How Yash Kapoor Built a 2,500+ Customer Plugin Business from Scratch

Meet Yash Kapoor.

Yash is 30 years old and lives in India 🕌

He gradually transitioned from freelance WordPress work to building and maintaining plugins full time as the products started gaining traction. He now runs a small software company called DevDiggers. His focus is on creating plugins for WooCommerce and WordPress.

Yash is the main person behind DevDiggers. He handles development, product planning, and most of the support himself, though he occasionally take help with small tasks when needed.

I didn’t begin with the idea of starting a business. I worked as a freelance WordPress developer. I handled client projects, built new features, and fixed stores. It was all about helping clients solve their problems.

Over time, I noticed something interesting. Even though my clients came from different industries, the issues they faced were pretty similar. Managing inventory handling online and offline sales, and dealing with too many manual tasks - these problems came up again and again.

I kept running into the same kinds of problems. At some point, I thought why do I keep recreating these solutions from scratch? Wouldn't it make more sense to turn them into actual products?

That’s how the journey of DevDiggers (registered in August 2023) really started.

The first serious product I worked on was MultiPOS, a point-of-sale plugin designed for WooCommerce.

The concept came straight from what I had seen in real stores I collaborated with. They needed a way to handle sales in their physical shops while keeping everything synced with their online store.

One thing I noticed right away was how crucial offline functionality turned out to be. Internet issues happen more often than many realize, and a physical store can’t just shut down sales when that happens. I made sure to include offline support in the product, and it turned into a feature that people valued.

It was an incredible feeling to see businesses use something I created in their everyday work. That was the moment it stopped being just lines of code and started feeling like an actual, useful product.

Getting those initial customers was a slow and not-so-glamorous process.

A lot of the early traction came from launching plugins on CodeCanyon. Marketplaces were helpful because people were already visiting them in search of solutions, which meant I didn’t have to build a distribution strategy from scratch.

The first users helped a lot. They found bugs, gave ideas for new features, and sometimes guided the product in ways I hadn’t even considered before. Many of the updates actually came straight from chats during support.

Outside of marketplaces, the growth happened due to organic search and writing guides and examples.

Organic Search

Most of the organic growth came from writing detailed blog posts and tutorials related to WooCommerce problems that store owners search for.

For example:

These posts started ranking over time and brought store owners who were already looking for solutions.

Guides and Examples

I also created content that helped the users understand the value of the plugins faster:

There was no big viral event or huge launch. Things just moved forward, bit by bit.

I kept working on and releasing new plugins for DevDiggers over time. Every plugin came from noticing common problems in WooCommerce stores.

Not long ago, I introduced a freemium plugin called LoyaltyX. The concept is pretty straightforward: many stores focus on getting new customers, but they don’t spend enough effort to make sure those customers stick around.

Loyalty programs can be effective, but a lot of small businesses see them as too pricey or complex to set up. I wanted to create something easier and more approachable so owners could get started for free and expand from there.

Switching to a freemium model has been a learning curve. It makes you focus more on how easy it is to use, how simple it is to get started, and how people find it valuable.

To be honest, marketing has been a way bigger challenge than building the actual products.

When you’re writing code, it’s easy to track progress. You create, test, and tweak. With marketing, it’s different. Sometimes you try things, and nothing changes.

At first, I tried promoting everything in a general way, but it didn’t turn out well. Over time, I realized that targeting a specific audience and solving one clear problem worked much better.

The strategies that ended up helping the most were:

Search Engine Optimization

Regarding SEO a few initiatives worked out pretty well for me:

SEO took time, but it has been one of the most consistent sources of traffic.

Support

I didn’t understand how crucial support was in the beginning. Strong support builds trust, and trust keeps users sticking around for the long haul.

Today, DevDiggers offers multiple WooCommerce plugins. Businesses use these plugins to handle their daily operations and keep customers engaged.

I still spend most of my time building, improving, and talking to users. I’m not chasing trends or trying to build something flashy. I just focus on solving real problems and making the products better over time.

So far the total number of paid customers is 2500+.

If I had to give one piece of advice, it would be this: talk to users and pay attention to real problems.

Most good product ideas don’t come from brainstorming. They come from real conversations and real frustrations.

And be patient. Things usually take longer than you expect, but steady progress compounds.

See you next time.

Thanks,
Jakob Jelling

I’m on X. Come out and play.