E148 - 10 Years of Driving Success Through MVPs (Kim Coleman, Paid Memberships Pro)

May 25, 2021

In today’s episode, Joe talks to Kim Coleman, the co-founder of Paid Memberships Pro - the most complete WordPress membership plugin. She has her hand in all aspects of the development, management, and marketing for the product and the team. She oversees frontend development for the core open source plugin and over 75 Add Ons.  

 

They discuss the value of MVP in growing a business, catering to customer needs, and building and testing new features through the community. They also touch on the importance of formulating the right content for branding, and membership pricing and discount schemes. 

 

Episode Resources:

• Paid Memberships Pro
• Paid Memberships Pro WordPress.org
• Kim Coleman’s Twitter
• Leave an Apple podcast review or binge-watch past episodes
• Send questions to [e-mail] for the next Q&A pod
• Visit the WPMRR website

 

What to Listen For:

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:46 Welcome to the pod, Kim!
• 04:12 What has changed over the years?
• 07:02 The biggest concerns are the desire for the developers to refactor some features
• 11:11 MVP on the site’s current workload and paid memberships
• 13:55 Deciding between adding as a core part of the plugin or an add-on plugin
• 17:32 Limiting what the plugin is responsible for in WordPress
• 22:46 The struggle to get content from your customer when building a site
• 27:51 Allowing the community to test newly built products and features
• 30:07 Pricing: during product launch and how it evolved over the years
• 37:32 Turning experiments into blog content and knowledge share
• 40:43 People buy because of urgent technological issues they cannot solve on their own
• 42:31 Running a company and the family together with your partner
• 45:37 Homeschooling kids during the pandemic
• 49:13 Find Kim online!