Alex King has announced that his company WP HelpCenter will be shutting down on February 28th. The WordPress HelpCenter was a company aimed at providing support for plug-ins and themes to offload the support burden from developers. As Alex points out, the company was not able to gain traction with developers. But the nail in the coffin for something like WP HelpCenter is that commercial support for free plug-ins and themes was not something people were willing to pay for. Alex believes that the service WP HelpCenter provided is still needed in the WordPress community and for anyone else willing to dive into the market, he shares the following tips:
I would recommend getting funding in place so that you can hire and do internal training, then come to market with a 5-6 person team (with dedicated sales and project management roles) in place from the start. Then it’s just a matter of providing great service and doing smart marketing to generate revenue. I would also recommend including a training offering, as that seems to be a service many people find valuable.
It will be interesting to see who steps into the market that WP HelpCenter is leaving behind and if they do things a different way to become successful. Meanwhile. Alex’s development company CrowdFavorite is doing very well with job openings available.
