Member Spotlight: Vito Peleg

Vito Peleg is the founder & CEO of Atarim – the internet’s collaborative layer. They’re the visual collaboration & workflow platform that’s trusted by teams from startup to enterprise to help them ship their best work. Originating from his own needs as a web design agency building sites for clients, realizing that communicating with clients was – by far – the #1 time sink that ate away at project profitability, and, perhaps more importantly, mental sanity. Vito decided it was time to change that by enabling point-and-click collaboration that fills the gap of communication on design work once it’s “real” and out of Figma.

What do you enjoy most about working in WordPress?

Although this is likely the most common response to this question, my answer has to be the community. Thinking back to when we launched Atarim (as WP FeedBack at the time) – I think it’s fair to say that you’d find it hard to come across another community that’s as welcoming and receptive as everyone was to me and to my vision for how WP FeedBack would completely change how agencies operate. And now, years later, it’s crazy to see where the journey has taken us. Both beyond WordPress and beyond agencies, now supporting countless teams across the world to deliver better work as a result of a platform we originally built to solve our own communication bottlenecks. The WordPress CMS itself is still leading the industry – remaining the top CMS among our user base – and the power of the WordPress community is strong.

What do you love most about your Post Status membership?

The ability to network, connect, and level up with some of the brightest product people in WordPress. I think it’s safe to say that no other community has all the amazing faces that Post Status does. This, along with the fact that the community is in Slack, which we already use internally as opposed to another community platform, means that it’s actually active and possible to reach people for deeper 1:1 conversations as well. And last but not least, there’s something that I think speaks volumes about the types of people Post Status has attracted. This is that regardless of who you are, Post Status is the chance for people of any level to connect with other makers, developers, designers – and, dare I say, some of the (if not *the*) best in the industry for advice without having to fear that they’ll be judged for the question they ask.

What business/web/WordPress advice do you have for others in our industry?

My biggest piece of advice is for people to focus on their internal processes and workflows. So many people overlook bottlenecks that ultimately prevent them from scaling their operations beyond where they are now. And above all, the most common reason we see this happen is that teams (and individuals) aren’t looking to identify the bottlenecks and find a way to fix them. I think I can safely say everyone agrees that the WordPress market loves to take their cards out for shiny new tools – i.e., a new form plugin pops up on the market every few months. However, the vast majority are hesitant to invest in solutions that actually stand to improve how their team operates, get work done, and ultimately have a bigger impact. The type of “change” that would impact their day-to-day & big-picture outcomes in a bigger way beyond the type of “change” that primarily stands to shake things up, like trying a new page builder. This is, of course, not to say that new tools shouldn’t be looked at because, naturally, as WordPress people, we love working with new tools – themes, page builders, plugins, you name it – and this is an important part of staying ahead of the curve. But, it’s balancing knowing that with the fact that changing page builder every three months as an agency is not going to be what allows you to build a sustainable, predictable, and calm business if you’re constantly introducing disruptive changes.