I have the honor of sitting down with legacy WordPress entrepreneur Alex King of Crowd Favorite in today’s episode.

Rounding off my release of big name WordPress agency founders, Alex paints the portrait of his 10+ year WordPress career. We cover the recent acquisition from VeloMedia to learning the hard lessons of building a team.

Many successful founders find themselves faced with new challenges that were not listed on the roadmap to success they were carrying. Mr. King is no different and we’ll hear how he navigated that terrain.

Alex King of Crowd Favorite

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Do interesting stuff, create value, and success will happen

Here’s what I have never heard from a successful entrepreneur:

“I looked at what the other guy was doing and copied them.”

Now, that’s not so say you can’t look at the competition and do it better – but that’s a different discussion. Enter in Alex King who has been working with WordPress before it was even WordPress. Building plugins and products based on his own desires and then finding a customer fit secondary.

If you’re naturally interested in building solutions that are creating value for you, chances are it’s solving this need for someone else in the world. So while you might find it advantageous to scour CodeCanyon and pick the top seller, remember that’s a short game maneuver.

Investing in a team

There’s a strong undercurrent of the right team and culture across many of the guests I sit down with.

Founders like Jake, Brad, and Shane all echo the importance of investing in the employee (read: team) before anything else. Arguably this is the biggest challenge of a small startup to century old businesses.

Here’s the thing: It’s going to change over time.

As you evolve, as your company evolves, so will the culture and the people. You need to be aware of this change and embrace it when the time comes.

I want you to really listen to the tone of Alex’s voice and you can hear that there are hard lessons learned. Rightfully so. If there was a starter guide to all of this, the whole game would be quite boring wouldn’t it?

Apologies on the recording

Looks like I messed up the audio and recorded with my webcam and not my Rode podcaster. Sometimes the USB cable pulls out when I move the boom. I hope you do make it all the way through because it was a great one.

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