487 - Building WordPress plugins: lessons from Newsletter Glue and EventKoi

Nathan Wrigley Welcome to the WP Builds Podcast. Bringing you the latest news, interviews and fun for the WordPress community. Now, welcome your host, Nathan Wrigley. Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds Podcast. You've reached episode number 487, entitled Building WordPress Plugins, lessons from Newsletter Glue and EventKoi.

Nathan Wrigley It was published on Thursday, the 29th of October, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley and in a few moments I will be joined by Leslie Sim so that we can have our chat. But before then, a few bits of housekeeping and self-promotional bits and pieces. Please stay tuned. I would really love it if you did and didn't skip forward. The first thing to say is that if you have a product or service in the WordPress space...

Nathan Wrigley Perhaps you would like to add it to our Black Friday page. If you go to wpbuilds.com forward slash black, currently there's roughly a hundred products over there. It's completely free to list them. However, if you would like your product or service to be boosted and to feature more prominently on that page, you'll notice that there are some cards at the top. Over there at the minute, we've got NovaMira, we've got Show.fm, we've got Elementor and we've also got WSForm.

Nathan Wrigley Thank you so much to them for coming on board and helping keep that page alive. There are some blank cards. If you look at those, there is a button underneath them. And if you would like your product or service placed there, click on the button, fill out the form, and we will get back to you ASAP. If you'd like to just advertise more generally on the podcast and get in front of a WordPress-specific audience, head to wpbuilds.com forward slash advertise. And I'm going to keep droning on about it. Show.fm is a new SaaS platform that I have launched to help podcasters make podcasting easier. So we really do have a whole set of features that are unavailable elsewhere. So if you know somebody that's doing a podcast, if you're doing a podcast, or even if you're thinking of doing a podcast, go check it out. Show.fm.

Nathan Wrigley Until the 31st of October, so a couple of days from now, you'll be able to make a substantial saving in order to try and onboard quite a few founders to help us shape the platform. We're offering up to 75% off our studio plan. So go and check that out. Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, today I am chatting with Leslie Sim. Leslie came on the podcast several years ago now to chat about Newsletter Glue. She's moved on from that now and is working on EventKoi. And so we talk about what it's like in the year 2026 to have a WordPress plugin. What are the challenges? What are the differences between the product that she had, which was very niche, to a project which she now has, which is much more general?

Nathan Wrigley How is she managing it? How is she finding the challenges of building in the WordPress landscape and in the open? And it's really interesting to hear from somebody so honest and forthright. And I hope that you enjoy it. I am joined on the podcast by Leslie Sim. Hello.

Lesley Sim Hello. Good to be here.

Nathan Wrigley Leslie and I have already spent half an hour trying to figure out what we're going to talk about and what the state of the world is and WordPress and events and podcasting and all of that. But it's lovely to have you back. How long has it been, do you think?

Lesley Sim Years. Too long. Maybe three, four, five years, something like that.

Nathan Wrigley Hopefully not five. No, maybe not. I don't know if this is true because in the WordPress space, which is what we normally talk about, you've had two products that I associate with you. Firstly, there was Newsletter Glue, which you have moved away from and I guess sold. We can get into that. And then EventKoi, or EventKoi, I should say, not events.

Lesley Sim Singular.

Nathan Wrigley Yeah, Singular. Do you want to just tell us a little bit about both of those and the journeys and what have you very quickly, just so that we've got some knowledge of who you are and what you've been doing low these many years?

Lesley Sim Yeah, so Newsletter Glue was my first product, my first plugin product that we built. It was, I guess in a sentence, it kind of gave People substack features inside of WordPress. So you could publish a blog post and inside the post or the editor, you can also, you know, click a button and that also sends out the email together.

Lesley Sim Yeah, so we did that for a few years, I want to say four or five years. And then we sold that and we started EventKoi, which is an events plugin.

Lesley Sim And I want to say that the learning there and how we made the move from Newsletter Glue to EventKoi was with Newsletter Glue, it was a very niche product that we sold for a lot of money to very specific journalists and editorial teams. And we then decided to make the move to a more mass market product, which is what EventKoi is.

Lesley Sim We, so that, that's like... It's a product that has, hopefully, millions of potential buyers, users. And that also means that we have dozens, if not hundreds, of competitors. So it's a very different market. And I'm enjoying learning how it all works.

Nathan Wrigley Did you consciously, I mean, was it the product itself, like you wanted to do an events thing that led you there? Or did you want to experiment with, okay, we've gone for this niche thing, and that was kind of interesting. You know, high ticket price, few customers, but they were, you know, paying your wage. Was it a conscious decision, we want something more widespread so that we've got a greater chance of making an impact? Or was it simply, I want to do an events plugin, and that, by coincidence, has a greater footprint?

Lesley Sim The former. So we, we wanted something bigger, more mass market. We felt that we were ready for it. So, so the reason why we went with Newsletter Glue to begin with was because nobody knew us. And so trying to get someone to... To buy a mass market thing when there are already hundreds of competitors is really hard, but when you have something really niche and it's like we're the only one or two options around, then people are going to be willing to give us a chance.

Lesley Sim But after doing Newsletter Glue, we felt that enough people knew about us that if we were to launch something more mass market, there would be at least enough trust to get us off the ground. And then once you're off the ground, you know, hopefully we're able to do the marketing, do the brand building and have enough people trusting us to use us.

Nathan Wrigley Yeah. Did that wisdom hold? Is that what it turned out to be?

Lesley Sim I think we're very much still in the people who we know are excited about us and use us. And we're still trying to get to like the, you know, second, third... You know, 10th degree of separation away kind of thing. So we're still working on that part.

Nathan Wrigley I use that metric all the time. I mean, I don't know that I do it much outside of the WordPress space. Like, you know, if I'm willing to buy a vacuum cleaner or a kettle or something, I don't really care. So long as it, you know, maybe there's something about the brand. I'll, you know, I've trusted that brand before and it's worked. But in the WordPress space, the person behind it hadn't really ever thought about this. But the person behind it is a significant bit of my buying decision.

Nathan Wrigley And I will definitely go back to the character or team that I've had success with in the past. And by success, I mean, you know, no problems. The plugin got updated in a timely way. The support was good and all of those kind of things. And also, curiously, when I buy something in the WordPress space, my journey from clicking on a link for a product I've never seen before kind of goes like this. Click on link, go to home page, go to pricing.

Nathan Wrigley Then go to the About page. And the one that I dwell most on is the About page. And I read almost every word of that. And if you don't have an About page, I'm thinking, why don't you have an About page? Why don't you want to tell us who you are? So I don't know if I'm curious, but I'm like you. I go with, you know, the intuitions that I've built up over the years. But you say it's, you know, that worked. But obviously, if you started with a niche product, so I don't know, you've got 1,000, 2,000, 500, whatever the number of customers you've got is, and then you're trying to move that over and you can bring those 500, 1,000, 2,000, whatever, but you're charging less, does that mean you're now in a situation where you need to either put your prices up or find more customers to make it do the same amount of revenue, that kind of thing?

Lesley Sim Yeah, so we're trying to find more customers, get better at kind of mass marketing, I would say.

Nathan Wrigley Yeah. And how are you at that?

Lesley Sim Learning. And of course, I've chosen the best possible time to learn now that, you know, SEO has been completely decimated and even the best marketers in the world don't know how to market anymore these days.

Nathan Wrigley Yeah. So what are you doing? What's your like playbook of, well, we're recording this in October, late October, 2026. What's your go to set of things?

Nathan Wrigley I'll throw into the conversation that I, podcast listeners will know this already. I am, I have a product out there in the market and I'm on the same journey as you. We're trying to figure it out at the same time. So let's bat this around a minute. What's working for you? Or at least what are you doing? Whether it's working or not, we can talk about. Um, yeah, so I...

Lesley Sim I can say a bunch of things that will make me, maybe to some people, sound smart, and to others, maybe sound really dumb. This is the way.

Lesley Sim So I've been, I guess I think about it in terms of two different frameworks. So the first just being like, you know, typical marketing funnel, top of the funnel, bottom of the funnel type stuff. So I make sure that I'm doing things across every different layer of the funnel.

Lesley Sim So I guess that that's pretty basic. But then I also try to think about it in terms of short term customers and like long term investments. So short term stuff is like if I see someone. You know, looking for an events plugin on Reddit, then I'll try to reply to that thread, try to be helpful, and hopefully convert them as a customer. And that's been pretty successful. I get, you know, like a small handful of customers that way. But it's, you know, that doesn't scale, but it does get me, yeah, there's only going to ever be so many customers, you know, complaining on Reddit, right?

Lesley Sim I'm not going to be able to build a business off of that.

Nathan Wrigley Well, yeah, I guess if you're in the right market, if you've got the right product where three customers is going to do it for you, then that's great. But yeah, perhaps not here. Anyway, sorry, I interrupt. Carry on.

Lesley Sim Yeah. So, you know, I get the three customers or whatever from Reddit, and they are fairly easy to convert because they're already primed. They're looking for an alternative. They're looking for someone that like fits the exact specs. And they've told me, you know, on the Reddit where they're complaining, like, every single thing that they're looking for. And so, you know, when I chime in and I say, like, this is, you know, we have every single thing exactly how you want it. It's a pretty easy conversion. But like you said, not that many.

Lesley Sim Going on Reddit and Complaining and me being like the perfect fit. So that's kind of like an example of like short term stuff, which I do to, you know, get money in the short term. And then you have to also do like the long term plays. So that's where it becomes like more fuzzy because we, nobody knows, you know, how SEO or whatever they call it, AI, SEO, whatever thing they call it these days works.

Lesley Sim And so, you know, I try to do the things that people say that you should do, and then it's just kind of hope and pray. So I just do a balance of both. I do the short term stuff and then I also try to do the long term stuff.

Lesley Sim I try to ask customers as well, like how they find us. But, you know, obviously not everyone is going to give me a report of like their buyer's journey, although I love that.

Lesley Sim But, you know, they typically just say, you know, I did some research, I did some, I, you know, did a Google search, or I looked at a bunch of articles, and they find us. So I think some of the long term stuff does work. You have to be there, be available, be around, be findable. Yeah. And I think it's just like, putting in the reps, and hopefully it pays off over time.

Nathan Wrigley It's a, I think, does it feel a bit brutal from, at times, you know, does it feel a little bit like you're sort of shouting into the void a bit? Or do you, do you take, you know, this is just necessary. This is what I need to do. This has got my business head on. I'm doing it. Because I, I think, for some people, myself included, to some extent, the, the... Going out and trying things on Reddit and things like that, I just find it quite hard, you know, to summon up the energy to keep doing it because you don't quite know where it's going to land. You don't know if that comment that you make is going to get you booted out of that subreddit because it comes across as a bit salesy. So you have to kind of meter those things as well. So really, I'm just, you know, how do you feel about all that sort of stuff? Is it a necessary part of business? Do you enjoy doing it? Because I know some people do love that kind of stuff.