November 2013 • Page 2 of 3 • Post Status

ZippyKid relaunches as Pressable, makes changes to business

ZippyKid is a managed WordPress host that’s been around around three and a half years. They have grown their business consistently since their launch in May 2010, and today have a number of high profile blogs and corporate profiles as part of their client portfolio.

Vid Luther, founder of ZippyKid, has been a PHP consultant and performance engineer in the hosting industry since 1998. I’ve met Vid a few times now, and we’ve also stayed in touch online the last couple of years. His technical savvy and understanding of the market is very evident when I talk with him.

ZippyKid has a solid hosting product. But hosting isn’t all about your product. It’s a competitive industry, and even the WordPress managed space has started to get crowded with options that are often tough to differentiate as an outsider. Being a solo founder with a very strong technical background, marketing and messaging has not been Vid’s forte. He’s admitted this openly on sites like Quora.

To date, ZippyKid has successfully grown from nothing to over 1,200 customers and a nine employee company (plus two more starting soon). That’s a net growth rate of about one customer every day. They are profitable and their burn rate is low, meaning they’ve made efficient use of funds raised from their outside investors.

They’ve experienced consistent, linear growth over a sustained period. Their growth pattern has allowed them to invest heavily to serve existing customers well while onboarding new customers. Rackspace, the largest hosting company in the world, provides the data centers and networking infrastructure for ZippyKid/Pressable and their customers. Rackspace bought one of the hosting companies Vid was the lead systems administrator for in 2003. Since then he’s been close to the senior leadership at the $5.8 billion company.

Some of the original founders of Rackspace are investors and have an advisory role in the company.

I got to see Vid as he came out of Rackspace with the expertise he needed to attack this [managed WordPress hosting] the way it should be… it is not just technology, its about service expectations. If you don’t deliver it in a way that can be consumed it doesn’t matter.

– Dirk Elmendorf, Founder of Rackspace

ZippyKid is now Pressable

ZippyKid’s next step in their growth is to rebrand and restructure some of their business. They are changing their name to Pressable and restructuring their hosting plans to better serve existing customers and market to new customers.

UpThemes retires all old themes, sets clean slate for the future

UpThemes has retired all of their old themes, and released their first new theme. … Read more

WPML 3.0 introduces new GUI and better eCommerce support

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I can haz braces?

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Turn WordPress into a Twelve-Factor App

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Theme frameworks explained in an animated infographic

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The BuddyPress default theme is being phased out

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Basis, a business theme with an intuitive content builder

basis The Theme Foundry has released their vision of a business WordPress theme, called Basis. Basis is yet another theme by The Theme Foundry that reiterates why I like having them as a partner. Basis has a content builder in it that allows site owners to easily create dynamic pages.

The content builder is pretty awesome. I installed and configured Basis with a home page template, using the content builder, in less than ten minutes. For an app, product, or small business, Basis lets you put a website together ridiculously quickly.

But what I like best is that all of the markup is stored both in the_content() and in post meta. This makes your content you create with Basis transferrable to another theme, and you only lose styles. This makes it a markup builder as much as anything, and the possibilities for how this concept could be transferred elsewhere are exciting.

I talked to Zack Tollman, the developer of the content builder, about Basis. I told him that this would get a lot of comparisons to drag and drop frameworks. He understood that, and it’s something The Theme Foundry talked about a lot before they did this theme.

It’s not a drag and drop theme that is made for businesses.
It is a business theme that had hard to arrange layouts that warranted a more complex layout UI that we were compelled to build.

Basis isn’t trying to be a framework. It’s trying to be a business theme. Their goal isn’t to target the drag and drop framework market. But I must say, the intuitiveness of the Basis content builder is impressive. In fact, it’s why I write this post. I’d love to see what the WordPress could learn from this for the CEUX (Content Editing User Experience) project. Unfortunately that project is on hold right now.

This video of the Basis content builder in action better shows how good it is:

WordPress for large scale publishing

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Interview with Mark Forrester, co-founder of WooThemes

Last week I had the pleasure of visiting WooThemes HQ in Cape Town, South Africa. Throughout the week I had the opportunity to interact with WooThemes’ co-founders Mark Forrester and Magnus Jepson, as well as the rest of the Cape Town based managers and Woo Ninjas. It gave me a great opportunity to see the inner-workings of one of WordPress’ largest commercial theme and plugin business.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting a handful of interviews and analysis about my trip and time there, to give you the insight I gained on what it’s like to work for and at WooThemes. The goal is so that those of you that wonder what the grass is like on the other side can see just that.

My first interview is with WooThemes co-founder Mark Forrester. WooThemes started only five years ago, and now is a multi-million dollar business that supports more than thirty employees. I talked to Mark about the beginning, the initial growth of the company, and the evolution they’ve made from “just” a theme business to a mostly plugin business.

Direct Download

The early days

Hearing the history of WooThemes was enlightening. They started so early in the market that they really had no idea just how sustainable such a business could be. Each of them had personal brands they’d been building up and some of them even had other ventures they were working on simultaneous to the early days of WooThemes.

WooThemes cut their teeth by delivering features to themes that made websites not feel, “like a blogging platform.” Features that are taken for granted today were brand new five years ago: featured sliders, grid layouts, etc.

It wouldn’t be the same journey today

When WooThemes entered the market, the market was ripe for them.

We’ll all agree, the three of us co-founders, that we had a lot of luck being at the right time at the right place. I think entering the market now is a completely different ballgame and a lot more difficult. … It’s a very competitive space and I think a lot more research is required as to what specific niche you can sort of cater for within WordPress users.

Mark says that if they were entering the market today, they would need to take many steps that they didn’t have to do when they started. Similarly, in order to stay relevant, they can’t rest on their laurels when there is so much competition out there today. They utilize data and research in order to make decisions as to their next theme or product.