From an Idea to a WordPress Product

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Mark:
Hey, welcome to Do the Woo: Behind the Build, hosted by me, Mark Westguard. In this series, we’re going behind the scenes of some WordPress plugin businesses, exploring the journey from concept to creation, as well as the ongoing work involved in maintaining and running those businesses. Today’s guest has become quite a close friend of mine—Derek Hau from WP Sunshine—and we’re going to be discussing his newest plugin, Conversion Bridge. Welcome to the show, Derek.

Derek:
Thank you, Mark. Glad to be here with you.

Mark:
Do you want to give us a little five-second intro about who you are and where you’ve come from?

Derek:
Derek from Fort Collins, Colorado—there, five seconds. I’ve been in the WordPress space since 2007, 2008. Started doing client work like many of us, just found it as this great solution to help build sites for clients and let them be able to edit some stuff on their own to take away some of that burden. The least favorite part of building sites for clients is making those text changes, so anything to have them do it.

Over the years, I started one plugin—my first one was called Sunshine Photo Cart. That is a massive, massive plugin, which I regret starting with. It’s a complete eCommerce ecosystem, basically WooCommerce with 20 of its own add-ons but built just for photographers. It was a very niche space for my then-wife at the time, who was getting into photography.

Over the years, I’ve become unhappy building sites for clients. I’ve done it for 20-plus years now, so I’m making the move to slowly become product-first and started releasing plugins in very different directions—small plugins. I have a confetti one that adds a fun little confetti effect after you submit forms like WS Form, as well as for WooCommerce and other interactions on your site. Then I have an address autocomplete plugin.

My latest one, which I’m really excited about, is called Conversion Bridge. It allows you to add analytics platforms—up to 10 or so, I think there are maybe 12 now—to your site. The setup part is pretty simple, but the best part is it makes conversion tracking a one-click setup in most cases, which is a truly important metric. It also sends data not only to your analytics platforms but also to paid ad platforms like Meta Ads, Google Ads, Pinterest, TikTok, and more.

Mark:
Yeah, it’s a one-stop solution. So, is this your first rodeo?

Derek:
No, at this point, it’s not.

Mark:
With the photo product, how many plugins? Six? How many in total have you made?

Derek:
Well, the photo plugin itself has quite a few. There are six payment gateways—if you count those as add-ons—but in total, I think there are 20 or 22. I can’t remember exactly. There are so many add-ons. Just like WS Form, people always have different things they need.

Mark:
So really, you’re managing tens of plugins, not just a few.

Derek:
Yeah, some of them are bigger than my confetti plugin alone. An add-on can be bigger than my entire confetti plugin.

Mark:
So what inspired you to create Conversion Bridge?

Derek:
Most of my products have come from client work and me thinking, “I want to solve this problem,” and then realizing, “Hey, I can make this for other people.” Conversion Bridge, though, was more of myself as the client.

I really wanted to move to privacy-first analytics platforms, and I use EDD to sell my plugins. So, I wanted to continue my conversion tracking and thought, “Let me find the EDD version for Plausible or Fathom.” I was clear at the time that there was nothing available.

This was also around the time when Universal Analytics was about to be phased out, and we were all moving to GA4. That was another reason I started considering a move, but there weren’t many options. So, I knew I would have to code it myself, and since I was already on the journey to becoming product-first, I thought there might be a lot of people wanting to move to privacy-first analytics who needed better tools to do so. That’s how the idea for Conversion Bridge was born.

Mark:
Did you find that despite seeing people move to other analytics platforms, there were still a lot of users struggling with GA4? The migration from Universal Analytics to GA4 seemed quite complex.

Derek:
I’m not sure if the migration itself was difficult—it’s more that the usability of GA4 is horrendous. Even experienced users who spend six to eight hours a day in it agree—it’s a nightmare to use.

It almost feels like Google rushed it out due to legal reasons. It seems like the developers built it, and the UI/UX team never got a hold of it before it was released. Now they’re backpedaling, trying to fix things.

Mark:
No offense to Google, but I’ve found that with a lot of their products. They’ve steadily become more complicated over time.

From concept to launch, how long did it take you to build Conversion Bridge?

Derek:
I started it the week before Christmas—who knows why—and launched the first version in February 2023. The official first release was February 1, 2024.

Mark:
I use Conversion Bridge, and for me, it gives peace of mind. If anyone needs to connect their website to analytics—especially for eCommerce tracking, which can be tricky—it does the job brilliantly. There are so many eCommerce platforms, and it can be hard to find a reliable solution that properly tracks conversions, but yours does it perfectly. So, congratulations on the product.

Derek:
Oh, thanks! Yeah, one thing I’ve noticed is that there are week-long courses on Google Analytics these days, and I’m like, “A week-long course just to understand an analytics platform?” It’s wild.

There was a video I watched—a great guy, really knowledgeable—and it was a 10-minute tutorial on how to set up conversion tracking when you redirect to a thank-you page. But that was just one scenario. There are many cases where you don’t redirect, or you redirect somewhere else entirely. And he admitted that even after 10 minutes, he hadn’t covered everything. You still had to do the work, test it, and jump between multiple tools and screens.

To me, that was more validation that Conversion Bridge was needed. It just takes care of it—toggle a setting, and you’re done. Nothing more needs to happen.

Mark:
That makes a lot of sense. When you start a new client site, the first thing you should do is set up conversion tracking on the old site. Then, when you launch the new version, you can measure real improvements.

Derek:
Exactly! That’s the real metric—seeing conversion rates before and after changes.

Mark:
So yeah, we were talking about marketing—is it a challenge for you to market the product given that it is one of those products that sits there in the background and is not something that you use day to day?

Derek:
I think it’s more of a challenge because it’s one of the last steps that someone does. So it’s not at the start of a build. It’s not like a page builder or a contact form or anything like that, that they need while they’re building. It’s something that gets added at the end, and it’s kind of like, well, we should do that.

I’ve talked with a lot of agencies or freelancers and stuff like that, and they’re like, “Oh, I’ve been following you on Twitter. It sounds like a great product, and I really want to try it, but I haven’t yet.” So it’s getting them to finally dive into it.

Once they use it, they go, “Yeah, this is phenomenal.” The few people that I’ve been like, “Well, fine, here, let me just send you a license so you can test it on that one site, see what it’s like,” and then hope that they buy a multi-site license or end up buying it for their next client site or something like that. It’s not as foundational as page builders or forms or those more front-end core building parts.

Mark:
I mean, you and I are both bootstrapped businesses, I guess it’s fair to say. And it’s a challenge because we don’t have the marketing dollars there to go out and say, “Hey, to a million people, here’s our product.” So it’s a lot about word of mouth, it’s a lot about getting into people’s stacks—development stacks—and it’s a slow but steady process, but we get there in the end.

So did you build your products on your own, or did you have a team behind it? And what resources did you use to get it off the ground?

Derek:
Yeah, so it is 100% me. The UI, the UX, the website design, the marketing, and then the coding and the building—it’s all on my own. And all the documentation and all the…

Mark:
Documentation takes forever.

Derek:
The documentation, the videos, the walkthroughs—yeah, it’s a lot of me. I guess if you’re going to work on a product, you have to do a lot.

Mark:
And you have a lot of variation there. It’s a bit like Make.com or Zapier—you’ve got to connect from this platform to this analytics package. So there’s a lot of different variations that you’ve got to put together documentation for.

Derek:
In some ways. I mean, it is nice in the way it’s structured—here’s how you set it up, and here’s how you set up Google Ads, here’s how you set up Google Analytics or Plausible. Those are simple things. And then here’s how you set it up in WS Form or GiveWP or whatever it may be. Thankfully, I don’t need to necessarily create documentation for each one of those. I think if I combine everything right now, there are about 742 combinations or something like that.

Mark:
So you could just glue those two together, right?

Derek:
Yeah. It’s like, “Here’s how you set this one up, and here’s how you set up this one.” And then behind the scenes, Conversion Bridge just makes sure that all those variations talk to one another and do what they need to do. But yeah, there’s a lot.

But that’s also the added benefit—those partners. You can make partnerships with those companies and all those integrations. And documentation itself is another area that makes it easier because, as a developer, I can write about how something works, and that doubles as content marketing.

In the beginning, I thought, “Maybe I should write more about things like what is the best analytics platform?”—something more marketing-driven. But as a developer, it’s just easier to write what I know. So it becomes a lot easier to create content pages on the website without overthinking it.

Mark:
And in our discussions, it sounds like there’s still a lot more that you can do. I know that you’ve become quite regimented—you do a week of marketing, then a week of development.

Derek:
I mean, I’m trying. Last week was my first week of doing it, and it went really well. It went really well. So yeah, I’m trying to do one week of focused marketing and then the next week go back to development to kind of force myself to do it. And I would say after the first week, I actually got some good momentum, and I’m excited to dive into it more because I didn’t finish everything that I wanted to do.

And as you know, as a perfectionist-type person, when you don’t finish it, you’re like, “I’m dying to get back in there and actually finish it.”

Mark:
I don’t know how you’re leaving development alone, Derek. I don’t know how you’re leaving it alone.

Derek:
Well, to be fair, I’m not 100% product-first. So I do have a couple of days within the week where I still do contract development work—about 15 hours set aside. That did scratch that itch a little bit.

But like I said, once I started getting into marketing, I found a way to edit the plugin itself to fit and match some marketing ideas I had. So I did dive into the code a little bit. But it’s not necessarily new features or anything like that.

Mark:
Yeah, it’s a challenge for our small businesses. Well, especially for us one-man bands. It’s a real challenge—we have to wear every hat, and we’re not necessarily great at wearing every single hat.

I know for me, marketing is always a challenge. And that’s why I’ve focused on community—working with people within the community, building friendships, going to WordCamps. And that, over the years, has resulted in noise being made about the product, which I’m very, very thankful for.

Derek:
I’ve tried to do the same. And honestly, I’ve followed your lead a little bit, just understanding that it’s easier to put yourself out there.

Being open and honest about things on Twitter, going to a WordCamp, meeting people, just talking to them—it forms opportunities that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

You have to put yourself out there in one way or another. You can do it by writing blog posts, content marketing, creating videos—these days, you’ve even got to create videos on TikTok for our WordPress plugins!

But it doesn’t matter which way you do it—you have to pick one. And for me, doing it behind my screen in my office, where I’m comfortable, makes Twitter the safest and easiest way to participate in the community.

Is it the most effective? No. Is it the most efficient? No. But does it at least start the process? Yes. And that’s what matters—getting the ball rolling in the right direction.

Mark:
And I think we’re very fortunate in the WordPress community to have so many people out there that want to help, 100%, and want to talk about what you’re doing. And there’s a right way of doing it—you don’t just send your plugin off to X, Y, and Z and say, “Hey, talk about it.” It’s about building relationships with these people and offering back as well.

So whenever I tend to do something with somebody who has some kind of influence, I like to just offer up my expertise in other areas. We will produce content on stuff that’s not related to WS Form.

I think the interesting thing for me has been that it’s not so much about my product brand—it’s been more about me in the WordPress space. And I learned that fairly early on. Initially, I was like, “Right, I’ve got a new logo, I’ve got to push that everywhere.” But then I found that no, people actually want to talk to the developer. They want to know who they’re buying the product from.

And that’s been important for me.

In terms of customer support, what approach do you use and what products do you use for customer support?

Derek:
I have a form on the site, and that submits over to Help Scout. I got into Help Scout 10 years ago, and I have some massively grandfathered plan. Most people have bailed over to FreeScout, I believe, because of the cost of things.

But also, as a one-man business, I don’t have 15 support agents who all need to dive in there. So yeah, it’s just tickets through there, and I use Help Scout to manage all those tickets.

And I definitely have a philosophy that is customer support first. Every day, I start my day by answering support tickets. I had that same mentality when I was doing client work—I wanted to respond with a quality answer within an hour of getting that email. Or, if they left a voicemail, I wanted to get back to them almost immediately—almost obsessively—because I knew how important it was.

But to me, I found that with client work, the last 10 years of it were all referrals as a result of great customer service.

And taking care of your customers does a lot of the marketing for you. Since I’m not great at marketing, I focused on customer service, which led to great reviews, referrals, and positive word of mouth.

So customer support is an area I feel is a strong suit for me, and I really lean into that. That’s why it’s always the first thing I do each day—answer support tickets, get those people taken care of, and then move on to development and other work for the rest of the day.

Mark:
Yeah, I’m the same. I’m always very quick to answer support tickets as much as I can. And I’ve found that it’s almost been a marketing channel in a way because the better the support you provide, the more positivity you are building in your own community, and the more people are referring you.

So yeah, I’ve been using Zendesk for a while, and one of the things I’d like to do with it is to integrate it more with my sales side. That way, when someone comes in, I can see more information about that customer.

But to do that, I’ve got to upgrade to a very expensive package, which I’m not going to do right now. Maybe I’ll do that later.

Derek:
Yeah, I mean, I know Help Scout has an integration with Easy Digital Downloads, which I use to sell my products. That way, I can see their licenses right within Help Scout.

So, for example, with Sunshine Photo Cart, I can immediately see whether they’ve purchased a license. And obviously, with Conversion Bridge, I can see what they’ve bought, how long they’ve been a customer, and that kind of stuff.

Not that I treat anyone differently, but it’s helpful to have that information.

Mark:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s useful just to make sure they’ve got a license and everything.

So, we spoke a little bit about marketing. What marketing channels or strategies have worked best for you, do you think?

Derek:
For me, with Conversion Bridge, it has been social media—just really being active.

I was doing a lot of “build in public.” There are 10 analytics integrations and 50+ plugin integrations. And what I basically did was, every time I had a new integration, I posted it on Twitter and tagged that company. That way, people following them could see it.

And that really helped because, over time, people would say, “I love seeing how quickly you were doing it and how many integrations you were building—it was wildly impressive.”

So there are a lot of people who know about it and have heard about it, which was the first step in building awareness.

Then, as I mentioned earlier, it was also great because I started doing outreach with those companies that I had built integrations for, and they were like, “Oh, that sounds fantastic! Let’s talk about that.”

So it was an easy way to reach out to them and start a discussion about cross-promotion.

And as you mentioned earlier, it’s important to ask, “What can I do for you?” rather than just, “How can you help me?”

Over time, I’ve built up a little bit of an audience as a result of this approach.

Mark:
Yeah, I found it interesting. Some of the integrations I’ve done—like with Webex—have had companies be really proactive and excited to collaborate.

But then, some of the bigger ones are just kind of standoffish. They’re happy that you integrated with them, but they don’t really engage.

So, it varies depending on the company.

Derek:
Yeah, one interesting thing—when I signed up with WP Engine maybe 10 years ago for my client stuff, I reached out to them because I searched “conversion tracking for WordPress,” and they had a blog post about it.

And in that post, they listed a plugin that wasn’t even actively maintained anymore.

So, I reached out and said, “Hey, I’m a WP Engine customer, and I’ve been for over 10 years. I have this new product that does exactly what you’re writing about.”

Within a week, they got back to me, updated their blog post, and now I’m featured in it. And that article is ranked second in Google search results for “conversion tracking WordPress.”

That was a great way to get SEO exposure and visibility.

So, using those connections you already have—even just as a customer—can sometimes create great opportunities.

I think doing these types of podcasts is also another great approach. I’ve been doing several of these lately, and my best sales day, to be blunt, so far was after I jumped on with Kevin Geary and did a live stream walking through Conversion Bridge.

I met Kevin a little bit before that—we ended up playing golf at WordCamp before the event last year. And just like you mentioned, being part of the community, talking with people, meeting people—everyone’s been so great.

Honestly, I haven’t met anyone where I’ve thought, “No, I’m going to stay away from this person.” Everyone’s been welcoming and open and just great to talk to.

Mark:
I totally agree with you. I mean, in all the industries that I’ve worked in, WordPress has been the most welcoming and enjoyable to work in.

That’s another reason why I—like you—have focused 100% on products and not doing agency work anymore. I just enjoy it so much more. It’s nice to be in control.

And also, as small business owners, we now have an asset. Whereas before, doing agency work was good, but at the end of the day, you’re just selling time. I did it for 28 years, and I just got to a point where I thought, “I can’t build another website.”

Derek:
Yeah, I know that feeling. It’s painful. It’s something I could literally do in my sleep at this point, and it’s the last thing I want to do.

I realized when I woke up in the morning excited to build a new feature, but then got an email from a client asking for something simple—like “We got a new person at our hair salon. Can you add their photo and bio?”—it would ruin my entire day.

Something that would take me three minutes to do just completely killed my momentum. That’s when I knew—I was done.

Mark:
Yeah, for us, I think it was just needing a career change. Obviously, there are so many people who get into web design and love it—it’s new and exciting for them. And for me, it used to be.

But after so many years, it wore thin, and I needed a change. I’m glad I made the switch. It’s been fun. Maybe in 20 years, I’ll go back to web development.

So, if you could go back and do one thing differently—here’s a tough question—what would it be?

Derek:
It’s not that tough, actually. I’d say from two different angles:

First, I would have built marketing into the very beginning of all my planning. I would have been more strategic about it from the start.

When I built Sunshine Photo Cart, there was no marketing plan. It was just, “I’m going to build this and see what happens.” It was very much a side project, and I thought, “If I make a few hundred dollars a month from this, that would be great.”

I was still focused on client work, so I wasn’t even considering products as my full-time thing.

With Conversion Bridge, I was in the mindset of becoming product-first, but I was still just thinking, “This seems like a good idea.” I talked to a few people, they said, “Yeah, that sounds great!”—and I started building it.

But I didn’t really plan it.

Luckily, the integrations provided a natural way to do marketing—by reaching out to those companies and doing some cross-promotional efforts. But if I had known that earlier, I could have been a year ahead in my marketing strategy.

Second, I would have spent more time identifying the real target audience from the start.

When I started building Conversion Bridge, I wasn’t even going to include Google Analytics at first because I didn’t want to compete with existing Google Analytics plugins.

I wanted this to be a separate tool.

But within the first few conversations I had, the first five people who reached out all asked, “Does it work with Google Analytics?”

I immediately realized, “Okay, obviously, this needs to be part of it.”

If I had done better market research upfront, I could have figured that out much earlier. That would have saved me a lot of time.

Mark:
Yeah, that’s important. I see a lot of new plugin developers trying to promote their product to the entire world.

But every product has its niche and its ideal customer. That’s something I focused on early on with WS Form—I wanted to target agencies and developers, so that’s where I focused my marketing efforts.

And as small, bootstrapped businesses, it takes time.

There are days where you’re like, “Why am I doing this? This is ridiculous. I should just get a 9-to-5 job.”

And then there are days when you wake up excited, maybe you’ve had a few orders come in overnight, and you think, “Okay, this is working!”

I saw a tweet the other day—somebody made a graph of their income. It was low, low, low… peak. Low, low, low… peak. And they put labels on it, showing their emotions at each point.

It really resonated because, as product owners, we go through those cycles.

That’s kind of why Bob and I decided to do this podcast—or whatever we call it now with video.

We were sitting down at WordCamp US in Portland last year, and I really wanted to help small businesses.

The big companies with money get all the attention, while the small businesses often go unnoticed.

I wanted to raise people’s profiles.

So hopefully, with this show, we can make some noise for people like you and help get the word out.

Derek:
Yeah, and one of the big differences between client work and product work is—you sign a client, and you know you’re getting paid X amount for that project.

With product work, I could spend 100 hours building Conversion Bridge and get nothing in return.

That’s a huge shift in mentality.

It requires a lot more faith. You have to really believe in what you’re doing.

And yeah, I still do contract work to pay the bills because I’m not fully product-only yet. But I’m working towards it.

It’s definitely a different mindset, and I didn’t fully grasp how different it would feel until I was in it.

When you have a bad month with zero sales, you start wondering, “If I were doing only product work, how would I survive this month?”

It’s something you have to be mentally prepared for.

Mark:
Yeah, I mean, you are working two jobs—your agency work and your product work.

It takes a lot of courage to take your foot off the agency side and fully commit to the product side. It’s scary.

Derek:
It is, but it’s also rewarding. And at the end of the day, I love what I’m doing now.

Mark:
Well, my last question—if you could give one piece of advice to other WordPress product developers, what would it be?

Derek:
Get out there. Just give it a go. And leverage the community.

The WordPress community is full of people who are willing to help.

Building relationships and engaging with the community has been one of the most valuable things I’ve done.

Mark:
That’s great advice. So, how can people learn more about your product and connect with you?

Derek:
Check out conversionbridgewp.com, and you can find me on Twitter @derekhau—I post about my journey, my products, and participate in the community there.

Mark:
Awesome! Well, thanks for being on the show.

Derek:
Thanks for having me, Mark!