Post Status Notes ›
# Go Big or Small, Billions or Just Enough?
ConvertKit founder Nathan Barry wrote a blog post about The Billion Dollar Creator in 2020, mentioning WordPress, WooCommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, WP Engine, and Automattic. Despite the age of the post, it’s a timely one you may have missed. It’s generated a spirited conversation in Post Status Slack about the value of going really big or staying smaller, and the advantages/disadvantages of SaaS.
Several Post Status members batted around the idea of “going big” or “staying small” in the vein of Paul Jarvis’ Company of One.
[CM]: Early on, my (borrowed) mantra as an entrepreneur became “optimize for happiness.” But I would wonder why others stayed solo or “small” (because they could), while I built a team around me (I had to and wanted to). Others would be puzzled and sometimes critical why we did what we did. But I believe, especially in entrepreneurship, “To each their own.”
Go big. Stay small. Go medium. Take money or bootstrap. Part-time or full-time. Hundreds of things, or one. Billions, millions, or enough. Whatever your desired flavor. I liked what I built and respected what others built. That’s the beauty of entrepreneurship — you get to make it what you want it to be. Mute the critics as best you can, and keep on your own path.
Also — Justin Ferriman, co-founder of LearnDash, which was acquired by Liquid Web, and Bryce Adams, founder of Metorik, offer great food for thought in our main Slack channel. Jonathan Wold added perspective on WooCommerce competing with Shopify by building a hosted solution and losing “the benefits of playing in a decentralized ecosystem.”
# Hosting Benchmarks
[CM]: Review Signal released its WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks for 2022 — brilliant work by Post Status member Kevin Ohashi. They had 33 companies participate this year with 79 different plans across 7 different price tiers including WooCommerce plans.
I asked what his high-level impressions were on the testing and results, and Kevin said: “What has stuck out to me is the speed. Everyone is getting faster at all the price tiers. And I expect it to get diminishing returns at a point, but we're still seeing significant gains.”
If I am a consumer, things are looking pretty bright, there's a constant new flow of companies entering the space and growing to meaningful size to compete in these benchmarks. Some of them are offering excellent performance, which pushes everyone to compete — especially the larger companies who have to keep up.
If I am a hosting company, if we're not staying up to date on everything I might be a little scared because there are a LOT of companies out here offering pretty impressive performance. It's going to be harder and harder to convince people that you have some magical 'intangibles' that make it worth it if you aren't also fast. Fast should be the default. Then everything else as well.
Review Signal also shared their load testing scripts on GitHub for testing your own sites, or for building your own testing suite.
# Acquire to Grow, Sell to Focus
SiteCare has acquired Maintainn from WebDevStudios as they turn to focus on their large-scale projects. This is SiteCare’s second acquisition in the WordPress maintenance space.
# Freelance Dev World
Jon Christopher is asking freelance developers: “What's your world looking like right now? What's your typical project looking like task-wise? Mostly front end? Mostly back end? Custom themes or plugins? Full mix? Anyone doing only plugin dev? What are some recent projects you've had that you can anonymize enough to talk about?” Chime in on Post Status Slack.
# WP Communiity
WP.Events is a new site devoted to sharing WordPress community events from the good folks at StellarWP and The Events Calendar.
David Bisset has started an Unofficial Waitlist for WordCamp US 2022 tickets.
From WordCamp Europe — it’s the “aftermovie” for WCEU 2022. Big thanks to everyone involved in organizing and executing on this amazing event!
