Why small can be just the right choice

I feel honoured to write an essay for HeroPress. While thinking about what I should write about, I wanted to make sure it will be helpful to others.

Of course, everyone’s goals are different. My partner Manuel and I started to create WordPress products, because we saw the opportunity to build a small business and keep it a business we both felt comfortable to work in over the years. And that’s what we did. We love to travel and searched for a way to live the nomad lifestyle long before the term was even a thing. We travelled and worked on our blog and themes. And don’t get me wrong, it was not easy in the beginning. We had to build an audience first, so we wrote blog posts about everything we learned while keeping financially afloat with small client projects. We put endless hours of work into our blog, before even dreaming of one day earning income just with our themes. But we loved every minute of it.

We worked from Thailand, Sri Lanka and New Zealand, and we felt creative and free.

We went to WordCamps and creative conferences along the way and met so many new people with similar values and goals.

Having these experiences formed our way of thinking about the way we wanted to work moving forward. The benefits of being a small team of two seemed so obvious to us. We could make decisions fast and react to new trends without asking anyone for permission. As long as we built something others liked, we would always be ok. So that’s what we focused on. We built one theme after the other and loved the creative freedom this work gave us. The positive feedback and listening to the stories our customers shared on how our themes helped them reach their goals kept us going.

Living abroad

As we could work remotely from any location. We didn’t need an office or a local team. Keeping our business so flexible allowed us to move from Germany to New Zealand in 2015. After about two years working towards it, we were able to apply for a business visa and eventually for permanent residency four years later. Living away from family is never easy, but the opportunity to live in another country surely teaches us so many valuable lessons we would never want to miss. It’s a true gift, all made possible by our small WordPress business.

Reacting to changes

Fast-forward to 2018 and the WordCamp Tokyo, where we first got the chance to dig deeper into the Gutenberg project during contributor day. We knew changes were coming, and we needed to react with our business. Even before, we felt that building one theme after the other felt a bit tiresome and not like the most effective way for WordPress users to build their site design. We were never convinced by the page builder solutions, as it just seemed too bloated and untrue to WordPress core to bring a wow effect to us. We love to keep things flexible and minimal, and adding an entire framework on top of WordPress never felt like a great idea to us.

So here comes this Gutenberg thing, a promise to a more flexible, component based way of creating designs for WordPress.

We felt like this is meant to be for us. So once home from the WordCamp we started to build blocks and explore how this new WordPress would work. We did not realize back then how big these changes would become and how much it would impact our work and our business.

But it felt good to build something new and to try to find a better solution to offer for our theme customers. We struggled to gain footage for quite some time, as there were just so many new technical things to figure out and so much was unclear. But we still never doubted that we are on the right track, as with every new release the opportunities seem to get better and more stable.

And just now we are just about to relaunch our business websites with a brand-new block theme that is solely built with our blocks, WooCommerce blocks and WordPress core blocks. It finally feels like all the work comes together and themes and the Gutenberg project are ready to be merged into one and released for production.

Opportunity to pivot

During all these changes, we had the time to think about the future of our WordPress business and what we want our road ahead to look like. Many others around us have sold their independent businesses or took a job at one of the big WordPress businesses. I feel like it’s also a natural path of WordPress and all of us growing up.

For us, we feel like we are just getting started again, finally having found a way to have fun creating for WordPress again.

Building one of our last classic themes, we felt like we had lost the fun in designing for WordPress. We felt like themes were stuck, being either too inflexible and or way too bloated to be any good. It felt like we were trying to build, squeeze out a solution into a product that technically was never meant to be this way.

Block themes, the site editor, patterns, and blocks come as a chance for us to do it better. It’s a big shift and a difficult project to pull off, for sure. WordPress is used by so many people in so many ways. But block themes make WordPress lighter, and they don’t stand in the way of other add-ons as much as classic themes felt they were. It’s amazing how we can take all the components apart and mix and match them together. There are still missing pieces, but we are getting there.

For us, we are taking this shift that we are sort of making together with WordPress, as an opportunity to make things better. We always felt like we wanted to offer more support and help to our customers. But we never found the time. So with our upcoming relaunch, we are taking the chance to change that. We will offer new services and are exploring more ways to offer our customers what they actually need. It feels like a breath of fresh air to us, and we haven’t had so much fun with WordPress in a long time.

It’s funny, who would have thought that a piece of software can impact your life in such a big way.

WordPress has impacted where we live, who our friends are and which destinations we like to visit. We feel more open-minded because of WordPress, we believe in the power of open source projects and we believe that a group of people from all over the world can build something meaningful together.