The concept is still alive, but is taking longer than most would want. I realize that you are aware of the interim solution of the BuddyPress Job group. I suggest contacting Andy and also John James Jacoby to ask them the status of Andy’s original initiative.

We’re inundated with BP projects, and would love to increase our team (by hiring project freelancers) to cope with the workload.

@jeff – you referred to a post of Andy’s on this matter, but that seems dead in the water

Thanks for your comments!

In other words, I get paid for being awesome.

Lol! That is good stuff!

I appreciate, and agree, with your assessment. My main, full-time focus is on building out a new web-based platform which will create value. I’ll be creating value for others through the service, and creating value for myself through the company that I’m building. But, while I’m working on that, I need a trickle of cash flow to help pay the bills as I burn through cash in my self-funded startup.

The 20% of my time that I’ve donated to the BuddyPress community this past year was worthwhile. I did it for no other reason than what you suggest: to “just write some code; have fun; and meet some interesting people.

But, as I focus more on my startup, it occurred to me that it would be nice if some of the effort I put into the BP community could actually help underwrite my efforts. We can’t all work for free. I have no interest nor intention to build a career out of WordPress consulting.

I bill for my experience. I bill for my ideas. I bill for the strategy I bring to the table, and the solid track record I’ve built up. In other words, I get paid for being awesome.

All blustering aside… I blogged about this recently (http://j.mp/2S3ObS) and the main point is this: Don’t trade your time for money. That’s what *employees* do.

Do what you love. Care about your craft. Make cool things. But above all, create value. The rest is easy.

So instead of worrying about how to spin up a business model around writing open source code, just write some! (Or don’t). But if it has become tedious and the only way to temper that feeling is with some hard cash your going about it the wrong way and will end up unhappy. Creating value however, has both tangible and non-tangible rewards. After that its just process management and living a kick ass life following your bliss from project to project.

One possibility to seamlessly, and hopefully painlessly, add premium features to a plugin is via a separate file. Just set a constant based on the existence of that file. If a user has that file, that means they purchased the premium version. Premium functions will only fire if the constant is true.

Of course, as the plugin must be GPLed, other users could legally make that premium file available to others for free. But, as Mike states just below, the real differentiating factor could be the level and type of support offered to basic versus premium users.

It would be simple enough to keep a list of registered premium plugin users—those who directly paid for your premium plugin. Then, whenever a support issue pops up pertaining to the premium features, you check to see if that person actually paid for your premium plugin.

Let’s say you have an excellent plugin, like Jeffs privacy plugin. Creating two versions requires quite a lot more development time, and also could introduce more bugs. That to me seems like a slippery slope to having to work on code even more, even if it is balanced by some level of income. Plus, for some of my plugins at least, it’s actually quite hard to separate the core idea of the code from the extra features that would appear in a premium version. It’s not impossible, and as I’ve said before I’m not at the level of the JJJ’s, Andy P’s and Jeff S’s of this world.

I’ve been blessed by some donations from the Wordpress community, but nowhere near enough to even make a dent in any of the bills that keep coming through the door. As I hinted at before, I’m reliant on my day job to keep my head above water. And I’m indebted to my long-suffering wife who allows me many hours of Wordpress hacking, without too many complaints. But to be honest I can’t maintain this for ever.

The best solution I’ve found personally was mentioned by someone above, and that’s to do freelance consulting work with a great client who then allows the work (or at least part of it) to be released to the community. But, as everyone knows, those clients are hard to come across.

Thanks for your thoughts. Welcome back from the snowy midwest!

I think what you and a few others have outlined here is the most practical, and already practiced, route to earning a living (or part of it) via WordPress / BuddyPress. The two-tiered, basic and premium plugin path is also an option with which only a few developers have had success. Although, that may be starting to change.

Although the ultimate goal of this exercise is to find that happy medium where BuddyPress developers can make a good living while give back to the community, my personal goal is different. I already give quite a bit back to the community. I’m looking for ways to earn a decent cash flow without having to resort to consulting.

As I’ve said in a few places in this post. My primary focus is on a big project. Building the technology platform for my new company takes a lot of time. I do not have any spare time left in the day.

Unfortunately, startups do not throw off cash to their owners—at least initially. Since my startup is self-funded at this stage, that means I’m burning up cash, not making it. I’m trying to see if there’s a way that BuddyPress can give my a reasonable cash flow. If not, then either my donated time in the BuddyPress forums will have to go, or my plugin development work will have to cease.

I’m sure my situation is rather unique. I posed this question above:

Do I really have to become a consultant again if I am to make a living off of my WordPress work? I think that is a ridiculous expectation.

I do plan to try the two-tiered plugin path. Perhaps the results will be pleasantly surprising. But it also could be that the answer to my question is that developers in my situation are not likely to find a career (or even part of their career) within the WordPress ecosystem. I should simply look at my time as a donation and not expect anything more.

Fact is that Joe Client probably doesn’t care what tools you use to do the job. They do care that you’re responsible and competent enough to pick those tools yourself and deliver to them what they asked you for when they asked for it.

I think there’s a few different ways that developers can make money specifically using BuddyPress, and they’re probably not profound or new to anyone. There’s a little algebra between how much money you want to make, how much work you want to do, and how much exposure to clients that you want to have, and I think it’s up to each developer to fill in those variables and do that math for themselves. Algebra + Economics = Bleh in my opinion, but it helps to think about it in those terms to quantify a return on your time.

If you want your exposure to clients to be minimal, but you want to maximize the value of your time, then you need to hit-up Advertising and P.R. agencies for social networking development work, and convince them you can complete the tasks using custom BuddyPress components that you create, hopefully still under the GPL so you can reuse the code later. This means you’ll probably be doing almost all the dev work, from installation to testing to deciding it’s time to roll out.

If you don’t mind having clients and interacting with them, then you go the freelance route. You can make any amount of money this way, since you’re responsible for making sure your time is as valuable as you can make it. The way you make money this way is through exposure and building an online brand around yourself, your services, and your time. You do this through the support forums, the developer email lists, blogs, twitter, etc… Since BuddyPress is based on WordPress, involvement in the WordPress community is essential also. My opinion here is a little bias, but I think this is the most rewarding way to make money with BuddyPress. Clients come and go, and if you’re as good as you say and your clients are happy, then hopefully more clients will come and go at an exponential rate. Once you’ve got a good amount of clients, then you charge more since your available time is now more valuable. The rest is just boring ol’ economics.

Lastly, if you don’t want to put in long hours, and you want your exposure to clients to be minimal, but still want to try and maximize the value of your work, then you need to produce code that is of some kind of epic value. I.E. make a complete shopping cart solution that works with BuddyPress, or make some kind of insane niche type component that maybe doesn’t fit for the inclusion into the core but still fills a need in the market place. People will be forced to buy your code and use it, because it’s just so darn awesome they want to pay you for it.

If none of those sound like good ideas, and if you’re not prepared to bend WordPress and/or BuddyPress to fit those clients, then you’re probably going to miss out on the action.

Andy said:

I’m certainly a believer that for the system to work, developers have to see open source both as a way to give back, and make a good living.

…and I think that’s really what I think about the most. You get what you give and you really have to believe in the system and embrace the culture around it. If you spend countless hours using and learning BuddyPress, then eventually that recognition can turn into client recommendations, and people will start wanting to pay you for your time.

For me personally, I’m very blessed right now to have had super awesome clients, and because of them I’ve been able to work on the core of something that I really enjoy and believe to be revolutionary. It’s meant that some days I miss dinner with the family, and other days are 20 hour work days with a few cat naps waiting for files to transfer, but every career has give and take, and making a career out of WordPress/BuddyPress development is no different.

Specifically, something that’s worked really well for me is when I’m contacted by a potential client, I always offer them free support in the buddypress.org forums first. If they’re okay asking questions publicly and letting me answer those questions when I’ve got a free moment, or letting other people potentially help them and waiting for me to chime in, that’s great because it will potentially help other people with the same issue, and it’s impossible to put a price on real education. But, if they want my dedicated time and attention, we’ll talk about pricing privately, because it takes me away from helping others and ultimately they’re paying me for their comfort and the reliability of having that open channel of communication whenever they need it.

Now, I may have totally missed the point of this discussion, so kick me if I’m off track, but I think this post comes from the direction that there’s a few dedicated developers that are asking themselves “what do I do next” or “how do I monetize this special skill.” Without too much philosophy involved, I think the answer really is just a life lesson… The only really things stopping anyone from mastering something are time, timing, and practice, and having the correct balance of those is critical. John Lennon wasn’t born with the ability to play the guitar, and he wasn’t the best at it either, but time, timing, and honing his skills helped the Beatles become one of (if not the most) influential and most recognized bands in history. Comedians sometimes practice their skits hundreds of times so they can get the timing of their jokes perfect, but hopefully when they’re on stage it doesn’t sound scripted at all… and no one starts out by juggling chainsaws. Maybe lumberjack-jugglers do? No idea…

Thoughts?

Thanks for your thoughts. I believe Andy is already putting together a list just like your detail above. http://buddypress.org/forums/topic/if-you-offer-buddypress-services-read-this#post-32104 I fully support this concept and hope that it leads to sufficient paid work for those developers who wish to offer services.

For me, this approach is not an option. I do not have the time to accept consulting gigs nor do I wish to build a consulting business. I’ve been there before, had good success, and sold out just before the Internet bubble.

If I produced a plugin that was picked up in the core, I wouldn’t expect for every hour of my time to be paid at my current billable rate but a reasonable monetary “thanks” would be nice. Especially for something like Jeff’s privacy component which will definitely increase the BP user base.

If the component is valuable enough to be included in the core then obviously the work to produce it was also valuable.

What would be nice is to have a directory of developers who are available on a ‘work-for-hire’ basis so that people like me know who I can potentially outsource some of the more advanced level development work to. For me, it’s nice to have 3-4 different names of people who are available, because not everyone is going to be available at the time I need them to be. I am more than happy to share the wealth when it comes to custom projects – particularly because my focus is mainly on design, rather than custom programming, and many of my clients are willing to pay good money for custom plugin development.

Right now, I have a few names of folks that I contact regularly – but those contacts are people that I’ve connected with through networking, WordCamps, etc – - but like Automattic has a listing of consultants for WordPress, would it possibly be cool for BuddyPress.Org to maintain a listing of consultants who specialize in BuddyPress? Giving exposure to the talented devs who are willing to put themselves up for hire for custom client work is always a good way to help make some money on the side, while the free development work keeps their exposure up as a talented developer who is more than capable of creating new (plugin) features that users want.

Great post, Jeff – - and good feedback so far. Happy new year!

I don’t recall where I saw this before but some “free” webapp used to have a “feature bounty”. Community members could propose features they required and they would commit $x to the feature. Other community members could also sign-up for the finished product and commit their own $x. A developer could indicate at any point that they were willing to implement the feature and collect payment once delivered.

There are many issues with that though – How do you collect the money up front (so no one backs out or doesn’t pay)? How do you ensure the final product is acceptable? Should the final product be publicly released or only to those who paid for it’s development? What about future support/bug fixes? etc. etc.

Jeff – who is full of ideas but has no time to implement them.

If you search, there are a number of WP plugins already implemented that allow a site to share revenue between multiple authors. This is sort of what you’d want to do but as a plugin provider, you’d need some sort of way to ensure that the plugin user isn’t just disabling your share of the revenue. Obviously, once a user has your plugin code, they can modify it to remove the revenue sharing aspect. That’s the part that is going to be difficult to implement.

Of course, I’m assuming you want to force this revenue sharing model as opposed to allowing the user to donate a percentage. Any form of donation runs into the points you’ve already mentioned.

Thanks for your comments. I appreciate your perspective as a hobby BuddyPress user. I agree that most current BP users probably fall into that category.

Your idea about Google AdSense sharing is interesting. Do you have a link to a specific AdSense page that describes how this can be implemented?