Building businesses on WordPress

This past weekend I had the pleasure of giving a talk at the wildly successful WordCamp Miami (over 300 people!). My original plan was to show off our first month’s experience with PressBackup and how to launch a service around WordPress. We unfortunately didn’t have the data ready or lots to show as we’re still mid-soft-launch on it, and AppliedSEO wasn’t ready for launch either. So I pivoted my talk, and shifted to the opportunities available around WordPress.

There were two key themes to my talk: What are the pain points to solve, and what are the opportunities to be had in these areas. A key theme was to build SCALABLE businesses around the ecosystem, a point I want to keep harping on. I’ve embedded the slides below, but will summarize what I think are the key things we should all be looking at.

• Market Size: 40 Million+ WordPress powered blogs, 6% of all websites run WordPress.
• Ecosystem already in the 50+ Million range.
• WordPress.com premium themes could be a $10-20M business for theme developers in year 1
• There are still a number of pain points still present in market
  • Complexity
  • Security
  • Deployment/Management
  • Design
  • Functionality

I think any of these points can be solved and turned into a multi million a year business. Remember there are still MILLIONS of small business owners who don’t have a web presence and using WordPress would still be too hard (and too easy to break). People don’t want input boxes, they want to double click and edit in place.

Think these things over, let me know what you think, and I hope you enjoy the slides!