WordPress

“WordPress, most popular platform for hosting content. That's out there is running a programming language called PHP, not the most efficient programming language.”

“And it's like, it's such an easy space to compete in. It's kind of blue ocean for this.”

“I used to have a WordPress website for many years, like, 15 plus years, and I decided to rebuild my entire website using Claude, and I did so, and it's beautiful.”

“Over the entire lifetime of the business, we've sold 9.8 million dollars worth of WordPress Plugins.”

“So once we've got those plugins out there, customers started sending us requests for new features in that plugin. And sometimes it was best to achieve that, not through a feature, but a completely different plugin. So I would say, get a product out there and t…”

“And we also use lots of WordPress plugins, but in particular, easy digital downloads, which is the e-commerce software that we use to sell our plugins and sort out all the licensing and the download delivery and so on, which costs us about 300 dollars a year.”

“Find two star Shopify WordPress plugins with high usage. So you want low stars, but high usage. That's like the holy grail. So people care about the space, but the experience sucks.”

“I mean, I think WordPress is, is in a challenging position where they are kind of like in the end of their innovation cycle. And I don't think they're in a great position to respond to all of this disruption. So I think like it'll be seen more and more as a bi…”

“Now WordPress has grown to be, yeah, over 40% of all websites in the world, which is 10 x to number two, which right now is Shopify.”

“WordPress was actually a fork of abandoned open source project called B two.”

“I think it was React that they were doing something with the licensing or like a patent restriction on. And the WordPress community actually got Meta to change that and reverse something they were doing to lock it down.”

“I don't know how much of WordPress's code right now is AI assisted or something like that. But I think over the next five years, it definitely approaches maybe a majority.”

“You know, we haven't had a remote exploit in, you know, knock on wood, like I think five years, six years or something.”

“You know, the core features of a CMS, you can kind of write with a few developers in a few weeks or something. Like it's kind of not, you know, it's basically correct operations. But to replicate those 60,000 plugins and themes, gosh, no one's done it. It's a …”

“And again, you don't have freedom unless you're building on open source. That's why more and more companies and people are choosing if they're gonna build a business on top of something else, if you build on an open source, you have that guarantee. Even if you…”

“It has about 700,000 WordPress installs. There's a company called WP Engine.”

“So to save money, they were actually turning off features like revisions. So a cool part about WordPress that actually one of my favorite features is every change to every single post or page is saved forever, just like Wikipedia. So if you make a mistake, you…”

“They would refer to themselves as WordPress engine and client meetings and other things.”

“98% of all the core developers have stayed and contributed and are working on the next version and are supportive”

“And there are other open source projects that have this structure. None of them have been successful as WordPress.”

“Gutenberg is a huge part of why WordPress is relevant today. And it's actually an open source project we do. It's the block editor. It's actually bigger than WordPress. You know, because it's not just used on WordPress. It's used on every WordPress site, but a…”

“If or when I'm gone, I don't want to pass it to a committee. I want to pass it to someone else who can, you know, have a role similar to mine, and really sort of, ah, try to be a steward.”

“WordPress.com, having a free version of WordPress that has introduced, you know, over a hundred million people to the software in a way that you could just sign up for free.”

“Actually we're in the process right now of migrating the half a billion Tumblr sites to WordPress. Probably one of the largest data migrations.”

“WordPress is a commercial failure. They run 60% of the internet, and they're, like, a fraction of the size of even Substack, right?”

“Given that WordPress has shown that they are going to be aggressive, not making themselves out to be a friendly platform right now.”

“So the reason I have this as number six is that if bubble 10 X their pricing or had a big outage, you could rebuild that. And if you're hosted on AWS or using SendGrid or using WordPress, you can rebuild it. The risks are there, but they're lower than if you l…”

“I think you just gotta pick a big mission. We started in In 2003 to democratize publishing. And so that was broad enough that we've been able to stay at that and it's banded and it's evolved over time, of course, like what it means to publish has evolved over …”

“I think we're right now around like 42% of websites.”

“When we started tracking it, we were at .8.”

“One thing that we launched last year was a 100 year plan. Yeah. So you could subscribe to a hundred year hosting plan.”

“Tumblr is not running on WordPress yet, but it will. So we're going to switch Tumblr to be powered by WordPress.”

“The WordPress ecosystem, I would estimate to be about ten billion dollars per year.”

“They were really interested in the real time technologies for collaboration so that you could go to WordPress and like edit posts, what later became the foundation of their block based editor for WordPress five.”

“At max, I would have spent maybe just 50 dollars for lunch or bought an ebook worth 15, 20 dollars to open a dialogue with them. But we spent time in, in building the relationship.”

“Is that the plugin became really big, so it had like a million users. WordPress was growing quite fast, and I suddenly had on this free plugin that I built as a hobby, a million users, and I was spending way too much time supporting it.”

“More than 40% of websites on the web are WordPress sites. And companies like Shopify, and I heard your podcast with Toby, which was awesome, but Shopify has like two, three percent of the market, if that.”

“And honestly, WordPress is out there. So if you, if you're going to use another CMS, I think you're pretty stupid because every other CMS is going to cost you more money.”

“I started using some software called B-II Cafe Log, actually from a developer out of Corsica, France, and you know, started volunteering on the farms, forums, helping other people out, contributing code, and then what happened was that software actually was ab…”

“And shortly after that, maybe a year or two after that, we started to see WordPress show up in like whole internet numbers. And I remember the first time Google did a survey and they found this weird header in HTTP responses that they were like, we're not sure…”

“Initially the problem that I had with WordPress is that it was really oriented with plugins. Like you probably know, kind of anything you want to do in WordPress, you're going to require a plugin to pay for or whatever. Like it wasn't secure, like security bre…”

“I feel like Webflow is probably kind of the game-changing tool as WordPress was at, let's say, in 2008, because you're going to have the possibility to build everything on your own terms.”

“At the moment, there's around 40, 42% of websites on the world on WordPress and just 0.5% on the Webflow.”

“There are maybe some tools that are kind of transitioning from WordPress to Webflow, whatever, but none of them are going to give you great results and are actually going to give you the, all of the benefits Webflow has.”

“How much good the Webflow is because it doesn't have plugins that can be a downside sometimes. Because instead of paying for a plugin five bucks a month, you're going to probably be developing with JS and APIs and kind of everything on the back end to integrat…”

“If you're creating some CMS pages Kind of, you can have only one folder structure versus on WordPress, you will be able to have basically a category, then a post, then maybe another category, then another category, and then that can go pretty deep.”

“With WordPress, you had long development times, you had maintenance, and then you can kind of scale the agency pretty easily. Whereas as we are here kind of just on a runway, like the longest client is around three to six months.”

“I think they've sold like eighty million dollars worth of licenses.”

“I wouldn't go and hire developers on Upwork. That can be one of the hard things just because I started there, but then it became really popular looking at that there are many, that there's a lot of jobs and that the market is booming. So everybody that was a W…”

“Over the last decade have filled a portfolio of companies and WordPress space specifically, some in the SaaS space and collectively are now powering over twenty million websites.”

“And then since then, in the last two years, we've We funded a Shopify app business. We bought a WordPress theme business. We bought a content UI design business subscription business. And then last year we bought a SAS company that helps audio creators market …”

“Myself and the co-founder had never met in person. He was in the UK. I was in Houston, Texas, where I am today.”

“It is majority. So 55% under 24 and under. So it's a young blogging network, which is neat. It's different than WordPress's demographics. It's primarily mobile. 85% of mobile. It's still doing tens of thousands of signups per day.”

“One of the bloggers named Christine thought of this name WordPress, and she called me. She was like, I'm so excited. I'm so excited. There's this name, and the .org is available. You should go for it. And I just fell in love with it. So that's how we chose the…”

“When he came back, he had seen that, like, oh, all these things blossomed out of this thing. And so he looked at all the different forks and very graciously sort of crowned WordPress the official continuation of B-II.”

“So all of the forks, except for one, joined up with WordPress.”

“WordPress at the time of launch probably had like five or six main developers, but dozens and dozens of people would make like one small change or one little tweak to it.”

“Every install of WordPress had links to all the main developers. So because these thousands and thousands of websites were all linking to the word Matt, that would make Google think, oh, these websites, you know, Photomat.net, et cetera, is the number one site…”

“I had gone to CNET and said, hey, WordPress is cool, but it's really complicated to set up. If we can make it easy, you just click a few buttons and you get a WordPress, I think that'd be really popular. Let's do that. And that was my pitch to CNET. And I even…”

“And it's true, the software didn't do most of the things their software did. It was worse in so many ways, but it was better in a way that mattered, which was like speed and ease of use.”