WP Text Ads Blog

WP Text Ads finally went live on 2 May 2007. As I reflected back on the effort that was put into it, I thought it would be interesting to share with you some of the mistakes I made.

1. Be willing to spend on what you need

Back when I embarked on WP Text Ads, I decided to spend no more than $2000 to get WP Text Ads up and running. As a result, I had to think hard about every spending decision I made. Money was spent on domain names and on hosting. I use free software extensively. I went to the library and read as much as I could about sales and marketing.

All these are good practices. Over-spending is a sign that a startup may not make it.

But I went overboard by trying to design the website. Bad mistake. You see, I can design for the web as well as a fish can sing. (See TicTap for proof.) It was a costly mistake in terms of time spent. In the end, I relented and found a really friendly and fantastic guy who designed wptextads.com for me. Tiong Hong saved my life, and he’s now become a good friend too!

Lesson: Be thrifty, not stingy.

2. Manage your time

I work from home, and for the first 2 months of development I did not have a proper work schedule. When I think back, I realise that I spent too much little time working, and too much time being distracted by the TV, the bed and the fridge. Worst of all, I was spending about 12 hours a day ‘working’!

But I’ve managed to instill some discipline into my life now. I wake up at 6.30am to send my brother to school, then I’m back home for 1 hour of Bible study. News and email reading are limited to 30 minutes after that.

One thing that has really helped is the to-do list that determines my work objectives for the day. I feel that it’s kept me on course, and each tick I put beside an item is a cause for a little celebration. It also forces me to differentiate the important things from the not-so-important ones.

Nowadays, I spend about 7 to 8 hours doing solid work. And that gives me time to spend the evenings on other activities.

Lesson: Productive work comes from disciplined time management.

3. Be realistic about features

When I started on WP Text Ads, I decided to give 100% to it. I won’t accept sloppy work from myself and WP Text Ads must delight its users.

I still stand by this committment. But I was not practical enough in the sense that I planned too many features for version 1. A lot of time was spent coding them, and the result was that I spread my resources too thin. I grew more and more dissatisfied with WP Text Ads, thinking that even I wouldn’t use it in its current state.

So I assessed the situation and realised that I had to chop some features and focus on those that really help the blogger run his ads campaigns. Out came a lot of code, and in came renewed efforts to polish existing features.

Version 1 of WP Text Ads can do better, certainly. But I am certainly a lot more satisfied with it now that when it had many more features.

Lesson: Good software take a long time. Be a practical perfectionist.

4. Do not fear the unknown

Fear can be a great motivator. Or in my case, it was a de-motivator.

I work full time on WP Text Ads because I want to give 100%. That meant taking a leap into the unknown, and ‘Boom or Bust’ became my motto.

Despite the enthusiastic start, I began to lose confidence as the challenges increased. On some days, I wondered if they might be increasing exponentially because it seemed insurmountable at times. There were so many things to do - coding, designing, payment integration, website copywriting, setting up the server and more. The doubts crept in and the efforts put into WP Text Ads decreased noticeably. Thankfully, it did not decrease exponentially.

I prayed, read books, spoke to close friends. And the breakthrough came when I ran an almost feature-complete copy of WP Text Ads in WordPress for the first time. I was elated that it actually worked. The last sentence probably tells you how little confidence I had by then. But seeing WP Text Ads live on my PC finally convinced me that at least one person would be delighted with WP Text Ads. Fear was finally defeated! (Note: I’m not known to be a drama-king.)

On hindsight, I realised that fear seized me the wrong way. I let the unknown scare me and forgot that the unknown is the result of what I do today.

Lesson: Use fear to motivate you to act positively and courageously today so that you can be less fearful of tomorrow.

5. Don’t wait too long to release

If I had taken all the advice above earlier, I wouldn’t be giving this one.

WP Text Ads should have been released in March. It was feature complete and mostly debugged. But I had to tweak the website repeatedly, agonizing over the use of words like ‘me’ or ‘we’. I spent a lot of time testing and integrating PayPal into the site although I knew no one would buy the license so soon.

If I focused on what users need instead of what they might need, I could have used the past 2 months getting user feedback. But I shall console myself by saying ‘Better late than never’.

Lesson: Release early, especially if it’s version 1. Users expect something that works, not perfection.

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About the author

I'm Alex Choo and I live in sunny Singapore. I'm also the developer of WP Text Ads, a WordPress plugin that lets bloggers sell ads directly to advertisers so that they pay 0% in commissions and earn 100% in profits.

Feel free to drop me a note anytime you wish. You should also subscribe to the low volume email announcement list for WP Text Ads below.