Allow me to introduce myself.
Originally posted on the Southern Utah Independent
My name is Seth Shoultes. I co-founded a successful, open-source event ticketing platform based on WordPress called Event Espresso.
I’ve been a website developer and programmer for over 14 years. I used to consider myself a hacker, not a “real developer”, because I was always copying examples of development code or the latest website best practices from other developers and using it in my projects. I wasn’t copying everything exactly, and I was usually hacking up code to make it do what I wanted, but it always felt strange.
I always wondered, “How could I be a real website developer if I was always copying from someone else?” That was until I learned I suffered from “Imposter Syndrome,” which seems problematic among budding programmers and website developers. Why? Because that’s how we learn, by following the examples of others.
How did I get started in programming?
I have always been that person that likes to figure out how things work. I always tore things apart as a kid to see how stuff worked. Sometimes, I liked to try and take parts from a bunch of different toys and put them all back together in some way to form a new toy that looked like something out of a 1980s Mad Max movie. Every single one of my Atari or Nintendo systems was dismantled and then reassembled several times to see what was inside or how it worked.
As I got older, I found that I liked learning about new technology, and over time I spent less time trying to re-create scenes from Mad Max and more time learning about airplanes, model cars, and rocketry.
As an adult, learning about how websites work was very similar to tearing apart toys as a kid. Just by viewing the source code of any website, using built-in web browser tools, and a little Google searching, the basic programming language behind websites was easy to figure out. I found a new hobby.
Self-help books galore
Over time I also started collecting a ton of self-help books to get me through life, you know, classics like the “HTML Handbook” and the “PHP Bible“, which I carried everywhere (I didn’t have blazing-fast mobile internet at the time). In my back pocket, I carried HTML cheat sheets to quiz myself on the different HTML tags in my downtime.
When asked by friends or family what I was doing with all my time, or acting “anti-social” as my wife would call it, I had a time explaining what I was doing.
Hmm. What is it that I am doing? That’s easy, right? “I’m learning PHP & MySQL because it’s going to change the world”, I would say to blank stares and sometimes even more questions about my well-being until the subject changed to someone telling me, “Why don’t I do something productive?”
Scaling myself up
After a while, I realized it was time to start taking my friends and family’s advice. I needed to put these new skills to good use. So I started scaling myself up. I started taking on small projects here and there, like building small websites for family, friends, and local small businesses. Eventually, after a few years, I worked as a front-end website developer at a large insurance billing academy.
Before that, I built websites from scratch or used lesser-known Content Management Systems (CMS). It wasn’t until a friend introduced me to WordPress that I saw the potential of this wonderful CMS that some kid named Matt Mullenweg had created in the basement of his parent’s house in Houston, Texas.
This system was amazing! I found that WordPress included free plugins that allow you to transform your WordPress website to fit almost any online business model you’ve ever seen. Better yet, you could download and install these plugins for days. Or, if you had a hard time finding the exact plugin, you just created one that can do almost anything you can think of on your website. Everything you needed in a website project was already close at hand or could be developed quickly. It was like being a kid again!
So I scaled up and told people I was a WordPress developer, to those same blank stares. At least now I had a full-time gig doing something I love, right?
Starting with open-source software
Over time I became increasingly involved in WordPress, and people took notice. Especially my wife.
One day, my wife asked me if I could build a plugin for her WordPress website to allow her friends to RSVP or pre-register for her scrapbooking classes.
I already had some experience building web-based registration systems for a local preschool where I lived at the time, but my wife didn’t need anything that complex. I was fairly new to WordPress then, so instead of trying to build something myself this time, I figured I would find a WordPress plugin that could do most of the work.
This is what’s so wonderful about WordPress. Unlike most software developed by Microsoft, WordPress is an open-source platform for website development. Anything built on top of and publicly released for WordPress can be customized, re-branded, and re-released publicly, without legal repercussions, provided you credit the original author.
So basically I set out to find a free event ticketing and registration system for my wife, but that wasn’t happening, not that year anyways (2009). So I figured I would build my event ticketing system based on another simple plugin someone has already started developing but never implemented a payment system.
Since the ability to prepay and register for my wife’s classes was mandatory, and this was an open-source platform, I decided to go ahead and modify this person’s system and give him the code because I could see that other people could probably use what I had created. However, the developer of this other plugin never returned my emails, nor did he ever answer any of the support requests that were coming in from his users in the WordPress support forums.
So I went ahead and released the code I created (as my own) and started supporting it. Eventually, since the other developer (whose code I started with) wasn’t maintaining his code anymore, he figured it was easier to start sending all his users to my plugin.
Winning the Utah Entrepreneur Challenge
After about a year of developing, maintaining, and supporting this open-source event ticketing software for WordPress, I figured it was time to start making money off this project.
While working in the marketing department at my day job for three years, I learned many ideas and theories based on marketing, which I put to good use in building a business around my ticketing plugin for WordPress.
In just a few years, my co-founder and I established a team of remote developers, support technicians, and a customer base of over 10,000 international users worldwide.
In 2011, my co-founder and I entered the business into the Utah Entrepreneur Challenge. We walked away with $40,000 from Zion’s bank to use however we wanted towards the business I started in my basement two years before. It was amazing.
Writing articles for The Independent
You’re probably asking why I’m writing articles for a local news publication, especially if I have a successful business, right? Well, now that I have a great team of developers and support technicians. I am now in more of a leadership role and am looking for a way to keep myself from becoming lost in day-to-day business life. So I figured taking some time off here, and there would be fun to start sharing my business experiences, technical knowledge about WordPress, and other technology-related ideas in a public forum.
My ultimate goal is to help people in Southern Utah get more involved with technology, grow the local tech scene, and show you how to succeed online. I may throw in a movie, or gadget, review here and there, but my ultimate goal is to help others.
Want to learn more about me and my adventures? Check out my essay, “From the Ground Up.“