The WordPress ecosystem is rife with copycats and we're severely lacking a couple of unique ideas. Due to the popularity of WordPress and the obvious success that designers / developers and businesses have experienced in recent years, many more are flocking to the platform to make a quick buck. Which would've been absolutely fantastic for all those involved, except that these newcomers are not bringing much newness to the table.

In every industry where businesses have experienced significant success, you'll find a lot of "late-adopters" trying to get in on the gold rush. I believe that WordPress is still in its infancy as a ecosystem and as a result I think its a very viable decision for a newcomer to try enter the industry.

The supposed gold rush is most definitely not over and whilst the established players will continue to reap the rewards of being first movers, there is still space for newcomers to make a name for themselves. Yes, it is becoming harder and harder for a newcomer to gain traction when starting out, but it is most definitely still possible.

My problem is that none of these newcomers are bringing any new ideas to the table; instead they have preferred a strategy of emulating the success of the bigger players in the industry. At WooThemes we've often been amused at the varying attempts of newcomers to copy our brand / model / product strategy and yet we're still to be knocked of our perch. I don't say that in an arrogant way, but there's no way that Theme Company A can be as good a WooThemes as WooThemes itself will be. Uniqueness would've however served them much, much better.

To explain this in a non-WordPress context, I love the strategy that the so-hot-right-now flight search engine, Hipmunk, have taken since launch. When they launched, there were many similar services out there, yet they pulled the proverbial rabbit from a hat in tackling a known problem in a very unique way. They Hipmunk'd a whole industry as a result.

I think the whole WordPress community can do with more Hipmunking and less copying.

At WooThemes we've certainly tried to be first movers in a few spaces. Two of these that stand out (to me) are our contribution to the WordPress core with Menu's and all the work we've done to create Tumblr-like functionality in WordPress (which has been a bit of a passion project for me personally).

Another WordPress business that I think has achieved a similar level of first-moving uniqueness is Gravity Forms, which has truly revolutionized any kind of form in WordPress and become a must-have plugin for 99% of new WordPress installations. In a similar way, the "plugin + hosted service" model implemented by VaultPress or ScribeSEO is to be lauded for doing things differently (and being great at what they do of course).

These are the kinda ideas that I believe will add value to the ecosystem and continue to be a driver of innovation in the community. Copycats on the other hand simply dilute the offerings available, which in turn just makes the initial (purchasing) decision that much harder for inexperienced users.

I'm the "business" guy / co-founder over at WooThemes. Our business has 3 co-founders and over the years all 3 of us have evolved our roles to focus on the specific parts of the business of which we're most passionate about.

When we started the company, we were bootstrapping and as a result all 3 of us were hands-on-deck & in DIY-mode in terms of being involved in the actual production of our products, as well all the business & admin stuff. But as we grew the team and hired designers, developers & a support team, our roles changed quite drastically.

So at the moment, my role within the company would be generally regarded as being the "business guy". Most of the writing on this topic tends to agree that a triumvirate of co-founders (a designer, a developer & someone taking care of the business-side of things) is the ideal mix of skills in an online startup. Even though neither of us are exclusively responsible for one part of the business, there are obviously things that I do more and take more responsibility for as a result.

My Responsibilities

This is generally what I spend my days doing:

• I do all of the marketing & tracking of the campaigns.
• I do most of the blogging.
• Exploring potential business development opportunities.
• Networking with whoever.
• Managing collaborations.
• I try coordinate all of our daily / weekly / monthly efforts to assure that we're hitting our strategic aims. I tend to take a step back from individual tasks / projects and take a more holistic look at the stuff we're doing.
• Interacting with the WooThemes community across all channels.

Not a bad job, right? :) Well, whilst this is 100% what I'd like to do every day, it doesn't come without its own set of challenges.

The Challenges

Nothing in life is ever perfect. Remember that! :) Heck, if anything was perfect, life would be pretty boring in that we'd have nothing we could improve on.

These are the challenges of my job as the "business guy" at the moment:

• I haven't been designing or coding for ages, so if I have an idea or the team decides to put a little campaign together, I need to wait for one of the guys on the team to handle the design / code of the project before I can continue with my tasks on that project. This inevitably means that there is gaps between the conceptualization of a project and the execution thereof, which sometimes means it is tough to keep the motivation and momentum going for that project.
• There's a seemingly obvious list of priorities: bugs, products and then everything else. So guess what falls off the radar? Everything else. Guess what a big part of my job is? Everything else... :)
• As a result of the above two points, I generally have items on my to do list that takes ages to tick off. Either they're not top-most priority or I need to wait for someone on the team to "help me out". Neither is wrong, but I don't get the satisfaction of feeling that I've accomplished certain things by ticking them off.
• I obviously understand our products and wouldn't be able to market them without that intimate knowledge. But I don't understand the complexity and detail anymore, as I'm out of the development game. I don't understand why certain bugs are harder to fix and why it seems (to me) that all we do is fix bugs or upgrade existing functionality (instead of developing new, groundbreaking products). I need to take the queue from the rest of the team on this and I think we'd all agree that where communication is involved, it's always a bit of a challenge. :)
• I spend a lot of time trying to tie up loose ends & making sure everyone is on the same page. This doesn't deliver an actual "result" in itself, but does help in getting the work done indirectly.
• Some days I spend the whole day answering e-mail, yet it doesn't feel like I've been working. Self-doubt is a massive issue.

If you've read my blog you'll know that I don't mind being personal and sharing emotions - yes, emotions - in explaining my mindset and experiences as a business owner & entrepreneur. So I don't pretend to think that these challenges are the worst in the world, but I do think they're pretty significant and most co-founders in my position should share similar experiences.

What are your experiences in this regard?

I just finished answering a handful of WooThemes support e-mails and realized that one of the reasons for WooThemes' significant growth & success has been our focus on the minor victories.

See, I could've left those e-mails unanswered for a couple of answers and then Ryan (our Community Manager) would wake up and attend to those e-mails. But instead of making the customers in question wait for another 4 / 5 hours, they received a response much, much quicker and hopefully I was able to resolve their query. That's a minor victory.

In the big / significant victory is just the culmination of these minor victories. Every single time that we manage to help an user with a turnaround time of 30 minutes, instead of 6 hours (which is more than acceptable), we have a minor victory. Plus, we put that user in the position to tell the whole Twitterverse how awesome WooThemes is.

Now imagine what happens when 40 000 users experience these minor wins...

We've just hired our 10th member of the WooTeam: Ryan Ray who will be our new Community Manager.

For me, this has been a natural progression of having a community that now exceeds 45k registered users and also reinforces our belief that community and user interaction is of the utmost importance. In comparison with most other online companies of our size (in user base, revenue and the scope of our operations), our 10 member team is relatively small and we've basically just been hiring new members organically and as we really need them.

There's a couple of reasons why this position specifically is so special and much-needed in my opinion:

• Continuous & real-time interaction with a community is a full-time job, especially when your product is not hosted.
• We'd become efficient in dealing with the massive demands placed on our interaction resources - especially e-mail - and the focus had shifted to efficiency and not delivering a WOW! experience. Whilst we've always been trying our best to give users the best-ever experience, it's simply impossible without the appropriate resources.
• Tech is becoming more and more generic in established markets, which means that user loyalty and community interaction is a massive competitive advantage.

So hell yes, I'm excited about Ryan joining the team and look forward to reporting back positively here. :)

As most of you know, I made the switch from WordPress to Tumblr and then back to WordPress last year. The second migration back to WordPress being a relatively painful & manual-date-entry experience. If I had waited a couple of months, that would've been so much easier...

WooThemes launched our brand new Tumblr2WP tool last week, which basically exports any Tumblr account to WordPress and makes it immediately compatible with WooThemes' tumblog themes, as well as Express.app. Sweet. Heck, we even made it onto Mashable.

With more than 250 Tumblr accounts already exported since launch on Friday, I'd think that there's quite a few people that wants to marry the flexibility of WP with the awesome publishing experience that Tumblr has popularized in the last year or so. And this is exactly what we've been trying to create and enable at WooThemes: we wanted to replicate as much of the great functionality that has made Tumblr popular on our preferred platform (WordPress) and then give you the opportunity to decide which of these platforms you wanted to use.

If you haven't yet and have a Tumblr blog at present, have a look at the new tool and consider a switch...