We’ve all heard the same talks: a very calm, hip developer talks about working on or releasing some cool project. They’re bold, confident, and appear to have everything under control. If you’re like me, you don’t feel that way at all. You’re terrified of letting anyone else see what you’re working on. You assume that everyone is smarter than you, and that you have no business trying to start a business.

Let’s strip away the false pretenses and talk frank about how we really feel. Releasing a plugin to the public can be a very scary prospect. Charging people for the privilege of using your code is even scarier. When do you release? How often do you update? Will you make any money? If your plugin is open source, how do you get people to commit to your project?

Most of the time, it feels like you’re building a plane in mid-flight. I speak from experience. In two years, our main product, Ninja Forms, has now been downloaded nearly 350,000 times, and we average $28,000 a month in Ninja Forms extension sales. I think anyone would say that’s pretty successful. From the outside, it might seem like we have everything together and that we’ve got it all figured out. It’s taken two years to get here, and trust me, we’ve made plenty of mistakes.

In this talk, we’ll have an open discuss about the pitfalls of managing and supporting a premium WordPress plugin when your user-base is growing very quickly. Some points we’ll cover: Overcoming the fear of releasing a plugin. Our experiences with support. Tales from a terrible update. Leading a group of open-source committers.