Today, on ‘Expert Speaks‘, we have Jean-Baptiste Co-Founder & CEO at WP Media.
WP Media was (acquired by group.ONE in April 2021). And built a team of 30+ people based all around the world, helping people have faster websites. Jean-Baptiste loves startups, coffee, surfing, Italian food and Python (not necessarily in that order). And he also does some angel investments.
In this conversation with us, Jean-Baptiste shares his experience as being a CEO and co-founder of a company, his future visions, Work life and industry trends in the current market.
Hello Jean-Baptiste, Welcome to LearnWoo! How has your journey so far as the CEO of WP Media been?
Hi, Thanks for the invitation, the journey has been incredible in so many aspects. It has been very challenging. Indeed in 10 years, WP Media has changed a lot because of our growth and we had to adapt.
Besides, recently I took a new role at WP Media. In 2020 we’ve been acquired by One.com and I decided to resign from my role as CEO at the beginning of 2022 to start a new journey. I’m currently still working at WP Media but only as an advisor.
In WP Media’s current stage of growth, what are some of the new challenges you are facing?
I think the first challenge is hiring and finding good people. A company is built by the people who are working in it. So it’s our mission to find the best talents and this isn’t an easy task. The more we grow, the more we need to hire people, so by nature it becomes more difficult.
What trends do you see in the industry and how do you see things playing out in the next 5 or so years?
It’s impossible to speak about WordPress trends without mentioning Full Site Editing. There is a big focus of WordPress for years now, to improve the end-user experience and facilitate the way we can customize the theme without being knowledgeable in programming.
There is still a tremendous amount of work to achieve that result in an easy way for the user, so I believe this will be still the trend for quite a lot of time.
What are the most helpful technological platforms and tools you have used? Would you implement them in our organization?
We are using quite a lot of tools. Recently the one which has been very impactful is Github Copilot. It’s has been released almost two years ago, and it’s helping us a lot in our daily code. It’s providing suggestions and writes code directly in your code editor. I’m personally using it almost every day, and it’s raising a lot my productivity.
How do you prefer to communicate with your team to assign responsibilities to them?
We are big fans of asynchronous and written communication. Thus we use a variety of tools like;
- Slack (for daily interactions)
- Notion (the Knowledge Base of our company)
- an internal WordPress blog mostly for announcements and updates
- Github for project management
What is the best and the worst part of being a CEO?
The best thing is that your job is constantly evolving as the company is growing, which means that you have to learn a new job constantly. At the same time that’s the worst part as well; indeed when you start to be good at a thing it’s not relevant anymore for the company and you have to learn a new skill.
What are your recommendations for a WordPress novice?
Simply try WordPress in every aspect. Install it locally, install some themes, and plugins, try to write content, to add new features. That’s the best way of learning by practicing.
What important feature would you like to see in future versions of WordPress?
Not necessarily a feature, but in my opinion WordPress is still way too complex for a novice to install, use and manage. There have been a lot of efforts in that direction already, I believe that WordPress is still below its competitors regarding simplicity to use. So WordPress should pursue that goal of being way simpler to use.
Outside of work, what do you enjoy the most? And how do you manage work-life balance as it is quite difficult in today’s time?
I do like a lot of sports in general and DIY. I spend a lot of my “free” time practicing sports, and DIY which includes gardening and some small construction work. And of course spending quality time with my family.
Working from home for me, helped me a lot to manage my work-life balance. Working remotely means that you can work all the time, but also means that you can pause whenever you want.
What is the motivation behind your success and what advice do you want to give those who want to follow your path?
It’s very simple, we simply did something we were passionate about. We were (and still are) passionate about WordPress and Web Performance, which have been translated into: how we can help people have faster websites.
I think that one factor which has been the key to our success was simplicity. Web Performance is complex, our vision is that people shouldn’t spend time and energy trying to have a faster website. So we tried to make the simpler products thus they could focus and their business and not on their Web Performance.
For someone who wants to start a business, I would simply recommend being passionate and focused on the customers.
