TechHui

Hawaiʻi's Technology Community

 

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. 


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Replies to This Discussion

Wow so insightful!  Thanks for the great post.  I haven't seen the video yet but just what you highlighted hits several nails on the head - dead on for me!

 

I like the "perfectionism is disease"....I am a sufferer!  LOL!

Fred, glad my post was useful for you.  The video is a bit long at 50 minutes, but the insights are worth every second.  I'm so happy to have a place like TechHui to share this stuff.

 

And I agree with you on the perfectionism.  I'm one of those people with a bunch of domain names and got lots of nice WordPress themes bookmarked.  My next step is building a site for my web design business.  (Specializing in WordPress, naturally!)

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