I’ve been using WordPress for over ten years and running a business around it for eight years. Before that, I worked various construction jobs, then ran a small website development business and dabbled in all kinds of CMS’s, then moved on to work as a front-end developer in a marketing position at an international medical coding and billing education company. While I worked there, I developed their WordPress websites and built various in-house plugins, at the same time I stayed up every night after work developing the early versions of Event Espresso for my wife’s scrapbooking business. Due to the material costs and flaky customers, she wasn’t willing to shell out fees to Eventbrite. Since there weren’t any good plugins (IMO) at the time, I found an abandoned plugin that handled registrations, then added PayPal. Since I never heard back from the original developer, I ended up releasing and marketing my plugin under a different name. After a while, it got to where I was supporting it so much that I had to quit my full-time job to work on developing the plugin, supporting customers, and growing the business around the plugin. Somewhere along the way, I picked up my co-founder, Garth Koyle, we entered the Utah Entrepreneur Challenge in 2011 and won the grand prize of $40,000 for our business idea. At the time, we had just released the first version of our mobile apps, which allowed onsite ticket scanning and attendance tracking. Then in 2015, we launched our software as a service company, called Event Smart, which is powered by WordPress and Event Espresso.
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