Pippin Williamson isn’t your typical WordPress product guy. He doesn’t just have a handful of awesome plugins that help people work better, faster, and smarter - he has over 100 in his portfolio. And while he’s widely known for creating Pippin’s Plugins, AffiliateWP, and Easy Digital Downloads, his reputation in the WordPress world has been cemented through his unwavering support for his products and the community as a whole.

“WordPress is my passion, and I am constantly striving to make myself better, and hopefully, help out a few people along the way.”

We’re excited to welcome Pippin to our speaker lineup for Prestige Conference Las Vegas, where he’ll be interviewed by Jake Goldman on the ins and outs of running a product-based business in the WordPress marketplace.

In 3 sentences or less, please describe what you do for a living:

I build plugins for WordPress and am the founder of three large e-commerce based plugins, including Easy Digital Downloads, Restrict Content Pro, and AffiliateWP.

Why this career and not something else?

It was an accident. I had originally planned to go into indigenous language restoration in mesoamerica but stumbled into web development and quickly fell in love with it. I decided to follow what I loved.

When did you figure out what you wanted to be when you grew up?

For me, it happened when I was in my second year at the University of Kansas, where I was studying Linguistics. I began doing some web development on the side to pay my rent and quick discovered that I really enjoyed it. It only took a few months before I was serious about turning it into a career so I continued building sites late at night and on the weekends. During the summer between my fourth and fifth year at the University of Kansas, I decided that I was going to try and do web development full time. I told myself that if I could successfully pay the bills for the summer, I’d stick with it. I’m still here

Once you figured out what you wanted to do with your career, how did you start making things happen?

Since I began working in web development during college, I first spent a lot of late nights and many, many weekends working on client projects and my early plugin projects. It was a balance between school work, client work, my own ambitions, and doing my best to convince my fiancé I wasn’t crazy. There were enormous amounts of coffee consumed during those two years, but in the end I believe it paid off.

Who were your most valuable mentors and how did you connect with them?

My father has always been an inspiration to me. He’s been developing software for computers since before I was born and has owned his own successful development business for most of those 27-30 years.

My grandfather was another of my inspirations that I credit a huge amount of my success to. Of all the people in my life, he was the person that taught me the awesome value of generosity and kindness. I’ve never met another person that was as generous as that man; if I could be half of what he was, I’d consider myself very, very successful.

What’s coming up next for you?

In terms of projects, my team and I are working on a series of improvements to existing products and will be focusing on those for the next several months. We’re always striving to make our systems easier and more reliable to use, so anything that moves us in that direction will be on our radar.

Any industry predictions for 2015?

I feel that the potential for WordPress plugins is really just now becoming apparent. We’ve seen some truly great plugins that extend WordPress far, far beyond its original design, but I don’t think we’re even close to seeing the limits. Especially with the (possible) introduction of the WP Rest API, there are some truly great possibilities that have yet to be realized. In 2015, I suspect we’ll see the beginnings of several of these types of plugins.

What book(s) are you reading right now?

Two at the moment:

“Malt: A Practical Guide from Field to Brewhouse” by John Mallet to further my knowledge and understanding of how malt impacts the finished beer product that many of us really love.

“Clariel: The Lost Abhorsen” by Garth Nix. This is purely for personal enjoyment as the Abhorsen series is one my favorite book series I’ve read.

Favorite “guilty pleasure” song or band that you can’t help but rock out to?

James Blunt (not really a guilty pleasure).

Name one thing you’re looking forward to for Prestige Conference Las Vegas:

Connecting with many of the people I speak to frequently online but rarely get an opportunity to see face to face.