Szabi Kisded is the developer of YouLive which is a plugin to help video content creators integrate their broadcasts into their WordPress sites. Szabi talks about how they got their start with WordPress, the decision to sell the plugin through CodeCanyon and general advice on developing and promoting WordPress plugins.
How did you get started developing plugins for WordPress?
Hello, I am Szabi from CodeRevolution. This is my story:
I started my career in software testing, at Bitdefender. I evolved into an automation testing engineer from the initial testing position. I worked in C#, knew some C++ and Python. Two and a half years ago there was a major change in my life. My wife and I had a beautiful baby girl. I felt that I need more time with my newly enlarged family so I took a break from work. I stayed at home and taught myself PHP and JavaScript and also learned WordPress (of which I haven’t heard much of before but saw it’s huge potential after checking on it a little).
WordPress plugin development was the last and final step in this learning process. I started releasing plugins and slowly growing the general awareness of the CodeRevolution brand on CodeCanyon. Right now, I am a few steps from becoming an “Elite Author.” I assume that I should get there at the beginning of next year. I must thank all my customers that supported me and my work and helped me on my wonderful journey.
What was the inspiration for YouLive and can you go into some greater detail about what your plugin does and why it is so useful?
I started becoming aware of the fact that the “live video” feature began to appear in some of the largest social networks out there. This feature started to be the new “hot trend” of the current year. Everyone is live, everyone is streaming. I noticed that the social networks themselves promote live videos better than their normally uploaded video counterparts. This also made me think on a new plugin that could broadcast live videos in a way that there was not possible until now.
Long story short, here is the plugin in a nutshell: you embed a video from YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Twitch, Dailymotion or your server’s local storage to the post that you publish on your WordPress blog. The YouLive plugin will broadcast the embedded video to your YouTube channel as a live video. No further action is needed on your part. The plugin can also schedule live events, and broadcast the live content with a delay, to increase viewer engagement. The plugin has some really unique on the market features that are useful to many.
Was there one aspect of YouLive that was particularly difficult or challenging to implement and why was that so?
My plugin uses FFmpeg to create the stream. I learned how to use FFmpeg during the development of this plugin. I found it really useful, but also pretty volatile because its parameters are getting changed in major updates so I have to keep an eye on it and its updates. Its documentation is not the best so I had to dig a lot through the internet to search for the perfect command line for it. Another issue with FFmpeg is that shared hosting services are generally not allowing it to be installed, so (probably) only VPS or dedicated server users can use YouLive.
YouLive is very new so what steps are you taking to get the word out to your target audience?
I am searching for some people to promote my plugin, and benefit from Envato’s affiliate program, which just got moved over to Impact Radius. I promote it on Facebook groups and also try to spread the word about it using Facebook ads (right now they are paused, because I am rethinking my strategy for them).
Why did you go with CodeCanyon as the marketplace to sell YouLive instead of setting up your own storefront? What are the advantages and disadvantages for you in choosing CodeCanyon?
I chose CodeCanyon because of its sheer traffic. Without a bit of advertising for my plugins, clients are continuously flowing onto my sales pages. At the beginning (for an account that just started selling), their commission is pretty high but this changes over time. Commission are lowered by the amount of money sold on the marketplace and start to be pretty acceptable in comparison with the advantages you have for selling here. They handle collecting VAT from the clients, have a nice and tidy dashboard and a cool community. The disadvantages are clear: you don’t have full control over what and how you are selling. But this is a minor disadvantage for me.
What is coming next for both yourself and YouLive in the future?
More cool plugin ideas are in my head and some nice updates for YouLive are queued up among them. Some more unique features are coming for sure!
Regarding non-Envato stuff and ideas, I started creating some online courses on Teachable. I teach my students how to use WordPress and how to create WordPress plugins that are going to sell. I plan to add more courses there. An ebook is planned but only for the next year. Also, next year, I plan to extend the CodeRevolution brand to ThemeForest by creating a WordPress theme and publishing it there.
Ideas are many. We just need health, peace and love for all our wishes to become true.