Last updated - November 21, 2022
Today at ‘Expert Speaks‘, we have Pablo dos Santos, the CEO of WPFactory.
In this Interview, Pablo talks briefly about his Journey toward Success, his passion for WordPress, and much more inspiring advice for those who want to follow his path.
We thank Pablo for inspiring us with his words of wisdom. We hope you guys enjoy going through his informative answers.
Hello Pablo, Welcome to LearnWoo! How has your journey so far as the CEO of WPFactory been?
Hello, I’d like to thank you for the invitation. Well, challenging and rewarding at the same time. It’s not always easy to understand what users want and to translate it into a solution in a form of a product, not to mention the struggle of managing the different aspects of a company, such as advertising and hiring, for instance. But when we receive positive feedback that our plugins have been able to help our customers and their businesses, it’s very gratifying.
In WPFactory’s current stage of growth, what are some of the new challenges you are facing?
It’s hard to just pick one or two issues, but I believe hiring and delegating have been challenging, and we know this is important to take the next step to keep growing. We’ll keep working on it.
What trends do you see in the industry and how do you see things playing out in the next 5-or-so years?
I think headless sites are still yet to become more popular, and not only to pull and display the regular content from a WordPress site like posts and pages but also to retrieve relevant data provided by any third-party plugin. That’s why it’s important to make plugin data available to the REST API. Besides that, I must say that although I don’t like them so much, visual page builders are here to stay. I know they are not exactly a trend as they have been around for some years now. Maybe the real trend here would be no-code/low code and page builders are just a small part of that. I’d say most of our customers are using it. For the next years, I really hope that Gutenberg becomes more mature and offers better usability. It has improved a lot recently, but in my humble opinion, it’s not quite there yet, however it does have great potential and who knows someday it will be killing page builders.
What are the most helpful technological platforms and tools you have used? Would you implement them in our organization?
We haven’t been using any fancy tools for our products, but I think GitHub actions have been quite handy for us. We generally offer both free and pro versions of our plugins. The free version should go to wp.org while the pro version should be updated on wpfactory.com. To accomplish that we are using an action that automatically deploys the free version to wp.org every time we create a Git tag. We don’t even need to touch SVN. And for the pro version, we have created a custom action that does the same but deploys to our site. Very convenient.
How do you prefer to communicate with your team to assign responsibilities to them?
For the time being, we have been communicating by text only and we have been using Skype. Probably too old-fashioned, isn’t it?
What is the best and the worst part of being a CEO?
The best part is being able to see your idea becoming reality, and that it has the potential to impact many other people. The worst part is that you have to work hard without any promises or guarantees that you’re going to be rewarded anyhow. I was a CEO of a web agency company here in Brazil some years ago and I left to become a regular employee. It was good for some time, but I think having a business of your own changes you somehow, and later, even with the challenges, I decided to entrepreneur again and I don’t regret it. I can only thank Tom, who has invited me to become his partner on WPFactory. He is the founder and the brains behind it.
What are your recommendations for a WordPress novice?
WordPress might look tedious for a novice, as it has been around for some time and it’s built with PHP which developers love to look down on. On the other hand, it still powers about 40% of the web, offers great flexibility, and it has a huge community behind it. It doesn’t matter if you’re using it for just a simple freelance job or to create a custom plugin from scratch. Just go for it.
What important feature would you like to see in future versions of WordPress?
I’d really like to see a simple and native way of creating Custom Meta Boxes, along with custom fields, for different areas of the dashboard, like custom post types, the user page, taxonomies, and so on, all programmatically. Something like the current Settings API but actually easy.
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’m yet to find the perfect balance. Usually, I have the goal of working about 8 hours per day, only on weekdays. However, it’s very common to realize I’m working beyond that, and sometimes even on weekends. When I notice this is happening very frequently, I try to slow down and go back to the initial goal. Apart from that, I’m trying to include in my daily life small pills of entertainment/fun, a little bit of Netflix, guitar, or a pc game. And it’s very important to take a trip or two once in a while. It doesn’t matter if it’s short or if you have plans to work a little bit while traveling. It’s always good to recharge your batteries.
What is the motivation behind your success and what advice do you want to give those who want to follow your path?
I’ve always wanted to create something, to put ideas into practice, like a mad scientist. Combining that with the possibility of working from anywhere, anytime I want with great flexibility is probably the best match for my motivation. For those trying a similar path, I’d say: Try to create something that solves a problem, even if it’s really small. If you do that, you’ll notice it will help other people. If you start listening to the users and keep solving their issues, you’re going to realize a product is growing naturally in front of you. Then, of course, be persistent and you’ll thrive.
