How I managed to publish my 111th WordPress plugin on CodeCanyon?

Hello, my name is Szabi Kisded, I am 32 years old and I am a WordPress plugin developer.

My story starts in my home town Cluj-Napoca found in Romania, where I finished college at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca. Those years where very delightful, I spent most of the time playing DotA with my 3 roommates. I was an introverted person, I was not interested of many things besides computers and computer games.

During the college years, one of my colleagues convinced me to join a free internship training course that was held at Bitdefender, where I would learn how to analyse computer viruses, the final scope of the course was a full time position as a Malware Researcher. I enjoyed taking part of the training, I found it very interesting, but hard. When the training was finished, we had to take 3 exams, from the things we learned during the course. I failed exam number 2 from 3 and I said goodbye to the internship, but without being sad, because I did not wanted to be hired by them, I was there just for fun. My roommate passed all exams and was hired as a full time Malware Researcher at Bitdefender.

After this, a couple more months passed, while I continued to live my normal life, playing a lot of computer games. But, one day in June 2011, I got a phone call from Bitdefender, asking me if I am interested by a full time Driver Testing Engineer. Initially, I was not sure if I accept, but I was convinced by my roommate to accept. The job that I got fit me as a glove, my colleagues at work were young and cheerful, I really enjoyed working in that team. They convinced me to start going out and as a result I became more sociable and open. Also, I leaned more programming than all the years in college. With time, I was “promoted” to be an “Automation Testing Engineer”, which meant that I was developing my own programs and tools that run automatic tests on multiple computers, using interesting technologies like Intel AMT. I was developing these tools, so I was no longer only a software tester, but also a software developer.

But time when by really fast, I changed a lot and I married the most beautiful woman that I met my whole life. After one year of marriage, our daughter was born, Maya. At this moment in my life I took a huge decision, that later influenced my life a lot and helped me become what I am today. The decision was that I took the 2 year paid parental leave and stayed home with my newborn daughter. My wife also quit her job as a pharmacist and stayed home with me. We were still earning a decent income, because during the paid parental leave, here in Romania, we are paid 85% of our initial salary, for 2 years. My plan was that during these 2 years, I will learn PHP, JavaScript, WordPress and WordPress plugin development and also to publish some plugins on CodeCanyon (at Bitdefender, I worked only in C#, I had no prior contact with PHP or WordPress). I heard of WordPress the first time, from one of my college roommates, who at that time, already had a full time income selling plugins on CodeCanyon.

2 wonderful years followed, when, with the help of my wife, who managed to take care of our newborn daughter almost by herself, I managed to learn WordPress and plugin development, staying in front of the computer about 8+ hours a day.

In April 2018, when I had to return to my work at Bitdefender, instead of going back, I quit my full time job and started work as a full time WordPress plugin developer, publishing my plugins on CodeCanyon and also officializing my business, creating a legal entity for it. This is when CodeRevolution was born.

Initially, I created random plugins for different niches, I did not have a clear business plan. Popup plugins, browser version checker plugins or cookie notice plugins only to mention some of my attempts to release a successful plugin. Luckily, one day, I got an interesting idea: let’s create an affiliate plugin for Envato, that automatically published posts, using the official Envato API (and adding an affiliate tracking parameter to links from generated posts. I consider that this was the moment when I stumbled upon the niche that I target since then: automation plugins (autoblogging, automatic social sharing and other plugins that automize boring and repetitive manual tasks). Thanks to these plugins I managed to stay in business and to earn a full time income from selling my plugins.

I saw that there was a demand in this niche and I started producing multiple plugins that consumed different APIs, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Reddit, Vimeo, NewsAPI and many more. My WordPress plugins, when configured correctly, can import any post from any website. With this occasion I also discovered my passion to use and also develop new APIs.

Let’s put the story on fast forward again and we land at the day when this article was published, when I managed to publish my 111th plugin, in my CodeCanyon portfolio. During this time, my wife got her second college degree, this time in nutrition. Maya is 4 year old now, she is growing very fast. Life continues to move on fast forward. 🙂

I must say that the WordPress developer career I chose is not always as easy as many think, 60+% of my time I manage support requests from my clients and respond to pre-sale questions. For me, this is not the most enjoyable thing to do (I like developing new plugins more than anything – I got file of over 450 WordPress plugin ideas that I cannot wait to put into reality).

During these years, I realized that I love to find problems that people have and solve them with creative solutions, using the plugins I develop. Because of this, people will buy my work, because it will make their life easier. I also started a YouTube channel where I publish tutorials for the plugins I create, vlogs, news, stories and more interesting stuff from my life as a stay at home WordPress plugin developer. Check the “A Day In The Life Of A WordPress Developer” video vlog that I created (embedded at the bottom of this post), I hope you will enjoy it.

I created multiple online courses to help teaching about WordPress, programming, affiliate marketing and more. I also started a membership section of my site, where I publish new tutorials on how to become successful as an online entrepreneur. 

I continue to be a computer nerd, loving new technologies and computer games. But I also like being an entrepreneur, finding passive earning sources, eating healthy and doing calisthenics exercises so I always stay in shape. I love reading books and I really think that watching TV is a real waste of time.

My sales on Envato were not always ascending, but instead with many bumps and ups and downs, joined with many problems caused by the mistakes I made during these years, doing everything on my own. But now, in 2020, in retrospective, I can say that I have a happy life which I enjoy daily living.

I really hope that you will find my story interesting and it will motivate you in pursuing your dreams. I do not consider that I have a “success story” yet, I really like to aim high in life!

Thank you for reading until the end.

Don’t forget to be awesome!
Szabi – CodeRevolution.