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Naming the Business Model
First and foremost, PeakZebra is a SaaS offering. It’s the familiar online model, where you pay monthly, except maybe I’ll do what it seems like everyone else is doing these days and force you to pay for a year (which, even if I wind up doing it, I hate). But there’s a second layer, where…
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Is the WordPress Plugin Economy Played Out?
People have made some very impressive business successes by offering non-free plugins and plugins that are extensions to other plugins that are big enough to have extensions of their own (WooCommerce being the primary example). But I think it’s increasingly unlikely that this is a good way to launch a successful business. [Since originally writing…
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A Real-World Example of Avoiding Unneeded Prelaunch Dev
You hear a lot of blather about what the “minimal” in Minimal Viable Product means. And YCombinator has made an industry out of reminding people to launch before they think they’re ready. The trick of course is figuring out where this does and doesn’t apply without kicking the fledgling from the nest while the poor…
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What WordPress Should Be
As I was writing this, Joost de Valk posted a blog piece that points out three key areas of weakness that confront WordPress and rightly points out that we had better face these concerns head on and clear eyed. We need as a community to have the discussions that lead WordPress by developing a vision…
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The Launch List
I continue to chew through a lot of time making sure that PeakZebra, as a service, works. That it does what it’s supposed to do. But I’ve come to realize that one of my major challenges as a founder is training myself not to keep moving the “finished and ready for launch” goalposts. In particular,…
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The Limits of Open Source Software
Nothing has foregrounded the fundamental bargain of open source like the past couple months of WordPress drama. I’m not here to talk about that in particular, but it has really gotten people thinking about what’s legal, what’s ethical, what you can charge for, what you can give away, and how a business will or won’t…
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Adjustments in Thinking
It occurred to me that I was writing lots of blog posts and posting links to the posts on Bluesky and X. And there were even a couple of good souls clicking through to have a look at the proceedings. But on the blog pages (aka, pages like this) there was no call to action…
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Daily Dose?
It occurred to me that I’m so bad at thinking up witty little bits to post on Bluesky that I’d probably do better writing a five-hundred-word piece literally every day and then “skeeting” (as they say on Bluesky, though I have no idea why) the address and topic. I’d have something to say, sort of.…
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PeakZebra’s central architectural ideas
While your first encounter with PeakZebra may catch you a little off guard, especially if you’re coming from a WordPress background, the ideas behind it are actually very straightforward. Which is what makes them powerful, of course. Particularly in the WordPress world, there’s this notion of an add-on called a “forms package.” A forms package…
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Best WordPress Blocks Plugins to Push Your Gutenberg Imagination
Gutenberg arrived on the WordPress scene five years ago by now, but plugins that implement more-than-basic blocks were relatively slow in coming. Still, five years: so you might think everyone would have it all figured out by now. But no. And plugins that implement more-than-basic blocks were relatively slow in coming. For one thing, there’s…
