I started with the typical path into 9-5 employment. After studying Maths at University I went into a role in finance and qualified as an Actuary working with FTSE 100 companies to help manage their pension risk.

It wasn’t my passion though, and in 2011 after handing in my notice at PwC – I started side projects online. The goal was to earn a living and I started by writing an ebook on 101 tips to get worse at call of duty. It went on to sell over $3,000 and I was hooked.

I then moved into working insurance, alongside creating my first WordPress website to become a social e-bookstore (now shutdown). I learned WordPress and hired a freelancer to create a plugin for me on the back of an author wanting a way to put up a gallery of book covers for an upcoming book and have the community like, share and comment on them “Like how Facebook does it”.

I couldn’t afford the freelance rate at the time, so we partnered up and released Social Gallery on CodeCanyon. I handled support, marketing and customer acquisition. All while learning to develop plugins on the side. Social Gallery went on to make over $200k in sales in its lifetime.

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Fast-forward to 2013. I launched Epic Plugins and a year later Epic Themes and grew a portfolio of digital products reaching 30 plugins and 5 themes. I spent the next couple of years trying to muster up the courage to leave my 9-5 and even posted up on Quora about it here.

It took me a few months longer, but I eventually made the jump in 2016 and I quit my 9-5. Reading back the comments this one stood out:

Huge congrats. You are definitely on to something. Your level of engagement is a refreshing change for a market of folks looking to make a quick buck and leave their customers hanging. I am by no means an easy customer I would imagine and the support you have given me while I build my site has been amazing and really helped.

I very much look forward to seeing what you do full time if this has just been part time.

Focussing full time allowed me to co-found Zero BS CRM which eclipsed all of my other 30 plugins and themes and grew into a sustainable business. Automattic agreed and acquired Zero BS CRM in 2019 which went on to become Jetpack CRM.

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I’ve now been at Automattic almost 5 years. It’s been a crazy ride and I’ve been part of the Jetpack division since July 2020 when we re-branded ZBS CRM as Jetpack CRM. You can read my Jetpack interview here.

I’ve worked on different products within Jetpack and spent time on different teams. I’ve helped Jetpack Boost scale, integrate WP Super Cache to Jetpack and worked on Akismet‘s WordPress.org rankings. I’ve also launched both Jetpack Newsletter and Jetpack Creator as recent as November 2023.

Content Creation and Audience building is my passion.

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