Blog

It was early November 2015. I was scrolling through the latest drop from Vinyl Me, Please, a now-defunct record-of-the-month club I’d subscribed to mostly out of habit. Each month, they’d refresh their member store with rarities, exclusive pressings, and intriguing new releases. Usually, I’d skim, maybe pick up something on a whim, then move on.

But that month, something stopped me. A two-minute instrumental track... simple, unassuming... caught my ear. I hit play. And the sands quietly shifted.

Starting last year, I'm trying to write a post that recaps my experience running a WordPress product business. As I had never written a recap before, last year's post covered my journey from starting ForGravity up until the end of 2020.

This year's post is solely focused on what happened in the last twelve months: switching to a full time focus on the business, starting to build out a new product, an increasing focus on marketing and more.

When I was first starting ForGravity over four years ago, I was constantly searching for some method or measuring stick to figure out if I was on the right path, in terms of how the business was progressing with both adoption and revenue.

Every year, I would read Pippin Williamson's year in review posts and they gave me a lot of insight into a successful WordPress plugin business, but his business was much further along than mine was.

After launching ForGravity, I wanted to do my own series of year in review posts so those starting their own WordPress plugin businesses could learn what the road looks like... but I never got around to it.

So, before we discuss how 2020 went, let me give a brief recap of how the business has done since it started.

You can now easily send Gravity Forms entry data from one form to another without adding any code! Introducing Easy Passthrough for Gravity Forms.

An often used Gravity Forms workflow is populating a form off the values of another a form. A user visits your site, fills out a form and, upon submission, they are brought to a page with another form that contains fields that they filled out on the previous page. Having the user fill out those form fields again is a very inconvenient experience.

The easiest way to do this out of the box with Gravity Forms is to add query parameters to the confirmation URL so they can be populated in the second form. However, this can sometimes be a clumsy solution as you have to manually update the confirmation each time you add a new field whose value you want brought over to the second form. It can also get out of hand if you have more than a handful of fields that need to be copied.

Two weeks ago, a client came to us at BinaryM with a problem: they post a lot of sponsored articles on their website and needed a way to present these articles to their sponsors for review before pushing them live. Up until now, they were setting the post date to a year prior and publishing the post so it wasn't easily visible on the website. This obviously isn't the most ideal solution.

There are one or two other plugin solutions for this out there, but the most popular one has you jump to a separate section of the admin panel to manage the shared drafts. This method is unideal.

A few months ago, a client came to us at BinaryM with a problem: they wanted to be able to view and approve the latest post drafts on their websites without having to access the WordPress backend. I scoured the internet to see if a solution already existed and, surprisingly enough, there was nothing to be found. So I went with the next best idea: build a custom plugin!