Member Spotlight: Vikas Singhal

Vikas Singhal is the founder & CEO of InstaWP & ExpressTech. He is on a mission to make WordPress simple to use so that anyone from a beginner to an expert enjoy working with it, however this mission comes from his own pain point when he was running a plugin company named ExpressTech. His team was always struggling with a quick way to launch a WordPress website and using a local dev environment.

Vikas comes from a very small town in central part of India, his passion for computer science became evident he sold his first piece of software at the age of 14 for $100. He started using WordPress in 2017, to build a website for his brother’s online business. This led him to build a plugin and theme company (ExpressTech) and now he is working full time to achieve his mission with InstaWP.

What he enjoys most about working in WordPress:

Vikas is a programmer at heart and by profession as well. WordPress brings in the best of both world – quick & easy way to launch websites and ability to tinker with almost anything inside the most used CMS.

During the course of building a website for his brother, back in 2017, they had a custom requirement for the ecommerce website. To his surprise, there were things called as “plugins” which allowed to customized anything. So he quickly whipped up a plugin and made it work, which eventually led to the creation of his plugin/theme company.

Apart of this, the joy of working with WordPress community it just amazing! He started attending WordCamps in 2023 (very recent) and saw something which is very special – acceptance of new people into the community.

What he loves most about his Post Status membership:

Back when InstaWP was just a simple side-project, Vikas announced the Beta version on Post Status and Twitter (now X). He received tremendous amount of feedback and early adopters from a simple post in the #club channel.

This made him believe in the power of communities and Post Status membership is one of those special / dear to heart ones. In terms of pure $$, it pays itself multiple times over by the sheer quality of members in the group.

You can directly chat with esteemed members of the WordPress community right from Matt, Syed, Carl and many others. There is so much to learn and adapt from others sharing in this awesome community.

What business/web/WordPress advice does Vikas have for others in our industry:

Vikas’ advice to people want to start their own business is simple – just ship it and don’t waste time perfecting your first version.

He wasted almost 8 years of his life working on stuff which was already redundant. He was afraid of failure and never followed his passion. He believes that people should maximize their potential and don’t let fear of outcome cloud your judgement. If you are not sure, build a MVP in the side and show it to people in our community, specially via groups like Post Status. Build a safe passage from your full time job to a full time business. No need to jump ship completely blind.

Go out there and explore yourself! You will not regret it 🙂