42: M Asif Rahman on Developing Widgets for Elementor

Welcome to Elementor Talks, the podcast that connects marketing, design and development experts to help you build better websites. Em Asif Ahman, the man behind Essential Add Ons, is a veteran WordPress enthusiast and entrepreneur working closely with WordPress since 2004. Asif is the founder of WP Developer, an incubator and marketplace for WordPress products, as well as many other enterprises such as the Tech Journal and Analytify. Asif is a co organizer of WorldCom Singapore 2019 and the first WorldCamp Asia which will take place next year in Bangkok. In our podcast, Asif explains why Bangladesh has become a leading WordPress nation, tells us how Matt Muhlenvik encouraged him to develop his first plugin, and talks about Essential Add Ons upcoming releases.

Welcome to another episode of Elementor Talks. I'm Matan and today I have the pleasure to host M. Asif Rahman, the founder of WP Developer, the company behind Essential Add Ons. Hi Asif.

Hey Matan. Thank you for hosting me. We are looking forward to have a good conversation today.

So Asif, you actually we have to mention that you're much more than just the founder of WP Developer, but we have to start from some point. So we start actually from the beginning. You were born and raised in Bangladesh and you moved to Dhaka to attend the Notre Dame College over there. And you did a Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Telecommunication Engineering from university over there too if I'm not mistaken. But you also lived in the US mainly in Orlando, Florida for few years and now you're back in Bangladesh, right?

Yes. So how come it's actually like happen over the course of almost like 10 years. I moved to US at the beginning in like in 2010. Then I started to live in there like completely after 2011 and 12. I lived there for a few years. I had two little baby and. And we had this baby in us then like it's a very long story like why we came back and what we are doing. So I would just say like it's like a transition of life, like what's happening and what actually happened to me overall. Like I was always with WordPress so that's like one thing that never changed.

So can you tell me a little bit about Bangladesh? What distinguishes Bangladesh as developing high tech nation? Because I can see we have so many developers and WordPress entrepreneurs in particular coming from Bangladesh. Is there a specific reason for that?

It's actually very strange. You see the first thing is Bangladesh is very highly populated country. So we have nearly 170, 180 million people and our government is actually pushing education, especially tech education a lot for past 10, 20 years. So I do see like lots of computer graduates, like unbelievable number of computer graduates coming out in every year. And WordPress is very popular among here. Like I did a presentation back in WordCamp San Francisco in 2014 and I presented a slide where it says like in Bangladesh in that time alone we have over like 40,000 WordPress programmer only in Odesk. So it's a very high number of like WordPress programmer in here. A lot of people work in like fever upwork and a lot of those small work kind of thing. And Elementor especially is extremely popular in here. I am involved with Elementor from the start and we are also leading like the Elementor community in here in Dhaka as well. I do see like if I open up a meeting only for 50 people, it get like fully covered in only maybe half day or something. So people are very interested about like new things. And especially maybe we have a very large number of young population like in Bangladesh we say right now in this way that about 70% of the entire population is actually either from age below like 35. So most of the people in Bangladesh is very young right now. This generation is very young. So a lot of things are happening in here at the same time. Bangladesh is very different country if you want to compare with anything in the world. I have been heavily in India so a lot of people thinks like India and Bangladesh will be a lot similar because we look probably a lot same. Very, very, very different. I think it's kind of if you expect like a. It's a nation that is actually moving forward very high because of the high GDP growth that maybe you will also expect. Like the tech ecosystem is also moving fast. So a lot of things are happening at the same time. The startup ecosystem is also like moving very fast. One of my main reason to come back in Bangladesh is I have a lot of vested interest in the country. And I was back in like 2017, I was feeling like this is actually right time for me to stay here in Bangladesh because I could do much more here. The kind of movement is happening in here. So you could understand like why we are trying to catching up so fast and why so many things are happening in here.

So as we said, as I mentioned earlier, Essential Eddons is only one of the ventures that you were involved with. Could you tell us about the first venture?

Actually the first company I started is Arcom, my main company. I started that back even back in 2004 before even going to university. So I was already like doing some basic programming. But in that time it was more like I was shifting from blogger.com to WordPress. And in that time I was finding it very easy with WordPress to actually customize things and doing different stuff. I find it very easy to actually make a website. And at the beginning I was actually just blogging or like coming up with like different like media site. The first, if you ask me what was my first successful venture, I would say the Tech Journal probably Take Journal was like tech magazine. I started back in like 2008 and 9. It became instantly very successful. We are actually having like sales office in San Francisco. At one time we had like Alexa rank below 4000. So that is, that would be like fast venture that got like a good level of popularity and we're like gaining good revenues from there.

Did you have any connection to journalism before that? You know, covering tech and writing about tech?

My family business for two generations, my family business is in media and printing especially. So the first venture I actually started with one of my friend and my uncle was actually printed magazine, like a full magazine. So I started that back in like 2003. So you could say like that's in my blood, the media, press and everything.

So it's something that you have personal involvement with, you have passion about. It's something that accompanies your family for two generations from what I understand. That's interesting. So you always choose ventures based on your personal interest or sometimes it just goes following the needs demands in the market.

It's actually my answer will be like very different. It was always about people. I invested in a venture that I thought the idea is not really good. But I really like the founder. So for me, from my experience in my life, I have started many venture in my life. Many of those failed. But one thing was always common. If I got like some level of success, success, it was always like one people was like crazy passionate about that idea and he always stick to it. So it was always about people. So I really want to actually get involved with people first. And if the idea is something that I could help, then maybe it's actually like a good like synergy between both of us. So it's not just me, it's also them. Like if they feel like they will be comfortable to talk with me whenever they need to. It's like a kind of like all those has to be like good package.

So you mentioned Tech Journal as one of your first ventures. What was the first plugin that you developed?

It's actually very hard to answer because I was developing plugins or customizing themes from the very start but I have not released actually any of those. Back in 2010 or 11 I met Matt Mullenweg for the first time. He was a good friend of mine for a very long time. But in the time I remember we were actually working on a co working space in a like either like a day after the conference day or something. I mentioned like what we are doing in the Tech Journal and other things for Tech General we developed a lot of internal plugins that we never released. Then Matt told me like because for the passion of WordPress and for the open source community, even if I do not want to actually make money, I should still release those plugin. Maybe somebody else will actually found it like useful. So I was always thinking like if I need to release something it need to be like well polished. They need to have like a good descriptions or cover image or other things. So I released my first plugin back in 2011 and it was like something like very simple and it was not like pro plugin, it is just like a free, free plugin.

What was the first add on that actually achieved success? That made you think, okay, we have.

Something here actually that also happened in like different ways. First I was involved with Analytify there I have a partner, Adnan. We started analytify back in 2014. We released the premium version in the 1st of January of 2015. But we got like instant success. It was very popular. It was the first Google Analytics plugin that brings the dashboard inside WordPress getting like a good sum of revenue from there. And I was involved with Oidips, another large WordPress product company as a partner back in 2015. So Ouidips is a very big company. It has like a lot of like remarkable plugins later on. Back in 2017 I became the CEO of Oodips. When I came back in Bangladesh, I remain, I served UdePS as CEO for almost like one and a half year. So you can tell that like I was always involved. I tried different things, I had like different companies but I had some level of success with all of those. That's how it actually sustained it. I never had actually shut down any plugin company ever in my life. So all of those are still running. Essential Add on was like extreme big break. Like we never expected that Essential Add on could have like 200,000 or 300,000 active install within like two years. So that was like big break for all of us.

So that's a Good thing that you brought this up now. So first of all, what was the moment that you decided to create complementary solution for Elementor?

You see that will be also like a very strange story. So all of my companies are always involved with plugins. They are always bringing like new solutions. All the we dev solution is like very complex. They have a ERP in WordPress that's like very, very very complex. Odev doesn't want to do like any, any of the like that involved with him. So at the beginning because I was very much passionate about Elementor, I remember I started using Elementor when they have like probably less than 1000 active install. In my, in my all life I always hated Pace Builder. So because I'm a developer, like if I want to actually have a lot of like readymade things, I do not want like all of those like shortcode that like Visual Composer or all the other like Page Builder was doing. So Elementor was like very refreshing feelings for me. So I jumped into Elementor. I started using it in my blog and at the beginning I tried to convince few of the theme developers. Do you want to actually do something for Elementor? Maybe we could actually made a new theme. Nobody's actually making good themes in Elementor. Maybe we could make a multipurpose theme or blog. Nobody took me seriously. I spoke to like two, three big guys none of them actually took seriously and we can't actually do. Then I talked with one of my ex employee that time he was actually working with them company, the company behind X Theme. He was actually their head of support and taking care of their UIX. And that guy Nazmul Hassan RuPaul was one of my oldest colleague and he was very very very good in like UI ux. So I was able to convince him like leave this job and let's build something in Elementor. Maybe he could bring in his experience from X Theme and like create that kind of like what developers need to build something very unique. Instead of like looking at what other people are doing in Elementor, let's try to build a tool that will really help me to build like whatever I want to or if I look at company like vdeps or company like Analytify or other the things that I'm involved, let them build their landing page with Elementor. Let help them do whatever they want to. So that's how Essential Add on actually started.

I mean how do you decide on the next widget or feature that you're going to develop? Do you check the user's feedback is There actually a dedicated community for essential add ons users.

We have a dedicated community. We have a very engaging Facebook community. You can't believe what our Trello bot looks like. What the people requested. We have tons of things that people requested in general in each quarter we have a focus what you want to focus. We are always improving. If you think about all the wizard we have, the design element and other things, we are continuously improving at the same time, same time in each quarter we had a goal like what we are actually focusing like for the second quarter of 2019 we focused more on speed and optimization. So all of the stuff looks like really really robust. It loads very fast. Elementor itself actually changed a lot of things. So right now we had to actually keep up with the pace of Elementor. So we spent like one whole quarter to optimize and speed up all our things in next. For next two quarter we will be focusing not like the designing stuff. So like Elementor we feel like Elementor started as like page builder but then it transitioned to more like a website builder. So instead of like just working on for people that help them to create a like good landing page or doing like a dynamic things, we will actually help them more with integration. Because Elementor did a tremendous job to bring a lot of integration. We feel like we could actually take those for website builder. Think about learning management system. Think about all those event plugin, membership plugin. We want to build very close ties with all those platforms. People could create whatever they want. They don't need to actually be dependent on a team if they could use Elementor to build those kind of complex website. I think that's the future we are looking at and it's good. We have a really good partnership with Elementor so we understand each other. And we also have a few dedicated partnership with few of those ecosystem builder. So that's probably going to be our future.

And what would you say is essential add ons unique selling point? I mean which widget do you think is essential for which users opt you in in addition to Elementor?

You see from the start like that was like a very intriguing question because you see there are like tons of extension coming up, tons of like Elementor plugin. And do you know like we are actually the first plugin that actually was focusing on Element before us there was like a header footer element or anywhere element or those kind of tools that are actually sol in different ways. We are the first plugin to bring in like elements for Elementor. And you see from that time we focus Only on Elementor. If you look at like all the other like big or small competitor, they tried a lot of different things. Not only Elementor, they built for Visual Composer, they built for Beaver Builder. Yeah. But for us, as soon as we got like a really good playing ground, we never focused on anything. We even had a like cornerstone before even starting for Elementor. We. We never actually even like focused on that anymore because we feel like we need to focus on here is like a very good community that is actually backing us. And if you talk about like unique elements, we have actually tons of very unique elements. Like protected content. It was supposed at the beginning it was an element you could actually apply and like put content that will be protected. You could actually decide user level or password or like different kind of like elements where people could access. Later on. We actually converted it to and extension. So right now you could use that extension on any content. So whatever you are building with Elementor, you could apply protected content extension over any of those. We have like advanced accordion, advanced tab. Those are very unique.

And you just celebrated two years, two years birthday for essential add ons. That was on 20th of July. So what can your users expect next? What is the big thing that you're planning ahead?

I think like we are going to adopt a new tagline that will be like we let you build amazing website with Elementor. So before it was like page building. Now we are like graduating to building website. So we will be bringing a lot of like exciting things as we say in terms of like partnership and integration. If we have time, I could tell you like something very unique that we are doing from WP Developer that will actually enhance our user. But at the same time that is like a very long plan. So it will be considered as a like separate venture but it will be coming from WP Developer and Essential Add on. I could tell you a little bit more about what's actually coming from.

Okay, so share with our listeners a teaser so they can have.

We are actually looking at Elementor ecosystem in a whole different perspective. You see right now people are building a lot different kind of website with Elementor. As Elementor brings the header, footer builder, full site builder and archive page, single page, anything you could actually right now build with Element. We feel right now it's time for giving people more options so they could go beyond themes. So we are looking at bringing at a new platform. We are calling it Elementary5.com we are looking forward to introducing it in next month. It will be like a marketplace for Elementor templates. So we will bring in with tons of free templates and that's ready to use. It's not only about. It will take templating in Elementor in a lot different heights. And as it is going to be like Marketplace, we expect like tons of people who are actually building for building templates or themes for Inverto before and right now they are not actually. They don't need to actually build a lot of themes anymore because of Elementor. So we have a very large community for theme developers here in Bangladesh. So I'm actually connecting them and a lot of international people who are used to building like themes and they will be actually. They are already actually building templates for us. So I'm very excited about Elementary 5 as a platform. I think it will enhance what you could do with Elementor and at the same time we will be releasing tons of templates for free as well. So I think that will be very beneficial for the whole Elementor community.

That's great to hear. And that's coming up next month as you said, right?

Yes.

Okay, that's great. So we mentioned earlier the community of Essential Add Ons, but except for Essential Add Ons or Elementor community, you're actually quite active in WordPress community. You have attended more than 100 WordCamps worldwide as I understand and you also involved in the Asian based world camps. Anything interesting going on there? Is there anything that you can share with us about those events in Asia?

Lots of exciting things happening. I will tell you the most exciting thing at the end. To begin with right now I'm actually organizing WhatCamp Singapore. That's actually happening in August 16th. I'm also involved in organizing WhatCamp Dhaka here in Bangladesh. That will happen in 28th September. And the most exciting thing is what Asia is happening. The first one is coming up in Bangkok, Thailand in 2020 in from February 2020 to February 2022. And what can Asia will bring together? The whole WordPress community in Asia. And also we are actually expecting like thousand from outside Asia as well. So what can Europe already happened for seven years. What can us is happening for almost like four years? The four years I think this year. So what can Asia will be the first one in this demographic. And as you know like Asia alone is almost like more than even half of the world population. So we are very excited. I joined the team as an organizer. We have exciting team of almost like 40 organizers with me. So that's like something we are looking forward.

So that's World Camp Asia taking place next year in Bangkok, Thailand that sounds exciting I have to say. Do you think it's going to be like a user oriented event or networking oriented event or both?

You have attended. You were in what came Europe this year, right?

Yes.

So it will be the same. So we are doing it like very grand venue. So it's like by the river, very large one of the like largest venue in Bangkok and we are looking forward to have all the like very enthusiastic people among WordPress community. I expect it will not. It won't be anything. It will be more like what I have you seen in Europe probably we'll need like few more years to come up with like even really big event like Europe at the beginning the first what can Asia. We are looking more for like about like 1,000 people what camp or something. But the kind of interest I have seen like all the people who are already like asking questions sending like requests like when they could join or if they could volunteer when the like call for speaker coming up. I do think like it will be like an amazing whatcap. We are actually launching the ticket sale within like next one today. So a lot of like energy. I'm seeing amount or not only on only in Asian people all through the world.

Yeah we have a lot to anticipate to next year before wrapping up. Asif, how can our listeners follow you or contact you?

I am like all into like web and social media so I have, I maintain a blog. It's in asif.im asif like asif im and I'm available in like LinkedIn, in Facebook, Twitter and I also as I do invest very regularly so in Angel List. I have like active profile and I'm also like very much involved with Elementor Forum, the Elementor community so they could reach out to me in any way.

That's great Asif, it was my pleasure having you as a guest on our show and we'll keep ourselves updated with your activities and the WorldCamp Asia the first one. I'd like to thank you for your time.

Thank you so much. And from me I'm extremely blessed to be so much involved with Elementor Community. This community is something that is actually very close to my heart because I I always actually rely on this community. I always actually trusted that we could really do really a lot of good things together. And as we came this far maybe it's actually time for us to actually grow together and do a lot of different things that was not possible before. Thank you for having me and goodbye.

Goodbye and thank you all to our listeners and take care Bye.

Bye, Sam.