How WordPress created opportunities for everyone

Everybody knows WordPress. It's an open-source content management system powering 40% of all websites. Today, WordPress is celebrating its 20th anniversary and is used and appreciated by any size of business.

The fact that it is an open-source project has helped WordPress from the very beginning. It has one of the largest communities in the world supporting it. From designers and copywriters to hardcore developers.

Plus, it is not only easy to work with WordPress, it is easy to develop for WordPress. We have WordPress themes to define visual side of the site and WordPress plugins to take care of the functionality. And this is where the market appears.

I want to share the story of my full-time job where I work as product manager and how a one-man company became one of the largest businesses in the WordPress ecosystem.

Today, WordPress has a fancy drag and drop editor (called Gutenberg) but it wasn't like that before. It was easy to create an article in WordPress but you had to jump into coding if you wanted to make something more visually appealing. WordPress users were struggling with the interface not made for advanced (and even) regular websites.

To solve the user's problem, a drag and drop plugin Visual Composer (known as WPBakery today) was created. The plugin was one of the first visual page builders that allowed to build a layout by placing elements like images, text blocks, and buttons on the page. You can put them in a line or columns - whatever you wish.

At first, the plugin was just and addition to the WordPress themes created by our CEO out of his bedroom. The idea was simple - "People that will buy my WordPress themes will have this nice feature." That is where natural pivot happened. People started to buy WordPress themes from our CEO more and more, but the reason was not themes themselves - they wanted to get the drag and drop plugin.

The plugin was released separately and made a revolution. It allowed to develop extensions (add-ons). Yes, a plugin for a plugin. That created an entirely new market where early adopters make six figure businesses. Of course, those businesses helped to spread the word around and popularize the plugin.

Today, more than 4.1 million WordPress websites use WPBakery and the team has grown from 1 to 20 full-time employees serving millions of customers worldwide.

The company has also released a completely new products - Visual Composer Website Builder - an extended version of the initial WPBakery (Visual Composer Page Builder) and entered the WordPress hosting market with Indystack.