Maarten Belmans

2024 was a profitable, but strange year for my plugin business. I share numbers, struggles, and plans for 2025 in our Year in Review.✍️ If you'd like me to elaborate more on anything, just let me know! 👈 studiowombat.com/blog/2024-year…

I agree with that take. Hire the right people, but keep it small and lean and it's amazing how fast you can fix bugs, add feautures, change course, ...

Our plugin is powerful, which means users with complex use-cases can struggle (even with lots of docs). We used to build a demo on their site, but that's not really sustainable so I'm thinking of stepping away from it. Let's see if customers understand that purchasing a plugin…

Every now and then, a customer asks for a custom spin-to-win wheel. I slap some CSS on top of my plugin, et voila!

Been looking into WooCommerce "product table" plugins lately. Not one of them has accessible sorting... Time to build our own lightweight version!

We're getting these sort of tickets more & more. Sadly, if they reach our inbox, it means ChatGPT hallucinated.

Here I go again telling theme authors how to do their job. Please stop labelling your theme "fit for WooCommerce" if you can't follow their basic standards. It really is the wild west out there sometimes. 🙁

Your security plugin is not worth 21% of your site's execution time. Use some common sense and best practices and you don't need a security plugin.

European product people, are you doing anything to offset the USD losses?

We have some complex plugins. Customers don't always take the time to explain their issue properly and email chains become long. Would it be okay if I point them to this article? I don't want to be a bother, but at the same time, we need them to be clear.

Just spoke with a store owner making $1,000s/month who’s using the free version of our plugin. That's totally OK, but surprises me. If your store is doing well, why would you rely on unsupported software that gets less attention than paid counterparts?🤔 I can imagine this…

No need to overthink this, imo. We lead them to chat with us instead. Some data: ❌ 14% of our AI links are hallucinated, that's a lot! 👉 ChatGPT and Claude are the worst offenders. Perplexity and Gemini do a much better job. ✅ Often, it's just 1 word or character off from…

Another kind soul who understands it's their responsibility to be on top of their finances.

I have no interest in supporting users linked to a nulled site, even if you intend to buy our software (only because the version you seek is not available "nulled"). Never thought I'd have to say this to a pre-sale request but here we are!

I appreciate this small change @DevelopWoo! Finally, the menu is a bit more modern in the backend.😊

My tracker reports a lot less traffic from Google Ads than Google itself reports. So either everyone is using Brave or Google is inflating numbers. 🙃

Average response time this year is 2 hours 32 minutes. 🤯 I think FreeScout doesn't count weekends? Because that seems low, even if we strive for this metric.😊