The story behind my product

Disclaimer: WP Link Bio is live on Product Hunt!

About 2 months ago I released the first version of WP Link Bio for one of my clients.

Razões Para Acreditar is one of the biggest good news websites from Brazil. They publish inspiring and positive stories of people every day.

Their Instagram account has more than 920.000 followers and is growing very fast!

Instagram is one of the biggest sources of their website's traffic. Their followers always complained that they never found the links of stories and crowdfunding campaigns they've published on their Instagram profile.

Then I've realized that I needed to solve this.

At this time, I've found tools like Linktree, Shorby, Campsite, etc, thanks to @joshdance's link in bio tools spreadsheet.

Our client had 3 main needs:

• Custom domains: it's VERY important to use their own branded domain
• Google Analytics integration: to track, monitor and analyze all traffic generated by Instagram
• Facebook Pixel: to do remarketing for their crowdfunding campaigns and popular stories
• Google Tag Manager: we use it to include scripts from GA, Facebook Pixel and other tools. But also to track click events on the links.

I did find some options but our the price wasn't affordable. As a Brazilian company, paying any service in USD or EUR can be very expensive. The ratio is 4:1 for Dollar and almost 5:1 for Euros!

Since their website is powered by WordPress, building a plugin was an obvious decision.

So WP Link Bio was born.

The first version took about four hours of code. I built it as simple as possible because it was only for internal use and we've needed to ship it ASAP.

When I decided to launch to the public I knew it needed to be polished and easier to use.

For example, to set the page background color you must use a hexadecimal code. In the first version, I used a simple text input without any validation. In the public version, I put jQuery color picker plugin included in the WordPress core.

When you create something for internal use you don’t need to worry about those things.

Therefore, my target audience is not technical. Also, I could attract users from other tools that have amazing UI and UX. So it must be as simple as possible.

The first public launch of WP Link Bio was a premium plugin. Then, I realized that I could release a free version on the official WordPress Plugin repository.

I've been working with WordPress since 2004. I've contributed a lot with the community organizing meetups, WordCamps, doing talks, workshops, and support.

But I've never launched my own public plugin!

I remember a lot of times I came across popular plugins I've already built. I feel bad and depressed. And I knew that if I find a link in bio like plugin in the future, it would hurt me. I would feel depressed again.

I needed to change this. So I did and now WP Link Bio is free and open source!

#winning #inspiration #motivation