The beginning 🧠

Business Tip

Did you know that WPML has a compatibility program for WordPress plugins? WPML is the most popular choice for people trying to make their websites multilingual.

I got countless questions about whether or not my plugins work with WPML, and I even included a little paragraph within each plugin:

The beginning 🧠 1

Last year, I took the time to get in contact with WPML and developed an official integration with Simply Static. 
The process was straightforward, and I got a dedicated developer to answer my questions and help with the integration.

The beginning 🧠 2

What’s the benefit?

  • You get a couple of neat benefits from taking the time to make your plugin officially compatible with WPML
  • a backlink from their plugin directory here: https://wpml.org/plugin/getting mentioned in a blog article + their newsletter
  • include WPML as a trust element on your website + w.org page

The Story

After nine months of usage, a customer asked for a refund of the pro license (single license), and I denied it and referred to my refund policy.
Sounds familiar? Hold on..

After a week, he followed up on the conversations and told me he would ruin my reputation by spamming 1-star reviews in the w.org repository. I immediately contacted the forum moderators (there was already one 1-star review placed then) and forwarded the communication to them, asking for help.

After the usual “You are offering a pro version..we can’t do anything,” they promised to watch the reviews for the next few days. Guess what happened? This customer created 25 fake reviews from the same IP network – they all got banned (including the first one), and the accounts got deactivated.I was glad I warned them so they could act quickly.

End of the story? No!

Salty about his failed attempt to leave tons of negative reviews, he thought the next step should be a DDOS attack on my website.

He told me he had a pretty good hacker and would take my site down (Hollywood was already asking to make a film about the story..).

A couple of hours later (I never responded to him again), I got 3,5 million requests hitting my server for about 24 hours.That could have been a disaster for me if I had a traditional setup, but I’m using Simply Static and hosting my entire website on BunnyCDN.


I temporarily blocked traffic coming from Asia (the source of the attack) and reenabled country by country again after a couple of hours. I think that proves that static sites can help a lot 😁

The end? Almost..

I got 250 e-mails daily, and it was pretty time-consuming to unsubscribe and set up several spam filters.
Was it worth it?

Absolutely not. I should have refunded the order and let him go.
What I don’t get is why the hell he hasn’t disputed the payment via Stripe.

The analysis

Most of you have noticed the recent hype around Chat-GPT, GPT-4, and AI. While I usually don’t recommend jumping on the hype train, I got an idea of where AI is an excellent fit to enhance the feature set further.

A Glossary plugin

A simple, modern, clean glossary plugin is a good idea for someone who wants to start a plugin business.

Why start with it?

  • it’s relatively easy to build
  • it does not rely on external APIs for its core
  • adding Block Editor support is relatively easy

Why a glossary plugin?

There is quite a good demand for such solutions in the WordPress space. I’ve taken a quick look into AHREFS and collected some keywords that are a good starting point:

  • wordpress glossary (50 monthly searches)
  • wordpress encyclopedia (40 monthly searches)
  • wordpress dictionary (10 monthly searches)

While that doesn’t look like much, there are many combinations, phrases, and questions you can quickly expand on.

There are also quite a lot of articles covering the best X plugins for glossaries, where a lot of them don’t exist anymore – perfect for reaching out and offering an alternative for those broken links 😎

Competitors?

That’s one of the best news for that niche.

There are competitors, and some of them are pretty popular, but the top player destroyed his reputation by removing many features from the free version.

Here is a list of the top players:

But you said AI, no?
Yeah! All glossary plugins rely on content. You add a term, and you add a description for that term.
Use the API of CHAT-GPT and automatically generate a description of the term via AI.

Not worth it? 

Take a look at the experiment of Ian Nuttall on Twitter here:

The beginning 🧠 3

That’s it for the first newsletter.
I hope you enjoyed it.

Have a wonderful day, and feel free to discuss everything mentioned with me and others on Twitter, by e-mail, or anywhere you like!