WooCommerce is celebrating 10 years since WooThemes launched the first iteration of the WooCommerce plugin. Paul Maiorana, WooCommerce’s current CEO, covered a few high highlights of the plugin’s rising popularity over the years in his anniversary post. After 16 months in the wild, WooCommerce had been downloaded 500,000 times and passed the 1 million downloads milestone just 137 days later. In 2014, the night before the very first WooConf, the plugin celebrated passing 5 million downloads. It was acquired by Automattic in 2015 in a deal rumored to be more than $20 million.
WooCommerce’s anniversary post, which glossed over its checkered origin story, reignited some of the controversy surrounding the Jigoshop fork. While the post mentions that WooThemes hired two Jigoshop developers “to create a dedicated eCommerce plugin called WooCommerce,” it neglected to mention that the initial version was actually a fork of Jigoshop. WooThemes had convinced Mike Jolley and Jay Koster to fork the work they had done for their previous employer, Jigowatt, after failing to make a deal with the Jigowatt team.
In a post titled “Our forking views,” the remaining Jigoshop team shed some light on what transpired privately before WooThemes announced its fork:
Woo’s bid to buy out the Jigoshop project grossly undervalued the business and didn’t come close to covering our initial development costs, not forgetting the planning, time and effort both the Jigowatt team and community put into the project.
Woo then made to an offer to ‘collaborate’ which led to their decision to fork Jigoshop. What hasn’t been made public is that collaboration offer included conditions which would have given WooThemes full strategic control over the direction and development of the Jigoshop project in the future.
WooThemes was well within its rights to fork the open source Jigoshop code, but convincing some of its key developers to leave the project essentially forked Jigoshop out of its momentum and fractured its user base. It’s clear from the reactions to the WP Candy news post on the topic that many people in the community frowned upon this move at the time. It was one of the most eviscerating, real-world applications of the GPL in the earliest days of WordPress product businesses.
Mike Jolley was interviewed earlier this year by HollerWP. When asked about the Jigoshop fork he said that his job at Jigowatt was 90% client work on e-commerce sites, and “Jigoshop felt more like a side-hustle than anything.” He found it draining to stay on top of both the client work and the open source project. Jigowatt had offered him no shares or vested interest beyond his salary. Jolley said his move to WooThemes “was inevitable” and that he was grateful to continue working on a project that he was passionate about.
In a post titled Lessons learned from the Jigoshop – WooCommerce fiasco, Delicious Brains founder and CEO Brad Touesnard said he agreed Jigowatt had received “a stiff kick in the crotch courtesy of WooThemes,” due to what he perceived to be a fatal error on Jigowatt’s part:
If you are a company with an open source project gaining momentum, your core developers absolutely must have a vested interest in your company. And not 1%. It has to be a good chunk of the pie. Enough that the developers feel your company is also their company. Then if another company comes along to hire them, the developer is much more likely to tell them, “Buy the company or take a hike.”
I think the whole situation would have been different if Mike and Jay owned a piece of the pie and had a vested interest in Jigowatt. In such a case, they most likely would not have entertained employment at WooThemes unless it was part of a buyout deal.
These events have almost faded from memory for most casual observers after 10 years, but not for those of us who were there to watch it happen. Many of these websites referenced are no longer online but they are available via the Internet Archive.
In 2021, WooCommerce is more of a force than ever before, installed on more than 5 million websites. Merchants around the world are building thriving, profitable businesses on top of WooCommerce and its diverse ecosystem of extensions. Ten years later, it appears the founding partners of Jigowatt have largely moved past the controversy and are now building all of their e-commerce websites with WooCommerce.
“A lot has happened over the past 10 years, and we’ve come a long way from our humble beginnings,” Paul Maiorana said in the anniversary post. The subsequent “trip down memory lane” omits the messy details of forking Jigoshop. The Jigoshop.com website has now disappeared from the web, with the exception of pages preserved through the Internet Archive. Before the rest of these historical references disappear, it’s good to remember that all the earliest contributors to the Jigoshop open source project were also part of WooCommerce’s “humble beginnings,” even if not formally recognized by the e-commerce powerhouse that benefits from their contributions today.
Nick Diego released the Icon Block plugin last week. Unlike similar blocks that are available, it does not rely on a third-party library. Instead, it caters to the developer and DIY crowd, allowing them to add any SVG directly to the editor.
Diego is the author of the Block Visibility plugin, which is just a little over a year old and shaping up to be the best project in the space. Over the summer, he expanded it with a pro version that adds value with more niche options. When it comes to the block editor, he has thus far shown a willingness to find creative solutions to problems with a focus on a well-rounded user experience. His latest plugin seems to be no different.
Piecing together the pricing page for Block Visibility is what pushed him to create Icon Block. He had a massive feature list and was hand-coding the icons via the HTML block.
Block Visibility pricing table.
“I threw this little block together this week after becoming very annoyed at using HTML blocks for SVG icons (and not wanting to use a block library),” said Diego. “My goal was to build a simple SVG icon block using basically all native WP components. And as more functionality is added to core (margin, responsive controls, etc.), I will add them to the block.”
The result was a success. It checks a lot of boxes for such an icon solution that leans into the WordPress block system.
At its core, it allows end-users to copy and paste any SVG code into a text field and have it render in the editor and on the front end.
Adding a basic icon.
However, it does not stop there. It uses a range of core components and block-supported features to round out the solution. It supports must-have features like colors and alignment. Users can adjust the icon size, padding, and the border-radius while linking it to any URL.
One feature I want to see tacked on is a set of border style, width, and color controls. That is more of a nice-to-have extra than a priority.
Adjusting the icon’s colors, size, spacing, and border-radius.
Supporting core components would have been fine for a launch, but Diego took that extra step and added custom functionality. The Icon block has a “rotate” button that allows users to turn the icon in 90° increments. It also has buttons for flipping the icon horizontally and vertically.
There are tons of use cases for such icon plugins in the WordPress editor. One of the more common scenarios is a simple set of boxes with a graphic at the top.
Boxes with icons.
With Icon Block, this is simple enough to do by using the Columns block, dropping in custom icons, and customizing them. However, there is so much more that is possible.
The missing pieces are on WordPress’s end. Currently, there are not many robust solutions for building horizontal layouts. It makes it tough to align icons next to text.
The recently-added Row variation on the Group block shows promise. The experience is a bit fussy, but it is possible to place the Icon block next to a Paragraph, as shown in the following screenshot. I built a quick pricing table with check icons.
Pricing columns with icon list.
There is no way to control the spacing between items in each row from the interface yet. I wanted my icons a bit closer to the text.
The other issue is that this should be a list. There is no reason to repurpose other blocks to build the layout. However, the List block does not allow users to nest blocks.
These are not issues of the Icon Block plugin. It just shows a reasonably common use case that WordPress should make possible. This would make these types of plugins far more powerful.
There is support for an icon block to land in the Gutenberg plugin and, eventually, make it to WordPress. Gutenberg Project Lead Matías Ventura opened a ticket in 2019 to explore the idea of allowing users to insert SVGs directly into the editor. If this ever made it in, it would more likely be a visual selector that does not allow end-users to add custom code. Diego’s block might still exist as an alternative solution with more flexibility in that case.
While the plugin could serve as a perfect solution in its current form to a large share of the WordPress community, Diego has plans for improving it. He is considering adding an icon selector for users who do not want to add SVG code. By default, this would show the built-in WordPress icons. However, he also has plans to allow third-party developers to extend it with custom “icon packs.”
HubSpot, a company that provides inbound marketing, sales, and customer service solutions, has announced an upgrade to the company’s API that supports its HubDB Product. This third version of the API adds support for both id and name in the URL paths and adds new PATCH endpoints.
Considering the pest control business is currently valued at a staggering $16.9 billion, starting a pest control business certainly has the potential to ensure a healthy income.
But like any other business, you have to consider several factors to put your company on the fast track to success.
Below, I’ll give you a step-by-step rundown—right from determining the kind of services to provide to building your brand to registering your business—of how to start a pest control business, sans the stress.
The Easy Parts of Starting a Pest Control Business
The obvious benefits of starting a pest control business are being your own boss and having a flexible schedule.
You can start small, control all aspects of the business, and put in as much time as you would like. You also have a unique ability to control how little or how much you want to work, which gives you the freedom to decide which projects you want to take on.
Moreover, the cost to start a pest control business is about $10,000, which is significantly lower than other businesses.
Registering and maintaining your business is also easier. You can hire a business formation service to sort out and file the required paperwork, secure an EIN, among other necessary tasks. This will allow you to focus on the more important aspects of running and growing your business.
LegalNature, for one, is an excellent online legal service that manages business formation documents in addition to a host of other services, such as EIN, articles of amendment, and registered agent services.
The Difficult Parts of Starting a Pest Control Business
The pest control industry is highly competitive. People can see the scope and pros, and they all want a piece of the pie.
You need to identify and establish your USP over your competitors. But to do so, you have to be really thorough in analyzing the market and understanding where the demand lies. Mistakes will cost you dearly, and you may not end up with enough clients–right away or at all.
Then there’s also the longer sales process and inconsistent workload.
Hiring a pest control company is a significant time and money investment for the customer. This makes them more cautious when choosing companies. To ensure they hire you, you have to plan and predict a longer conversion funnel and nurture a good relationship with potential customers.
Additionally, be prepared for the inconsistent workload and how it’ll make your income less stable. You should send boundaries and budget accordingly based on the amount of work you plan to have.
Step 1: Narrow Down Your Pest Control Services
The pest control business is surprisingly comprehensive. You can provide a long list of pest control services and products to your target market, but the main question is: which services would you choose?
Determine Which Pest Control Services to Provide
You have to narrow down your focus to become a recognizable expert in one area.
Here’s a list of pest control services you can consider:
Residential, commercial—maybe both.
One-time services
Longer-term contracts
Fumigation
Trapping “varmints” (wild mammals such as raccoons, weasels, and coyotes)
Baiting
Lawn services
Attic and crawl space treatments
Termite control
Removal of nests
Rodent control
Mosquito control
Fleas and ticks
Bed bugs
The best call here is to think about the area you live in and the pest control problems prevalent there. Floridians, for instance, are always battling ants. Or, if you see many wood-framed houses in your area, you can consider offering termite control.
After zeroing on a pest control unit, you can carry out other essential business tasks, such as maintaining an inventory of necessary products and equipment, marketing your services, and hiring employees.
Step 2: Plan Your Pest Control Business
Having a well-drafted business plan improves your chances of being a successful entrepreneur. It’ll help you map out the specifics, as well as uncover any gaps and unknowns.
But before you can develop a plan, you’ll need to figure out some crucial pointers. Let’s take a look.
Know Your Costs and Expenses
Starting a pest control business involves a myriad of expenses, including equipment cost, insurance, rent, office cost, and so on. You’ll also have to pay licensing and registration fees and insurance.
Consider all the above expenses to determine an accurate budget for your business. This will ensure you don’t end up going overboard.
Define Your Target Market
Next, think about the requirements of your ideal client. Use this to develop a persona around your clients—who they are, what they need, and why they need it.
In this case, your ideal customer is a property owner who owns a lot of buildings. Think rental property owners, businessmen who own commercial properties, government agencies, apartment complexes, and so on.
While targeting individuals who own diminutive buildings is an option, you can charge a higher rate from people who own large properties for additional square footage.
Figure Out Your Pricing Structure
Deciding how much you’ll charge for your services is a key consideration when starting out.
The best way to get an idea of competitive prices is by conducting market research in your area. But to give you an idea, pest control businesses usually operate with a subscription model, where users pay a monthly or quarterly fee to avail of the services.
If this sounds appealing, you should think about how you’ll handle the recurring transactions.
Generally, creating a simplified user experience increases the odds of getting paid quickly and efficiently after sending an invoice. It’s why setting up a website is your best option for quick and secure payment collection.
Create Your Business Plan
A business plan is an outline of how you intend to run your business. It’s a formal document that includes the following information:
The legal structure of your business (partnership, limited liability company, proprietorship)
How do you plan on generating revenue
An overview of your assets and liabilities
An official plan for hiring employees
Your long-term goals and revenue projections
Besides keeping everyone on track, a business plan also comes in handy to secure small business loans or financing. Be sure to prepare a straightforward plan that highlights your biggest goals, challenges, and strengths.
Step 3: Build a Brand for Your Pest Control Business
Your brand is your company’s identity. It’s how your target audience will know you and differentiate your company from your competitors.
But there’s a catch: choosing your brand elements can be surprisingly tedious. I say this from experience.
It’s why I recommend developing your value proposition. Doing this will give you a better idea about what you envision for your company, which, in turn, will make branding decision-making easier. Here’s how to get started.
Develop Your Value Proposition
Customers always want the best bang for their buck, which is why they compare different pest control services. You have to know what sets your services apart from the pack.
To create your unique value or selling proposition, you can consider the following questions:
What unique service to offer that others don’t?
How do I solve customers’ pain points in a way that promotes satisfaction?
What makes my company’s customer service superior to my competitors?
Do my customers receive any intangible value from working with my company? If yes, what?
For instance, your value proposition could be that your company offers a complimentary follow-up appointment after the first on-site pest control visit. This could be particularly appealing to customers worried about pricing and results.
The idea is to lock in their attention, encouraging them to give your services a try.
Build Your Brand
At this stage, you already established the foundation. Next, it’s time to customize your brand.
As mentioned, your brand includes all recognizable characteristics that allow your customers to identify you. Your business name, logo, color scheme, and font—maybe even a tagline—are all a part of your brand.
Consider this: what do you want customers to see I know when they first interact with your company? You can clarify processes and make decisions based on your answer down the line.
Once you’ve picked out your company name, logo, and colors, make sure you use your brand image on everything—right from your website to vehicles to social media.
Step 4: Sort Out Your Licensing, Registration, and Insurance Requirements
Pest control is a regulated business, regardless of the state you operate in. You must check with your state laws before starting your business to stay on top of the various federal, state, and county licensing registration and certification processes.
Form a Legal Entity
You need to register your pest control business before taking on clients.
First and foremost, you have to choose a business structure. Your options include the sole proprietorship, partnership, LLC, and Corporation. If you choose to be an LLC or corporation, you won’t be held personally liable for your business‘s debts.
To operate legally, you’re required to file the appropriate legal documentation or paperwork and pay administrative fees.
Being the owner of a pest control business, you’ll have to complete several federal, state, and county processes. After all, you’re dealing with strong and potentially dangerous chemicals that usually require some red tape.
Here’s an excerpt from the EPA website:
Federal law requires any person who applies or supervises the use of restricted use pesticides (RUPs) to be certified in accordance with EPA regulations and state, territorial and tribal laws. Pesticide applicators must know how to apply RUPs properly and effectively.
Many states have made it necessary for all commercial applications to be certified—not just those using RUPs.
Therefore, you should check your state law on the legal requirements. Another good source to find certification courses is through your state’s Department of Agriculture (DoA).
Additionally, you should set up your business officially with the IRS. This is an important step to claim your business name, open bank accounts, and file business taxes.
Get Your Insurance
Ever thought about what you’d do if you stained an area with chemicals? Or if you damage a client’s property on the job? Maybe miss something that may end up in a lawsuit?
I highly recommend purchasing insurance for your pest control business. With an insurance backup, you won’t have to pay everything out of your pocket, keeping your business’s finances stable.
You’ll probably hire a few employees and buy vehicles to visit client sites along the way, so it would be worth looking into workers‘ compensation and auto insurance.
Be very thorough when researching your insurance options. Always take extra initiative to ensure you choose the path that’s right for you.
Step 5: Kickstart Your Pest Control Business
At this stage, you can finally focus on starting your business.
You have to buy the required materials and equipment, find clients, and work on a marketing strategy that gets potential clients to come to you.
Buy the Right Pest Control Equipment and Materials
Once your business is established, you’ll have to buy pest control equipment for your daily operations. Some of the more important purchases you need to make are:
Vehicles and work trucks for your supplies and equipment
Chemicals and pesticides
Uniforms, including safety gear and protective equipment (gloves, boots, respirators, long sleeves and pants, and so on)
Equipment for physical removal of pests and application of sprays
Business-related services like phone, Wi-Fi, and accounting software
This step will require considerable capital investment. You can get funds with personal assets or through small business loan options.
Find Your Ideal Clients
Think about your ideal client. What are their biggest pain points when it comes to bugs and critters? This will help you understand what kind of pests you’ll have to tackle throughout your area.
You’ve already established your target audience in Step 2. Now, you just need to find people who fit the bill.
Implement an Effective Marketing Strategy
Developing and implementing a marketing strategy is another crucial aspect of starting a pest control business.
You have to figure out how new customers will find you and what you can offer that would appeal to them. Incorporate some of the earlier steps, such as defining your brand and mission, into this part of the process. Here are a few tried-and-tested marketing and advertising tactics that you can consider using:
Local print advertising
Local and organic search engine optimization (SEO)
Digital media
Word-of-mouth referrals
Radio or televised ads
Use your efforts to gain greater insights into your target audience or ideal customer. Research the common pest control needs in your community, ask existing customers for feedback, and provide follow-up details about expected results.
Each marketing touchpoint is an opportunity to gather relevant data about your customer’s unique requirements.
So there you have it—that’s how you start your own pest control business and set yourself up for success. I hope this article will kick you off in the right direction and make your business a whole lot easier.
IoT deals with devices connected with each other, sharing data to achieve autonomous tasks. IoT has brought in home automation, modular furniture, smart complexes, and many new ways to save resources. How awesome would it be to find top trending articles in the IoT Zone in one place so that you can always stay up to date with the latest trends in technology? We dug into Google analytics to find the top 10 most popular IoT articles in August. Let's get started!
10. IoT Messaging Protocols
Want to learn more about the top platforms for IoT messaging protocols? Check out this article with different types of messaging protocols for your app.
One of the development team’s biggest challenges is having a consistent and reproducible environment between team members. The bigger the team or more teams working on the same project codebase, the issue is amplified. Different languages try to manage dependencies using a specifically inbuilt language-specific package manager.
For example, Python is using by de-facto pip as a Python package installer that is using Python Package Index repository. All dependencies can be declared in the requirements.txt file and installed with pip install -r requirements.txt Pypi is limited in managing consistent Python packages and versioning. New Python package managers try to solve the limitation of the pip like Data Science oriented Anaconda or Poetry that bring multiple improvements over pip with dependency management and packaging. Poetry is arguably Python’s most advanced dependency management option today by using a configuration file in toml format and generating project scaffolding, locking dependency in the *.lock file.
I enjoy little frameworks like Tonic. It’s essentially syntactic sugar over <web-components /> to make them feel easier to use. Define a Class, template literal an HTML template, probably some other fancy helpers, and you’ve got a component that doesn’t feel terribly different to something like a React component, except you need no build process or other exotic tooling.
Here’s a Hello World + Counter example:
They have a whole bunch of examples (in a separate repo). You can snag and use them, and they are pretty nice! So that makes Tonic a bit like a design system as well as a web component framework.
To be fair, it’s not that different from Lit, which Google is behind and pushing pretty actively.
I’d say that petite-vue example wins for just how super easy that is to pull of in just declarative HTML. But of course, there are a bunch of other considerations from specific features, syntax, philosophy, and size. Just looking at size, if I pop open the Network tab in DevTools and see the over-the-wire JavaScript for each demo…
Tonic = 5.1 KB
Lit = 12.6 KB
petite-vue = 8.1 KB
They are all basically the same: tiny.
I’ve never actually built anything real in any of them, so I’m not the best to judge one from the other. But they all seem pretty neat to me, particularly because they require no build step.
How awesome would it be to find top trending articles in the Microservices Zone in one place so that you can always stay up to date with the latest trends in technology? We dug into Google analytics to find the top 10 most popular Microservices articles in August. Let's get started!
10. Custom Rate Limiting for Microservices
Enforcing rate limits on microservices is a common requirement in the API economy. In this article, learn how to build a custom rate limiting solution. Follow this step-by-step guide to rate-limiting your microservices.
Mainframes have evolved significantly from being a legacy platform to incorporating some of the best cloud capabilities over the recent years. Mainframes have truly been one of the most reliable platforms for business-critical workloads for several years if not decades. The mainframe has been looked at as a growth area in many recent surveys as below:
90% of survey respondents see the mainframe as a platform for growth with compliance and security, cost optimization, mainframe modernization, data recovery, staffing and skills, and Implement AI / ML technologies as top focus areas (BMC Mainframe Survey 2020)
74% have long-term viability of Mainframe as a strategic platform whereas 66% would never fully replace Mainframes.
The fact that >50% of enterprise application transactions touch the mainframe is a key indicator of its significance and relevance when enterprises are trying to modernize their IT estate. Also, the new generation of Mainframes - IBM Z and LinuxONE Enterprise systems are also being built with capabilities to support modern cloud-native and AI workloads.
Keeping an affiliate program running smoothly is a big task. Inviting new affiliates, keeping track of the referrals they’ve earned, and finally paying everyone you owe can become a management nightmare without the right plugin. In addition, there’s a distinct lack of high-quality affiliate plugins specifically designed for WooCommerce. That is, until Solid Affiliate hit the market. […]
Software product engineering has dramatically evolved in the last decade to accommodate changing shifts in technology and the emergence of Product-as-a-Service. IT contracts are moving away from conventional engagement models towards value-oriented service integration at competitive price points. Organizations need to invest in long-term vendor relationships that guarantee end-to-end project ownership, technology trust, process maturity, agility, scalability, and focused innovation.
In this on-demand webinar, we highlight the newer dimensions of outsourced digital product engineering and how you can form great technology partnerships that deliver enhanced business value. Watch industry veterans dissect the benefits of outsourcing and provide tips on selecting an expert partner with agile, streamlined processes, and well-established security policies.
Sizing is something that seems deceptively simple: take the size of your dataset and the required throughput and divide by the capacity of a node. Easy, isn’t it?
If you’ve ever tried your hand at capacity planning, you know how hard it can be. Even making a rough estimation can be quite challenging. Why is this so hard?
Get ready, because here you won’t find a bunch of irrelevant numbers, paid reviews, and criteria recurring around the web. You won’t waste time registering for and testing dozens of useless CMSs and digging around website developers’ forums.
In this article, you get everything you need for choosing the best website builder of 2021, compiled through several interviews with experienced website developers.
Building quality APIs is essential to facilitating equally quality software. Think about it like this, If a waiter in a restaurant has terrible habits, then the restaurant’s overall quality will be affected. We don’t want that, right? This article will look at some tips and best practices you should remember when building and consuming APIs.
Tips to Remember When Building APIs
Is the API easily readable?
An API should be easy to read as this will make it easy to understand as well. Readability includes API definitions and response messages. Writing readable code also applies to software development as this will make it easier for further development and collaboration with other developers. Use readable response messages that include both error and success messages clearly stated out using standard error codes to give more understanding to the API users.
Agile development is a process of software development in which requirements are defined as user stories, are developed in small increments with the customer or client, and implemented through frequent releases.
There are many benefits to using an agile development process for your project. Collaborating early and often with the client can help to ensure that any potential issues will be identified and addressed before they become problems. If you want to know more about what an agile software development life cycle is and how it works, keep reading!
Developing and designing new MUnit test cases for the same integration flow is an additional effort for the development and delivery team if any changes in the same integration flow come in the existing flows regarding request and response structures. To reduce such a repetitive approach in MuleSoft integrations, a configuration- and parameterized-based approach is introduced in the development.
This blog will help you reproduce downstream API behaviors w.r.t. HTTP error codes using MUnit without real-time integration with the process or system APIs. Developers or architects will not be required to design or develop a new MUnit flow if a new error code is added in future enhancement inflow.
Technology is altering this world with every addition, where one such is robotic process automation. It has gained immense popularity among IT organizations due to its numerous advantages. While many stepped into the RPA circle,...
Keeping an affiliate program running smoothly is a big task. Inviting new affiliates, keeping track of the referrals they’ve earned, and finally paying everyone you owe can become a management nightmare without the right plugin. In addition, there’s a distinct lack of high-quality affiliate plugins specifically designed for WooCommerce. That is, until Solid Affiliate hit the market. […]
