product they can try out before they purchase. It feels really good to finally be able to answer Yes! You can head over to http://timetrackerdemo.com/ to try out the plugin.

If you have any questions or feature requests regarding Time Tracker, we’d love to hear from you.