How CompassNavigator Was Born
I'm a developer who usually spends most of my day in PHP/Storm, not WordPress Admin.
I'm completely spoiled by its awesome command palettes. You can literally do anything with a few keystrokes.
Then I started working on a new website for my company's then only product Fortress, and suddenly I was stuck in WordPress admin all day.
The Frustration Began
It was driving me crazy how much time I spent just clicking around and waiting for pages to load.
After a couple of days, I had enough. I figured, "If I spend two hours building a simple command palette for WordPress navigation, I'll save myself tons of time over the next few weeks." That's all it was supposed to be — just a quick tool to scratch my own itch.
A Simple Solution Becomes a Product
When I showed this super basic version to some WordPress friends, they loved it and wanted to use it themselves. So I made a quick screen capture video (which you can still watch here) and shared it in some Facebook groups... and wow.
People almost bit my hand off, demanding I turn it into a real product.
It was crystal clear that I wasn't the only one with this problem — lots of people had the exact same pain point, and more importantly, were willing to pay to solve it.
Building the Vision
I then spent the next three months turning that basic prototype into what is now CompassNavigator, and it's been a wild experience.
Within a couple of days post-launch, CompassNavigator had 500+ paying customers, and I've been trying to catch up ever since. Ha!