Building WordPress Plugins for Portugal

BobWP:
This is special because this is from my new home country. I mean, you’ve all heard me talk about how much I regret moving away from the us, which well, now I never said that, but I’m dope. But Marco, my friend, welcome to the show.

Marco:
Hi. Thank you for having me and welcome to Portugal. I think I told you this several times now, but now it’s official.

BobWP:
Marco’s been a big help in a lot of adaptations for both Judy and I here and stuff, and he even helped me get my cell phone. I have to say this, I couldn’t even get my cell phone working right, the right plan. So he actually took me to the mall and he talked to them, got it all figured out. It’s like, yeah, I was a mess. Let me say that.

Marco:
Just helping a fellow WordPress person.

BobWP:
Yeah. So you do development, you do all sorts of cool things, plugins. We kind of focus a little bit on the product end of things, but why don’t you tell everyone who you are, what you do, all that good stuff.

Marco:
Okay, so my name is Marco Almeida, as you said. I’m from Portugal. I live across the river from Lisbon since forever. And yeah, I got into the web development really soon. I’m 44 now. I got into it around 20 and yeah, that’s what I do.

BobWP:
Yeah. All right. Okay. So you have your plugin site and then you have a development business.

Marco:
Exactly.

BobWP:
Can you tell us a little bit about both of those?

Marco:
So in 2005, so almost 20 years now, I’ve opened the typical IT company. I had a partner, we did IT support. We sold hardware, consumables, typical corner shop stuff, but we worked mostly with companies. And at the time, I already did some web on my previous jobs before I opened my own company, and I was working on my free time on a CMS, A content management system that we started using on this company web to build websites for several companies. I think most of the people my age in the WordPress world probably have a similar story of having built their own CMS at the early ages. And then time I took over the company myself alone, I didn’t wanted to do that. IT support selling hardware, consumables, all that stuff, and I focused more on web development. Well, WordPress was natural. It was a natural transition from the CMS that I developed and something that would be more flexible. And so it really went really natural. Funny enough, that CMS that I had, it was based on rows and columns, something that we now call blocks 20 years ago, which is really fun to see right now. But yeah, so I started using WordPress, I think around 2010. I published my first plugin on the repo in 2011. I think it was a plugin for open graph text to share your posts on Facebook and Twitter with the correct thumbnails. Funny enough, it was my first plugin and it’s the only one I’ve sold so far. I’ve sold to WP experts around the time of WordCamp Asia last year.

BobWP:
So what got you into the plugin? I mean, it’s like some of the stories we get from different folks we have on here is that the plugin often came from a need with a client. Yeah, same way.

Marco:
Exactly. Yeah, I think that that’s a common for everyone. So yeah, this plugin I was talking about, it was a need that I had myself and I just published on the repo, and so I start publishing plugins on the repo really soon. In my WordPress journey, most of the plugins, as you said, were stuff that I had a need for myself or for customers of mine I was developing websites for. And I also, in the early ages, I got into e-commerce. So there were a lot of needs, specific needs mainly for the Portuguese market. And that’s why nowadays there’s several plugins, several free plugins and premium plugins that I own that I developed that are mostly focused on the Portuguese market. And yeah, that’s how I got on.

BobWP:
Yeah, I find that interesting because when we first met, and I remember looking at your plugins and stuff that, yeah, it’s on the Portuguese market and I don’t see a lot of, well, I’ve seen some developers do that, but there was, what made you mean obviously there was a need that needed to be filled and nothing was available. And so how many of your plugins are you specific to Portugal?

Marco:
Well, probably on the commercial plugins, I have 10 commercial plugins, and I think six or seven are focused 100% on the Portuguese market. On the free plugins, I currently have 20 free plugins and probably also six or seven focused on the Portuguese market. And you were saying about the specific needs, I can give you some examples. For instance, the VAT number, which is something that in most countries is something that it’s only for companies in Portugal, what we call a fiscal number, which is the same as a VAT number, but for a person, and that’s something that WooCommerce doesn’t have the fields too, so I created a plugin for that. Also, we have a payment method in Portugal that it’s exclusive of Portugal, and it’s the most, so it’s the one people trust the most. And at the time there was no WooCommerce plugin for it. So I’ve implemented it and it’s now the most used payment gateway in Portugal. So there were really specific needs that someone had to do specifically for Portugal.

BobWP:
Yeah, that is really interesting. And the one you were just talking about, that’s the payment gateway, right?

Marco:
Yeah, it’s a payment method that exists in Portugal, I think for more than 35 years now. So when you get your, for instance, your utilities bill, like the electricity bill or the water bill, if you get it on traditional mail, in paper, you normally get a reference, an entity and the value, an entity, a reference, and the value. And you can go to any ATM machine or your own banking service. You just put on the reference the value and it’s paid for and it’s all automatic. So people trust this for a long time way before online shopping was a thing. And so at some time I had a customer that needed that wanted to implement that on his website, and there were already some companies providing that service with an API, but they weren’t building plugins for shops. They were just providing the API and expecting for each and every shop owner to implement it. So I saw an opportunity there. It was funny because I called them and told them, so I’m doing this for a customer and I will probably publish on the public WordPress repo. And they told me, so the company is called If then Pay, and they told me at the time, yeah, you can do whatever you want, just do not. We have nothing to do with that. You are the one who has to give support. We just provide the API. And I was like, okay.
Funny story, like six or seven months after they were the ones calling me saying, yeah, we got to talk. Because there’s a lot of customers going in because they first go to the repo, they install the plugin, and then they see, oh, I need a contract with this company. And so of course we now have an agreement. Well, this was launched in 2013, so we are 11 years now, and we have an agreement for the last 10 years. And of course now they’re paying me to keep the plugin and support the customers. And so we have a commission based agreement. So each payment that goes to, yeah.

BobWP:
Wow.

Marco:
And it’s more than 7,000 stores, right?

BobWP:
Oh, I bet. Because I remember when I first, somebody explained to me about being able to pay this at the ATM I was somewhere and they said, well, you could just go and pay this at the ATM, I think it was at the hospital. And I had paused and I thought, because I’d seen it, but I didn’t really didn’t connect and stuff. So that’s amazing. How do you Now I don’t get to talk. Most of the times it’s my host and I don’t get to talk with a lot of the product makers. What makes you decide when you do a plugin, you’ll have some that are free and then some that are premium. What makes you decide to go to the premium route?

Marco:
So at first, as I was saying, so I started publishing plugins on the repo, so free plugins very early. Although that payment gateway, although it’s a free plugin, I’m still being paid to have it online. So it’s almost a commercial plugin, not for the customer side of it, but for me as a developer. And at first it was giving back to the community and also put on my name and my company name on in public, getting to be known as a developer, a WordPress, and specifically a WooCommerce developer in Portugal. And there’s probably not a lot of Portuguese online shops that don’t have at least one plugin. One of my plugins installed because I made them so specific for the Portuguese needs, and it was really natural. At some time, I got contacted from someone from Angola, the African country, they used to be a Portuguese colony, and they were also trying to implement, they have basically a copy of our banking system there.

The payment methods are really similar, and so they wanted to implement that same payment method there. And so there was not a lot of potential for users, but they agreed on paying upfront to develop that plugin. And at the same time, I made a pro version, and that was my first commercial plugin. Actually, it was a payment gateway, not for Portugal, but for Angola. No, interesting. But it was really a test and I was not expecting for it to sell so much and didn’t, it’s not a commercial success for sure, but then the real first one that made me start with a premium. So for instance, another thing in Portugal, most countries of the world, if you have a PDF file or a piece of paper, you can call it an invoice that doesn’t exist. In Portugal, we, for several years now, every invoice must be issued by an IRS certified software.

So you cannot just make a PDF file and call it an invoice. So for instance, on WooCommerce, on the right side, on the other actions, when you have that option sending invoice to customer, that’s not legal in Portugal. So for instance, in the Portuguese translation of WooCommerce that I work on, we remove the word invoice from that string. And so I was doing some integrations with an API to one of those certified softwares for some customers. And from the early stages, I thought that this could be a really good commercial plugin because the shops needed, but there were already two solutions on the market. One of them was from Marcel Schmidt that very well. And so at one time, Marcel decided to do something else and he reached out to me and he told me, Hey Mark, well I know you are working with the same API.

I know we would like to have a product. I’m going to do other stuff. Do we want to take this plugin? We can reach a financial agreement on this. And so I took it. There was a lot of stuff to do. We were around the time WooCommerce 3.0 was launched and there were significant changes that we needed to do to the plugin. And so I released a version 2.0 of that plugin after some months of, and that become the first profitable plugin that I had. Funny enough, the competitor was also a friend of mine that called me the day I launched my plugin say, oh, I have a great success. We are now competitors on this. And I ended up buying his plugin also.

BobWP:
And I wonder how many other plugin developers, various parts of the world ever think of these more specific needs within their country? I mean, the couple of things there, for example, I didn’t realize with the multi bank that it’s Portugal specific, that nobody else does that at all. And yeah, that is really interesting

Marco:
And I think it’s a good way to get into the plugin development because you have a laboratory, very small user bases that you can test your stuff with, your commercial practices and everything. And that’s what I’m doing right now. I’m starting to do some plugins that are for the global market of course, but creating them for Portugal.

BobWP:
I want to also touch a little bit on community and stuff with you because I know you’re really involved. But sticking with the product thing, I know that you recently went to lifetime licenses. I mean really recently. Don, your plug is like,

Marco:
I announced it today

BobWP:
And I saw it on X. It’s always hard to say x, I still want to say Twitter, but I saw that and I’ve seen these discussions go on and on about that. What made you decide to do it? I mean, what convinced you to go that route?

Marco:
So first of all, as I was telling you for instance, when I bought that invoice express plugin from Marcel and from the other guy afterwards, they were both on lifetime licensing, but it wasn’t sustainable because they were charging the same value that I charged today for an yearly license and they were charging lifetime license. And I think that’s why we saw a lot of lifetime deals completely disappear. Some of them, even in some strange situations where they don’t honor the previous license. So I bought a lot of lifetime licenses that I use still today, like a CF, like WPML. So I have a ton of lifetime licenses that I still use. And so when I started doing my plugin business, I always said no lifetime licensing. So it’s got to be early. You got to pay by year yearly because it needs to be sustainable of course, but you got to try stuff.

You got to try new ways to sell your products and you shouldn’t be afraid of doing it. Even if you have to just take it down sometime. It’s not a problem as long as you honor the customers that bought it on that licensing. And so what I’m seeing now that I’m selling plugins for some years now is that most of the customers that keep the licensing for a long time, they really just ask support for the first months. They really don’t need a lot of support afterwards. So even if I’m losing money on the long run with these customers that decide to buy the lifetime licensee, I think it’s just a way to give them both options and let them decide if they want to pay each year or if they want to pay a lifetime license. So I’m charging something between three and four times the price of early license for a lifetime. And so I decided to give them that option and let’s see how it goes. If it doesn’t go well, I can just turn off that licensing and just honor the ones that matters. It’s just a test. Yeah, I’m testing.

BobWP:
Interesting. Yeah, I don’t know if I’ve ever bought a lifetime license. I’ve been given a few over the years, which has been really nice and I’ve been given them and I’ve used them for maybe as long as a decade. I can probably count on one hand or two hands how many times I maybe ask for some little help with support or whatever because yeah, and I imagine there’s some that are a lot more high maintenance or whatever depending on things. With the one with bank, is there a lot of, I mean, not on the side of the actual woo, which yeah, it updates, you got update or whatever, but is there a lot of updates on the other side when you’re using kind of a payment gateway like that? Is there a lot of things you have to keep on top of? But is there stuff pretty much set? Like you said, they’ve been doing this what for 30 some years and it’s just done it .

Marco:
Exactly. No, it’s really stable what they have. So if then pay the company that the plugin works for, they are what is called by the Bank of Port a payment provider. They’re not a bank, they’re a proxy between the business owners and the banks. They’re certified by the Bank of Portugal authorized to provide payment services. And so multi-bank was not invented by them MB way. So the other methods, the other really use methods in Portugal is something that when you check out, you just enter your phone number, your mobile number, you get a push notification on your phone, you have that app installed and you say Yes, and it’s paid for done. And so they are not the owners of these payment matters. They are just payment providers. And so what we’ve been doing during the last years is they normally get another payment methods into their portfolio and we just need to add it to the plugin. So right now it’s multi-Bank, MB Way, there’s another one which is called Pay Shop, which is actually a way to pay with real money. So you just get the reference from the website and then you can go to a local shop, like a newspaper stand or something like that. And they have a computer there just given the reference and the money and it’s paid for.

BobWP:
Interesting. So is that, are they paying for it after they received something online or are they actually getting it there? There no,

Marco:
No. So just imagine you chose bank transfer on checkout, but instead of doing a real bank transfer and the shop owner has to go to check the balance on the bank to see if the payment is there or not, you just go to a shop or if it’s multi-bank or you just use the reference on the ATM or your own banking services, if it’s MB Way, you just say yes on the push notification on the phone. And if it’s the pay shop, the one with money, you just go to the shop next door, make the payment, and automatically in one second the website gets a web service call like an API call. And you are the changes to processing after that.

BobWP:
Interesting. Wow, that’s kind of cool. Alrighty. Well, okay, so products, we’ve talked about products, but knowing you, I’ve got to touch on community a bit, and you’ve been involved with meetups toward camps. Just tell us a little history of your community involvement then. I think a couple of things I might poke out there.

Marco:
So my first WordCamp in Porto in 2013, so maybe around two years after I start using WordPress, I found out about this community that some of us already start calling like a cult or more cult than a community. So I went to Porto in 2013. It was my first world camp and then I went to Seville for WordCamp Europe in 2015. That was my first WordCamp Europe. I start co-organizing in 2019 in Lisbon. And then I was part of the organization team of Europe 2020, the one that didn’t happen in portal because of the pandemic last year. I was crazy enough to become lead organizer of WordCamp Lisboa in 2023. It was hard. But yeah, I do it with pleasure and to give back to the community and the meetups in Lisbon, they were not happening for some time now, and the pandemic didn’t help also. But now we are in about almost a year and a half of nonstop meetups in Lisbon and it’s not only me right now, I have two other people helping me with organizing. So we meet every month in Lisbon, Brisbane, and then there’s the people of photo also. And I’m going there next month to speak

BobWP:
And I’ll be there about WooCommerce, I’ll be there heckling you and I will let out a secret about meetups in Portugal, meetups are only done for, they can have these long, long dinners right after the meetups. I think you said that once jokingly. Of course. But I did experience that. So you go to your hour meetup and then you have a two to three hour dinner.

Marco:
So come for the meetup, stay for the dinner.

BobWP:
Yeah, exactly.

Marco:
So last August here in Lisbon, António Carreira, a friend of mine which is also on the organizing team of the meetup, we are trying to get someone to speak on the August meetup. And it’s not easy because everybody’s on holiday that month. And so we told yeah, we just do the dinner.

BobWP:
Hey, why not?

Marco:
The meetup will be the dinner. It’s okay. You only need two people and a glass of beer to do it.

BobWP:
Yeah, exactly. So what is it that keeps driving you to do, I mean I know you with the community, you’re always out talking to people, you’re doing meetups, you’re doing the WordCamp, and I know it’s probably a question everybody’s been asked and a lot of us have the same answer, but what really drives you to stay involved with the community? I mean, you got the business understand that part, but actively giving your time. And I’ve seen you’ve done a lot of contributions through the different teams on WordPress. What drives you to do that?

Marco:
Yeah, it’s really the sense of community. I don’t think most of the people that work in it and in development understands how special this community is. Of course with all these it’s problems and dramas that we have some time, it really is something that I’ve never seen in other areas of it. And so yeah, it’s the people, it’s the community, it’s giving back to a software. So 100% of the revenue at my place in my house, it’s word for us. Me and my wife, we work 100% of the day with word for us, so why not give back?

BobWP:
Yeah, really as simple as that, right?

Marco:
Yeah, it is really simple. Also, being with the people, everybody works from home now since the pandemic. I work from home for 15 years now. I need to see people. So I need to go to meetups and work camps and stuff like that. And that’s a way to be connected with the world. So for instance, as I was saying, I was part of the organizing team for WordCamp Europe 2020 in Porto. That only happened in 2022 that year a crazy American come to Porto and decided to stay. And then I was invited to be on the organizing team for the online version. That did happen. I was really glad to help, but it’s just not the same.

BobWP:
Yeah, I attended a couple online ones during that time and I just thought, yeah, there’s no comparison.

Marco:
Exactly.

BobWP:
Absolutely. Well my friend, this was wonderful. I don’t get a chance to chat with a lot of people. I let my host do all that good stuff, but I’m glad I was able to sit down with you and catch up and I’ll be seeing you in a short amount of time here in Porto at the meetup and looking forward to that. And that nice little bite to eat we’ll have afterwards.

Marco:
Yes, we always have that really cool dinner with all the people. As we were saying, it’s about the community, it’s about the people.

BobWP:
Yeah, exactly. So where can people find you? Give me your website addresses, all your social, where you hang out in social and stuff where people can connect with you.

Marco:
Okay, so myself, you can find me on Twitter, that X thing, I’m still wearing a Twitter shirt. People are not seeing this because it’s only audio. But yeah, my handle is Wonderm00n, but the last two ohs are zeros. And then you can find my company webdadospt and you can find my plugins brand. So I started selling the plugins and they’re the same brand as the company and then I decided to separate them. And you can find me at our plugins @ptwooplugins.

BobWP:
Alright, well absolutely a pleasure my friend, and looking forward to seeing you soon. It

Marco:
Was an honor. Thank you.

BobWP:
You bet. Thank you.

Marco:
Okay Bob. See you.

BobWP:
Bye.