In case you’re new here— I run WP Fusion, a WordPress plugin that connects membership sites to CRMs. About 34,658 websites use it, and it generates around $800k/year in revenue.
But here’s the thing: running a WordPress plugin business is lonely as hell.
You’re dealing with support tickets, refund requests, feature demands, compatibility nightmares across thousands of hosting environments, and the constant existential dread that Automattic will roll your entire business model into Core.
Which is why, nearly 5 years ago, I joined what would become one of the most valuable parts of my professional life: the WP Business Mastermind.
The Group
Seven plugin founders. Fortnightly Zoom calls. Daily Slack communication. And a shared understanding that nobody outside this world gets what we’re dealing with.
The roster:
- Me (WP Fusion)
- James Kemp (IconicWP, now WooCommerce Core at Automattic)
- Zack Katz (GravityKit, TrustedLogin)
- Katie Keith (Barn2)
- Jason Coleman (Paid Memberships Pro)
- Chris Badgett (LifterLMS)
- Daniel Iser (Content Control, Popup Maker)
We even travel to WordCamp Asia together. Yeah, we’re those nerds.
James Kemp — The Founder Who Shipped Into Core
If you’ve used Iconic on a WooCommerce store in the last decade, you’ve used James’s work. He built IconicWP into one of the most-installed WooCommerce extension shops in the ecosystem.
Then he and Katie launched Setary—bulk Woo product management—together.
Then Automattic hired him for WooCommerce Core.
That’s the rare WP exit story that doesn’t end with a private equity firm: he got hired into the platform he’d been building on top of for ten years. The plugin founder’s version of being drafted into the league.
What James brings the group: the perspective of someone now building from the inside. When the rest of us are reverse-engineering Automattic’s roadmap from blog posts and GitHub PRs, James can usually tell us—directly, within whatever NDA permits—whether something’s worth panicking about.
(Mostly: it isn’t.)
Zack Katz — The Wildest Resume in WordPress
Zack runs GravityKit—the company powering 40,000+ Gravity Forms-based sites, with a product suite that’s basically the missing UI layer Gravity Forms didn’t ship with itself. They crossed $5.5M in lifetime revenue. They’ve been at it since 2014.
That alone would make him a serious mastermind contributor.
But Zack’s pre-WordPress career is what makes him different from anyone else in the group:
- Started as a music attorney
- Managed talent for Dr. Dre
- Co-founded Beluga Heights—launched Sean Kingston and Jason Derulo
- President & COO of FaZe Clan
- President of BMG North America (500-person team)
- Co-founded Raised in Space with Scooter Braun
- Currently CEO of Fixated, a creator representation company that raised $13M
He runs all of that and GravityKit and TrustedLogin.
What Zack brings the group: a wider aperture. When the rest of us are arguing about plugin license tiers, Zack will casually drop a perspective from running a 500-person record label, and you realize the problem you were stressing about is actually a much smaller version of one he’s already solved.
He also reaches out to talk about AI a lot lately. Most recently from Berlin.
Katie Keith — The One With the Spreadsheet Already Open
Katie runs Barn2, one of the most consistently profitable WordPress plugin businesses in the ecosystem. She also co-founded Setary with James.
She’s the founder who shows up to a Zoom call having already done the homework.
When the rest of us are vibe-checking whether a quarter felt good, Katie’s pulling up an actual spreadsheet:
- New sales: down 17.8% YoY
- Profitability: down 10%
- Cart-to-purchase conversion: here’s exactly where it’s leaking
- 2026 strategy: leaning more into Shopify
That last one is the move that takes guts. Reading the WordPress ecosystem honestly enough to start porting your business to Shopify—while still running a WordPress plugin company—is the kind of clear-eyed thinking that’s easy to admire and hard to actually do.
What Katie brings the group: she keeps us honest about the numbers. Anyone can have a feeling about how their business is doing. Katie shows up with the data, including the data she’d rather not be looking at.
Jason Coleman — The Connector Who’s Also Building an AI Assistant
Jason is CEO of Stranger Studios, which makes Paid Memberships Pro—the membership plugin that’s been quietly powering a non-trivial chunk of WordPress’s subscription economy for over a decade.
He’s also the guy in the group who’s most aggressively in the same AI rabbit hole I am.
While I’m building AutoMem to give agents persistent memory, Jason is building Flint—his own AI assistant, with Discord integration and a memory architecture solving the same people-tracking problems I’ve been chasing. We trade notes. The convergence is uncanny.
But the thing that defines Jason in the group is that he’s a connector. He doesn’t just know everyone—he’s actively introducing them to each other.
A few weeks ago he sent me an email that started “I met someone you have to meet,” with two details: Berlin, loves Radiohead. That introduction turned into one of my best nights in Europe this year.
What Jason brings the group: the assumption that the next person you should know is probably a Slack message away. He acts on it more often than anyone else I know.
Daniel Iser — The Technical Purist
Daniel’s that developer who actually reads the WordPress Coding Standards and then argues about whether they go far enough.
Content Control and Popup Maker are his babies. Content Control does exactly what it says—controls what content users can see based on conditions. Popup Maker… also does exactly what it says. No bullshit naming conventions.
What I respect about Daniel: He ships clean code. Not “clean enough” code. Actually clean. The kind of code where you open a file and immediately understand the architecture.
When someone in the group asks “How would you structure X?” Daniel’s answer is always technically sound, well-reasoned, and usually involves a design pattern you forgot existed.
Is he sometimes pedantic? Yes.
Is he usually right? Also yes.
Chris Badgett — The LMS Guy Who Gets It
Chris runs LifterLMS—one of the big three learning management systems for WordPress (alongside LearnDash and Tutor LMS). If you’re selling courses on WordPress, you’ve probably evaluated his plugin.
What makes Chris different: He understands that LMS is just the infrastructure. The real business is helping people build course businesses.
So he doesn’t just maintain a plugin—he runs coaching programs, builds community, creates content about online education. He’s playing the long game.
When the group discusses business strategy, Chris is the one asking the human questions:
- “What do your customers actually want?”
- “How do you retain them long-term?”
- “What’s your vision for this in 5 years?”
Not “How do we optimize conversion rates?” or “What’s your CAC?” Those matter, but Chris starts with why people buy and works backward.
Why This Group Matters
Here’s what happens when you’re in a mastermind with people who actually understand your business:
1. Someone’s already solved your problem
Me in Slack: “Anyone dealt with Stripe webhook failures causing duplicate subscriptions?”
Jason: “Yeah, PMPro had that exact issue in 2022. Here’s how we fixed it: [link]”
Saved: 40 hours of debugging
2. Reality checks from people who’ve been there
Me: “Thinking about raising prices 50% and migrating everyone to annual billing.”
Group: “Have you modeled the churn impact? Here’s what happened when we tried that…”
Saved: potentially catastrophic business decision
3. Emotional support from the only people who get it
Me: “Customer left a 1-star review because our plugin ‘doesn’t work’ (translation: they didn’t read the setup docs).”
Everyone: “We’ve all been there. It sucks. Here’s the professional response template.”
Saved: my sanity
The Boring Stuff That Matters
We don’t just talk about code and marketing. We talk about:
- Hiring and firing (how do you fire a remote contractor who’s been with you for 5 years?)
- Licensing models (annual vs lifetime, when to grandfather, how to migrate)
- Refund policies (30 days? 60? Lifetime for features that don’t exist yet?)
- Support scalability (when do you hire your first support person?)
- Acquisition offers (should you sell? To whom? For how much?)
- Mental health (because this job can absolutely wreck you)
This is the stuff nobody teaches you when you’re learning to code.
What I’ve Learned
From Daniel: Code quality is a long-term investment, not a luxury. Technical debt compounds faster than you think.
From Chris: Your product is infrastructure. Your business is the transformation you provide. Don’t confuse the two.
From the group: You’re not crazy. This industry is genuinely hard. The problems you’re facing are real, not a sign you’re doing it wrong.
Is WP Fusion in Decline?
(This is the question I asked the group in 2024.)
New revenue was down. Active installs plateaued. Marketing efforts weren’t converting like they used to.
The group helped me see:
- It’s not just me—everyone’s seeing shifts in the WordPress ecosystem
- Legacy CRMs (ActiveCampaign, Infusionsoft) are losing market share to newer tools (HighLevel, HubSpot)
- The market isn’t dying—it’s evolving
What we’re doing about it:
- Better onboarding (reduce time-to-value)
- More integrations with modern CRMs
- Exploring AI-powered features (because why not)
- Focusing on retention over acquisition
Is it working? Too early to say definitively, but October 2025 was our best month since March 2024.
The Un-Sexy Truth
Five years in a mastermind group sounds romantic. Like we’re all sipping whiskey and discussing philosophy.
The reality: It’s mostly Zoom calls where someone shares their screen to debug a refund flow. It’s Slack messages at 2am when you’re panicking about a server outage. It’s Daniel sending a 15-paragraph technical breakdown of why your database schema is wrong.
And it’s invaluable.
If you’re running a WordPress plugin business (or any SaaS, really), find your people. Not customers. Not mentors. Not masterminds-for-hire.
Find the people dealing with your exact problems and talk to them fortnightly for 5 years.
That’s it.
Thanks
To Daniel, Chris, James, Zack, Katie, and Jason: Thanks for being the people I can complain to when Stripe changes their API for the 47th time. 🧡
To everyone reading this: If you’re building something in public and feeling alone—you’re not. Find your group.
– Jack