WordPress is an entrepreneur’s dream, both when they use it for their business and when they use it as their business. WordPress offers both a lucrative and an ethical business environment that new India needs desperately. That’s why we caught hold of six CEOs who use WordPress as or for their business and asked them three questions!
What role does WordPress play in your organisation?
Arun We are a media network company that operates five different portals; all of them run on WordPress. So needless to say, it plays a pivotal role in our organisation. WordPress is the foundation on which we build our castles on!
Amit Since 2010, WPoets has been providing services and solutions exclusively around WordPress.
Premanshu We design and develop websites using WordPress as a CMS. As most of our clients are SMEs and MSMEs, using WordPress allows us to provide them with many features and be cost effective at the same time.
Preetinder WordPress is an important part of our service offerings in Design & Development of websites and applications to clients across the world. We have been using WordPress for about 7 years and have built several web applications, business directory solutions, college / university websites and personal blogs.
Rahul In a way the inception of rtCamp started thanks to WordPress. I started blogging on WordPress in 2007, developed first plugin in 2008, started one of the first WordPress-only consultancy company in 2009.
Year after year, WordPress has made it bigger and better for us. 🙂
Karthik A major part of our revenue comes from selling WP related products (themes, plugins) and services (support, hosting). We use WP based websites for almost everything in our company. Also, all of our inbound marketing leads are generated from blogs that are run on WP
What is the one most important quality of WordPress that makes it great for your business?
Arun It is the extensibility of WordPress that appeals to us most. WordPress started as a blog platform, but today WordPress can be anything you want to it to be. It can be a community portal, a forum, an ecommerce site, a video site, a document management system or anything for that matter. When you couple this with a large passionate community, WordPress becomes a unbeatable proposition. That’s what we love about WordPress
Amit One of the primary reason is that it is the easiest CMS to work with, both for a user as well as a developer. Community support around the project is also very good compared to many other similar open source CMSes.
Premanshu One. You are kidding, Right ! The constant innovation, vast, helping community, huge number of contributors, the freedom to use/modify those contributions, ease of use, low learning curve for new users, built-in functionality to mange content… I can actually go on and on talking about why WordPress plays the central role in making our average business, a great business.
Preetinder The most important quality is its ease of use and its wide spread use among technical and non-technical users. This allows us to cut down our training time considerably, which otherwise we would have to spend on creating documentation and presentations on using any custom built system.
Other important factors are its vast and supportive user community and plugin ecosystem which easily allows you to find a plugin or theme for almost every use case / situation.
Rahul We never thought about it when we started with WordPress. I was a student in 2007 and started blogging with WordPress first. I loved the platform and just went on exploring it further. In fact I learned PHP and proper web development only after I started using WordPress.
But when I look back, I think I enjoyed being part of WordPress community. You never felt alone when working on WordPress.
So single most important quality of WordPress is the large and active community WordPress s!
Karthik Plugins and themes are available from thousands of premium providers. This brings down the cost of deploying solutions based on WP. Also, the large following and adoption by the developer, blogger and business communities creates a strong demand for WP based services and products!
Is it a good idea to start a new business revolving around WordPress?
Arun Yes, WordPress is growing and it will keep growing. The potential is immense!
Amit Absolutely! Popularity of WordPress is increasing day by day and WordPress already powers 23.3% of the top 10 million websites. WordPress is now being used more like a PHP framework, and that has opened the room for many more useful solutions.
Premanshu If I were doing business on any other platform, I would have said NO, because we don’t want competition 🙂 But that’s the beauty of WordPress! The more businesses start revolving around WordPress, the better it gets for us all. From profitability point of view, working with WordPress is highly recommended since there are a lot of resources already available and the ROI is great. So yes it is absolutely a good idea to start a new business with WordPress at its core.
Preetinder Yes, absolutely. Apart from the lucrative services business of creating and maintaining WordPress websites for clients, WordPress serves a good example of a great ecosystem for creating a product to support a niche or generic requirements. We have already seen several success stories of plugins, themes and complete businesses built around WordPress. WooCommerce, ElegantThemes, Appthemes, WPCurve are good case studies.
We, ourselves, are working on a new business idea around WordPress which is currently in beta/invite-only mode.
Rahul Of course, yes! WordPress powers every 4th site in the world. If you consider only the CMS market share, it’s every 2nd website.
This is a very large market to target, for both a product company or a consultancy!
Apart from typical product and consultancy companies, WordPress has specialised hosting, security and all kind of other focused businesses.
Karthik Yes, as with any business, it is good to start in a space where there is a strong demand. Right now there is very strong demand for WP products and services. For a small business, WP is a great place to start.
Though there is high demand, the barrier to entry is very low, so you have to quickly differentiate, else growth will be difficult. Once you find a niche to build presence in, there is a lot of potential to grow.
It’s unanimous then; it’s a great idea to start and run a business revolving around WordPress or at least a business that starts with WordPress. The demand is huge and the opportunity plenty. Also, the chief reason WordPress is so great for business is because it is backed by a great community (that is YOU, my friend).
So, if you have such plans you know who to say Hi to at WordCamp Pune (there are way more of them than the six here) for some business advice! You can also see this vibrant community in action and know what makes WordPress so special.
Arun and Karthik are speakers at WordCamp Pune, Premanshu is the most energetic organiser, and Amit and Rahul are both speakers and organisers and Preetinder is someone whose organisation has sent us great volunteers in great numbers. See the list of speakers and of organisers for a more detailed introduction.
Since Preetinder isn’t featured there. Here’s a brief introduction:
Preetinder is Founder & CEO of CityIT and loves all things open source. He is a regular contributor & promoter of open source software.
He has built his team and company around two popular open source systems WordPress & Drupal and is using & following WordPress / Drupal from about 9 years and can help you build almost anything using Open source software.
He believes passion and persistence are keys to success and everyone should follow their passion. When not working on new ideas / opportunities, he loves to spend time with his family and exploring new places.
Every Friday till August the 28th, we’ll carry a similar post featuring short interviews with six people working with WordPress with a common role, context or situation. 6 posts about 6 groups of 6 people each that you can meet on 6th Spetember at WordCamp Pune 2015!
Alexander Gounder is a web design and SEO professional running a digital agency called 
Nisha Singh spoke at the last WordCamp Pune and it was the first time someone was doing a session in Hindi! She’s back at WordCamp Pune 2015 to guide us with How to build a good quality WordPress theme and that too, in Hindi! Now how about adding your own theme to WordPress.org repository?