Betting on WordPress

Entrepreneurship is the art of giving life to ideas. However, these ideas and visions do not turn into reality without hard work and effort. Success depends on an individual's dedication, and on knowing when to lead and collaborate for the best results.

A glorious example of successful entrepreneurship in Bangladesh's IT industry is M Asif Rahman. He is the owner of a renowned conglomerate named Startise. Formerly, the company was called WPDeveloper. Behind the transformation from WPDeveloper to Startise lies an incredible story which is worth telling.

The journey of WPDeveloper started a few years ago with only a few members. It focused its mission on enhancing the WordPress platform, by creating tools that help users to easily create websites. Now, the company has over 120 members who are constantly helping the team achieve new milestones every year, leading to the company's fast and steady growth.

The founder, M Asif Rahman, said, "I started working with WordPress because of its very easy ways of creating a website. Over time, WordPress has evolved into a Content Management System and developed as an open-source platform. As it grew, WordPress started to build its own ecosystem of plugin developers, businesses, and entrepreneurs. We saw an opportunity to market WordPress and the economy around it and build tools to enhance it. So that's how we started our business with a few solutions for the platform."

Entrepreneurs need to have qualities like discipline, passion, resilience, vision, and adaptability among others. And this is how M Asif Rahman, the founder and Namul Hasan Rupok, the co-founder of Startise truly are. The moves they have taken, over the years, have helped build something truly remarkable in Bangladesh's IT industry which has made it a leading force in the sector, globally.

Nazmul Hasan Rupok, the co-founder and managing director of Startise said, "When I joined WPDeveloper as a partner and CEO, my goal was to boost and grow the products I had already created to reach a larger audience. I had been building plugins and digital solutions on my own, but I realised that in order to achieve major growth and effect, I required the support of a strong, talented team. Partnering with Asif Rahman was a strategic choice based on his knowledge, leadership, and existing resources at WPDeveloper."

In Bangladesh, a multitude of entrepreneurship scopes and models are available, such as FinTech, EdTech, AgriTech, Social Enterprises, Healthcare, Renewable energy, eCommerce, etc.

There are enormous opportunities that Bangladesh holds in the IT sector in building global tech solutions including SaaS for the eCommerce ecosystem, or related to AI, and in developing top-notch quality IT products that can be sold globally.

Among these sectors, Bangladeshis are doing very well in this WordPress segment; the number of companies working successfully with WordPress products and serving users globally is far ahead of India, which was unimaginable even five years ago. If one tries to find WordPress plugin companies from India and Bangladesh, their number of downloads, revenue, and a number of resources are tried, and Bangladesh is far ahead.

In that case, WPDeveloper, a Bangladeshi company that is empowering over six million users globally, had an unimaginable impact. Over time, the company started developing more WordPress plugins. It currently has more than 30 WordPress products. And now the company is serving more than six million users to build their website. What's notable is that one of the most popular WordPress plugins, "Essential Addons for Elementor," the biggest website builder for WordPress, has been developed by WPDeveloper. Now, Essential Addons is used by more than two million website creators from over 180+ countries.

Building a good culture: As over 120 team members are currently working here, the main secret of this is the company is very employee-friendly, focusing on employee satisfaction, benefits, and rewards. The most highlighted event of the year is the Profit Share Distribution event. The event's main purpose was to recognise the extraordinary efforts of its employees by sharing profits among them. Startise is one of the first private local companies in Bangladesh to share its profits with employees and appreciate the team effort and collaboration needed to achieve its milestone. It became the company culture as it has been celebrated since 2021.

Besides, other cultures are celebrated here, like Yearly Retreats at the national or international level, Annual Sports Day, PithaUtshab, BoshontoUtshab, Women's Day, and many more.

Employees get time flexibility in the office, where in the maximum office, the working time is fixed for employees. Along with this, there are monthly rewards, free training sessions and courses allocated for the team members if needed, free Netflix access options, an opportunity to have a MacBook, paternal and maternal leave, and so on.

Transformation from WPDeveloper to Startise: In 2019, they started working in the 'Software as a Service (SaaS)' sector. That same year they launched their first SaaS product, easy.jobs. It is an AI-powered hiring solution that is currently helping 15,000+ agencies improve their hiring management.

The team has another WordPress template cloud named Templately that helps users to design websites with its vast template library of 5000+ ready designs for popular website builders of WordPress. Currently, 750K+ Web pages have been designed using Templately by 300,000+ users.

Besides, this company started developing various apps, under Storeware, for the global e-commerce platform, Shopify. And at the beginning of the year 2024, this company launched its web-hosting service for WordPress, named xCloud. With xCloud servers, users can easily host, deploy, and manage their websites.

This is how their different brands are made -- WPDeveloper, Templately, easy.jobs, Storeware and xCloud. And to bring all of them in one place, they established a new parent company, Startise.

The CMO of the company, Afshana Rahman said, "Startise is more than a name, more than a brand -- it's a promise of innovation in tech and beyond. We are looking forward to redefining what's possible from Bangladesh and helping globally to achieve sustainable business growth using our solutions."

The co-founder, Nazmul Hasan Rupok said, "I see Startise as a pioneer in establishing new standards for quality and user experience. This means not only growing our product offerings but also focusing on how we can better serve our customers by solving their most pressing challenges."

Challenges: Asif Rahman talked about the challenges he faced while expanding this company. He said "When we started this business, the main challenges we faced in the workforce. Because most of the engineers in our company weren't previously experienced in the WordPress field and related technology like PHP and Javascript. So we had to train them. Then when we started focusing on SaaS and Shopify, all the technology we were working on was very cutting-edge. All our Shopify apps are built with Remix, which is the latest technology."

He added, "Our company is not venture-backed. We are a bootstrap company. Our growth always depends on how much we can save, and how we are able to expand. That's how we detect things like what kind of product we should build next and what will be the most trendy in this ecosystem."

Advice for aspirants: For future BD entrepreneurs, Asif Rahman suggested, "Build locally but sell globally and focus more on international markets. I think we have a significant issue in terms of marketing and sales. Unless we could go truly global, we cannot grow our business much more profitable and stable."

Asif Rahman also believes there are plenty of jobs in Bangladesh in the programming world. But the problem is that there are very few people with the skillset. For example, those who know technical things like JavaScript, Python, or PHP very well should not have any problem getting a job. But if they don't have a good skill set, then there is a problem in getting a job. Apart from that, everyone should adopt communication skills, teamwork skills, leadership skills, and time management skills. However, there are ample job opportunities in Bangladesh in the IT industry.

[email protected]