Jan Thielemann and Selling WordPress Plugins

Jan Thielemann is a plugin developer who got his start as a digital nomad who wanted to make enough money to fund his adventures. So he started a small side business selling plugins for Divi, where he found a good niche. He offers great advice about starting on your own, and the difference between truly passive and “half-passive” income.

Show Notes

* Jan Thielemann
* Divi Sensei
* Freemius
* Jan’s Travel Blog
* Divi
* Elegant Marketplace (Jan’s page)
* Vova Feldman and Freemius

Sponsored by:

Plesk: Get set up for free!
Pantheon: Get ready for Gutenberg. Sign up for a FREE account today.
Hover.com: Get 10% off your first order!


View on separate page
Transcript
Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to episode 115 of How I Built It. Today my guest is Jan Theleiman. I met Jan through the Freemius Slack channel, and you might remember the episode where I interviewed Vova Feldman. He invited me into the Freemius Slack channel, and I got to meet a lot of really cool people there, and Jan is one of them. He was a bit of a digital nomad for a while, and he started making money writing pro-Divi modules which he uses Freemius to sell. So, if you are thinking about getting into plugin development or premium plugin sales, this has been an insanely helpful episode for me. It’s always something I think about doing, and then I can never make the jump. “Do I do too much?” Or whatever. Jan offers a lot of really great advice. We’ll get to that interview in a minute, but first a word from our sponsors.
Break: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Castos. Castos is a podcast hosting platform built specifically for WordPress. Their Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin lets you manage all of your episodes and podcast RSS from your WordPress site, but have your files hosted on a dedicated media hosting platform. If you use WordPress, this is by far the easiest platform that I have used for podcasting. I also really love how the Castos team takes a commonsense approach to their pricing. You can create as many episodes and podcasts as you want and you don’t have to worry about how much storage you’re using or bandwidth restrictions. If you’re like me and you already have a ton of episodes from an old host, they’ve got you covered. Castos will import all of your podcast content into their platform completely free of charge. It’s literally one click of a button in your WordPress dashboard. I could not believe my eyes when I saw this in action. It’s stuff like this which is why I built my own podcasting course on top of Castos. They have put together a really special opportunity for the show today. You can get 50% off your first three months with the code BUILTIT19. Just head over to Castos.com/HowIBuiltIt to learn more.
Joe Casabona: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks “How did you build that?” Today my guest is Jan Theleiman. Jan, how are you today?
Jan Theleiman: Good.