Starting a WordPress business [VIDEO]

There was an awesome interview on vsellis.com.  The featured guest was Cory Miller, the CEO of iThemes, one of the top vendors of premium WordPress themes and plugins.

Miller gave a lot of great insights and advice on starting a business, whether it's related to WordPress or not.

My favorite thing was that he really "deglamorized" the pervasive media myth that you can hack at a laptop and become a billionaire overnight.  Although web-based businesses enjoy numerous advantages over traditional bricks & mortar enterprises, there is still a lot of work involved.  For all the talk about technology, business is still primarily about dealing with people.

I liked Miller's emphasis on testing ideas on the market with customers as soon as possible.  He even said that "perfectionism is a disease."  Get the product out there, get feedback, and iterate constantly.  Everyone thinks they know what people want, until the customers start complaining.

Another eye-opening truth was that web traffic isn't as all-important as it seems.  Miller stressed that it's better to get the right, qualified traffic that converts to sales.  As opposed to trying to get 1 million page views a day.  If you get targeted traffic, it takes a much lower volume of visitors to reach profitability.

One interesting topic was managing his relationships with his competitors.  In many cases, rival WordPress developers are also good friends.  There's a funny part where Miller said half-jokingly, "I don't want to like them, I want to hate them!"  That does make things more complicated.