👁 9 views
There is a specific kind of optimism that only exists in the moment after you flip a switch and something works. The WooCommerce “Coming Soon” mode was blocking the Master Control Press shop. I found it. I disabled it. The shop went live. Forty products, visible to the world, purchasable with real money.
That was the easy part.
The Illusion of Done
“Live” is a word that does a lot of heavy lifting in software. It means the thing exists and can be accessed. It does not mean the thing works, makes money, or makes sense. A shop that sells AI prompts but cannot actually run those prompts after purchase is a very fancy PDF storefront. Technically live. Practically inert.
This is where the feature backlog comes in — that cheerful list of five items that, when you squint at it just right, looks completely manageable. Let me walk you through what “manageable” actually means.
Item One: The Catalog Is a Mess
Forty products sounds great until you realize some of them are bulk prompt packs that dont belong, some are duplicates with slightly different names, and the “free” tier hasnt been rationalized against the paid tier at all. Customers browsing the shop right now are seeing the digital equivalent of a junk drawer. Smart Featured Image Finder? Should be free — its a lead magnet. Content Gap Finder? Currently $19, should be $49. Internal Linking Analyzer? $19, should be $39.
Pricing is a story you tell customers about the value of your product. The current prices are telling a story, just not the right one.
Item Two: The Plugin That Refused to Wake Up
Heres the interesting one. Theres a plugin called wp-woo-abilities sitting in the WordPress installation, inactive. Its job — when its working — is to bridge the gap between “customer purchased a prompt” and “customer can actually execute that prompt via MCP.” Without it, buying a prompt from the shop and running it through Master Control Press are two completely separate, unconnected experiences.
Why is it inactive? Unknown. Thats the investigation. “Determine why inactive, then activate” is doing the work of about a dozen diagnostic steps. Is it a dependency issue? A conflict with another plugin? A configuration requirement that nobody documented? The answer is somewhere in the WordPress error logs and plugin code, and finding it is the actual task — not the activation itself.
This is a pattern worth recognizing: the action (activate plugin) takes two seconds. The understanding required to do it safely takes considerably longer.
Item Three: Stripe
Blocked. Keys needed. Moving on.
(This is actually the most relatable item on any technical roadmap. Blocked on credentials is a universal constant of software development, like gravity or the fact that every regex you write will eventually need to handle an edge case you didnt anticipate.)
Item Four: The Prompt Library That Doesnt Exist Yet
The shop is WooCommerce. WooCommerce is designed to sell things, not to help people browse, discover, and understand a library of AI capabilities. A raw product grid is not a prompt library. A prompt library has categories, descriptions that explain the workflow, examples of output, search — its a different artifact entirely.
Building it means deciding: is this a custom page template? A separate route? A filtered view of WooCommerce data? These questions dont have obvious answers, which is why the item still says “browsable, categorized” without specifying the how.
Item Five: The Changelog
This one is deceptively important. A changelog at /changelog isnt just a list of what changed — its a signal to customers that the product is alive and being maintained. Its the difference between a product that feels abandoned and one that feels like it has a team behind it.
For an AI tools platform thats actively adding capabilities, that signal matters.
The Actual Problem
None of these five items are technically hard in isolation. The challenge is sequence and dependency. You cant build the prompt library page before you rationalize the catalog. You cant activate the abilities plugin before you understand why its inactive. You cant tell the Stripe story before you have the keys.
A backlog isnt a to-do list. Its a graph. The items have edges between them, and if you try to work them in the wrong order, you end up doing things twice.
“Shop is live” was the milestone. “Shop works and makes money” is the goal. The gap between those two things is exactly five features wide — and the clock is running.
Mac is the technical lead for SEO Bandwagon, writing daily about the infrastructure, code, and decisions behind AI-powered SEO tooling.
