plugin.fm Freemius

Jason Cohen is the founder of the renowned WordPress hosting company WP Engine. His background in building and scaling successful businesses means he’s not only a serial entrepreneur but also an investor and startup mentor. His journey as a founder includes various undertakings — including co-founding Smart Bear Software — which makes him an expert in growing businesses and organizations.

Joost de Valk quite literally changed the WordPress SEO landscape with his company Yoast. What started as a small bootstrapped product grew into a business empire with 140 employees and over 12 million websites using the product… And incredibly, this was just the beginning of Joost’s journey. In 2021, Joost and his wife Marieke van de Rakt exited Yoast, which set him on a new, exciting path into the world of investing with Emilia Capital, a fund he started with Marieke.

Amir Helzer is the founder of OnTheGoSystems, the company behind WPML, a leading multilingual plugin used by over a million websites. Originally, WPML was a freemium plugin, but due to unfortunate — even somewhat controversial — circumstances, Amir and his team decided to make the product paid only. This business model shift would end up transforming his company for the better.

Justin Ferriman is the founder and former CEO of LearnDash, a platform that he grew from a simple blog to one of the leading solutions in the LMS space through a mixture of aggressive marketing and clever ‘guerilla’ tactics that helped him take on bigger competitors. He’s a non-technical founder who approaches business with a competitive streak that’s seen him go from underdog to top dog in the eLearning industry.

Arvid Kahl co-founded FeedBack Panda, which he bootstrapped and later sold for a life-changing amount. He is also a published author and writes extensively about entrepreneurship and bootstrapping. On top of this, Arvid also hosts a weekly podcast called ‘The Bootstrapped Founder’. In this episode, he shares his insights about how software product founders can balance transparency and business strategy as well as why building in public can be life-changing.

Chris Badgett is the co-founder and CEO of LifterLMS, a popular LMS (learning management system) plugin for creating, launching, and scaling courses. So far, LifterLMS has helped achieve 8 million+ enrollments and 12 million+ completed courses and lessons. Chris is rightfully regarded as one of the leading voices in open-source eLearning and educational technology and discusses how software product creators can benefit from marketing through course creation.