Admin Page Spider

The free base plugin was always required for the premium version to function but I separated the two so that people could discover and purchase the premium plugin on its own, reducing the difficulty of getting going. By this stage a large portion of the third party plugins I wanted to support were in the plugin and all sales were word of mouth.

After a few months of the free version I realised I could monetise it by simply adding support for third party platforms and additional features.
I packaged up a premium version and sold it as an 'add on' extender to the base plugin

For a while I had built my tool and used it internally. Then I shared a screenshot of my Wordpress admin page to a facebook wordpress community and someone noticed it and asked me the name of the plugin. I realised I could polish it off and make my very first wordpress plugin out of it.