What I Got Wrong Building WordPress Products

Custom Development Was Always Our Strength

Our team has been doing custom WordPress development since 2013. That was always the foundation. Clients came to us, we built what they needed, and the revenue kept the lights on. Custom work was never the problem. It was the part that actually worked.

The problems started when I tried to become a product company alongside being a services company. And made every mistake possible along the way.

Three Years with BuddyBoss Changed How I Thought

I spent about three years working with BuddyBoss as a freelancer. That period was valuable in ways I did not appreciate at the time. Being embedded in a product company, handling support tickets, talking to users every day — I learned what people actually need. Not what developers think they need. What real users struggle with.

Support was where the insights lived. Every ticket was a window into someone’s workflow, their frustrations, their actual use case. I got good at support because I genuinely cared about solving the problem, not just closing the ticket.

That experience planted the seed. I thought: we know what people need, we can build it, so let us create products.

How We Broke the Product Lifecycle

We started Wbcom Designs and launched Reign as our first theme. Then the addons started. And this is where things went sideways.

The pattern was simple and destructive. A custom development client would need a specific feature. We would build it. Then someone on the team would say, “This could be a plugin.” So we would package it, slap a free and pro version on it, and push it to the store. No market research. No customer analysis. No plan for how to reach people who might actually need it.

Every request we received became a product. Every feature gap we noticed during custom work became an addon. The store kept filling up with small, scattered items. None of them big enough to stand on their own. All of them dependent on third-party platforms like BuddyPress and BuddyBoss that kept changing underneath us.

We broke the product lifecycle completely. The way it should work: research who needs this, figure out who the customers are, plan how to reach them, build it, market it, support it, iterate. What we did instead: build it because it felt useful, launch it, move on to the next one.

The Real Cost of Scattered Small Products

At one point, our store had dozens of addons and plugins. Each one needed maintenance. Each one needed compatibility updates when BuddyPress or BuddyBoss released new versions. Each one needed support responses. Each one needed documentation.

The maintenance cost was brutal. We spent more time fixing third-party compatibility issues than building new features. Two to three developers tied up just keeping existing products working with the latest platform updates. That is not product development. That is survival.

And because no single product was big enough to be a standalone success, we never had the resources to properly market any of them. No dedicated landing pages. No onboarding flows. No proper sales funnels. Just a store page with too many items and not enough explanation of why anyone should care.

Meanwhile, custom development kept paying the bills. So the cycle continued. Earn from custom work, spend on maintaining products, never invest enough in making any one product great.

Ignoring What I Was Actually Good At

Here is the part that stings the most. Support was my strongest skill. I knew it from the BuddyBoss years. I knew it from every client interaction. When I was directly involved in support, customers were happy, retention was high, and word-of-mouth brought in new business.

But I was stuck doing custom development to keep the revenue stream alive. The products were left with other developers and support agents. And here is what I did not see soon enough: they were not measuring the right things. No metrics on response time. No tracking of common issues. No action taken when patterns emerged. The support quality dropped and I was too buried in client work to notice until the damage was done.

I should have been the one setting support standards, training the team, building systems around what I knew worked. Instead, I was writing code for client projects because that was where the immediate money came from. Short-term thinking at its worst.

The Moment It Clicked

About two to three years ago, I started stepping back and really looking at what we were doing. Talking to other agency owners, product founders, people who had been in similar situations. Meeting after meeting, conversation after conversation, a pattern became clear.

We were playing the wrong game. Staying busy for less gain. Filling our days with urgent tasks that were not moving us forward. Creating ten small things instead of one great thing. Reacting to every feature request instead of planning a product roadmap.

The realization was not dramatic. It was slow and uncomfortable. We had been doing this for years and the compounding effect of all those small decisions had put us in a position where we were working harder than ever with less to show for it.

But it is never too late. That is the one thing I kept hearing from founders who had been through similar cycles. The moment you see the problem clearly, you can start fixing it.

What We Are Doing Differently Now

The changes are not overnight fixes. They are structural shifts in how we think about our business.

Standalone products, not addons. Every new product we build needs to work on its own. No more tiny addons that only make sense if you already use three other plugins. If it cannot stand alone, it does not get built.

Proper market analysis before building. Who needs this? How big is the market? How do we reach them? What are they currently using? These questions come before any code gets written. Not after launch when it is too late.

Better documentation and after-sale support. Docs are not an afterthought anymore. Every product ships with proper setup guides, use case documentation, and troubleshooting resources. Because I know from experience that good support starts with good docs.

Full marketing planning for each product. Landing pages, content strategy, email sequences, comparison pages, case studies. Marketing is not something we do after the product is done. It is part of the product plan from day one.

Reassembling and organizing the team. The marketing team is being rebuilt with clear roles and accountability. Not everyone does everything. People own specific functions and deliver on specific metrics.

Paused custom development for planning. This was the hardest decision. Custom work was our reliable revenue. But I paused it to focus on planning and execution for the product side. We are going for the long term, not just surviving month to month.

Free plus pro model, done right. We still offer free and pro versions, and some products are pro only. But now the free version has a clear purpose: let people experience the value, then upgrade when they need more. Not just a stripped-down version that frustrates people.

AI Is Changing the Game Too

One thing that makes me optimistic about this transition is how AI is improving our workflow. Documentation that used to take days can be drafted in hours. Support responses are faster and more consistent. Market research that required weeks of manual digging can be done in an afternoon.

But AI also raises the bar. When everyone can build faster, the differentiator becomes quality of features and quality of after-sale service. Which brings it back to what I have always believed: support and service are the moat. AI just makes it easier to deliver both at scale.

Mistakes are not failures. They are lessons disguised as setbacks. Every wrong turn taught me something I could not have learned from a plan that went perfectly. The real failure would have been to keep going without stopping to ask: is this actually working?

If you are a new agency or product founder reading this, know that the scattered phase is almost inevitable. The key is recognizing it early, having the honesty to admit what is not working, and the courage to change direction. It is never too late. Keep learning, keep correcting, keep moving forward.

Keep Learning, Keep Correcting

I am not writing this as someone who figured it all out. I am writing this as someone who spent a decade making mistakes and is finally taking the time to correct course.

The biggest lesson from talking to other founders is that everyone goes through some version of this. The scattered product problem, the maintenance trap, the “busy but not growing” cycle. The ones who break out of it are the ones who stop, look honestly at what is not working, and have the courage to change direction even when the current path feels safe.

Custom development taught us how to build. BuddyBoss taught us what people need. Running Wbcom Designs taught us what happens when you skip the hard parts of product management. Now we are putting all those lessons together.

It is never too late to play the long game. Take the risk. Make the plan. Execute it properly. And keep learning from the people around you who have walked the same road.