This weekend ZippyKid will be celebrating their 3rd year in business. Without question, congratulations on that major milestone. It’s tough enough to start a business let alone keep it viable and sustainable!
Vid Luther and his growing team are doing a great job of providing a competitive service to the likes WPEngine and Page.ly as well as Automattic and WordPress.com. Competition is a great thing and it forces businesses to innovate and stay hungry.
What’s neat is that Vid Luther shares a lot more of the backstory of how ZippyKid came together including some choice and encouraging words from Matt Mullenweg himself – he shares this story like so:
In August 2010, I went to the very first Houston WordCamp, where I found out about WP Engine. It turned out that they had started just a few months before I started ZippyKid. I got to meet the original founders, Aaron Brazell and Cullen Wilson.
It turned out they were solving the same problem I was trying to solve. At first I was scared. Aaron’s a big name in the WordPress ecosystem. What could I do better than him?
Fortunately for me Matt Mullenweg was at the WordCamp as well. I doubt he remembers it, but we sat next to each other during a performance talk at WordCamp. In between sessions we talked, and I asked him if he thought a WordPress hosting company was a good idea or not. Would Automattic get upset if I started one?
Matt encouraged me to keep at it. He said it was a great idea and I should do it. When I asked about WP Engine, he said the market was huge, and that I shouldn’t worry about them. There was enough of a market that both of us could succeed and that it didn’t have to be a zero sum game for either of us. Matt taught me a very valuable lesson. Competition is a good thing.
If someone else was investing time and money into this problem, then it’s probably a real problem, not something unique to my small circle of friends.
Love that. It’s why many of continue to do what we do and why we here at WP Daily continue to publish the way we see fit and allow the market to fill in the rest of the gaps.
On another note, I didn’t know the play-on-words with “ZippyKid” using GoDaddy as “SlowDaddy” – that was a riot!
One claim that I did find fascinating is this one by Vid:
We’re trusted by more Fortune 500 companies, state governments and higher education institutions than any other WordPress host.
From a 3rd party perspective (and neutral party) it wouldn’t seem as if this is true but it could very well be fact. I think I may do a bit of digging, at least for my own research, to see how the other WordPress managed hosts compare.
Again, congrats to the team on a job well done!
1 Comment