Magnus Jepson

Loved this TEDx Talk by Norwegian comedian Harald Eia on why socialist Scandinavia is a breeding ground for rich people.

Had a good time at WordCamp Norway listening to talks about WordPress being used for sites like Miljøpartiet De Grønne, Fnugg.no and United Influencers.

Talking to agencies like Dekode, Maksimer and Making Waves, it is good to hear WordPress gaining momentum in Norway and making a shift against proprietary CMS’s like Episerver for the enterprise clients.

We use BuiltWith to measure WooCommerce growth and compare to our competition. They just updated their entire database which includes 332 million domains, and WooCommerce just passed a million websites (up from 900k). The new number is 1,111,882 sites running WooCommerce which is close to WordPress.org usage stats of 1+ million sites with the plugin installed.

This is pretty amazing for an eCommerce platform which is just over 4 years old, but shows the powers of open source and WordPress.

I told the WooThemes story at Internetdagarna in Stockholm.

Our @mjepson telling the Woo story at #ind15 in Stockholm #wordpress #wpdagen RT from @bloggcoach 🙂 pic.twitter.com/ErAvFOUY4J

— WooCommerce (@WooCommerce) November 23, 2015

#WordPress powers 25% of the Internet. #WPbiz #WPdagen #woothemes pic.twitter.com/hbGOmj0Pbr

— Johan Bergqvist (@JohanBergqvist) November 23, 2015

Magnus Jepson, @mjepson, från @WooThemes på #wpdagen #wpmeansbizness #ind15 pic.twitter.com/kZb9cqsRWF

— Therese Davidsson P (@tdavidsson) November 23, 2015

Looks like Drupal is upping their marketing budget #ind15 pic.twitter.com/muijtJmaOp via @marcybarcy

— Magnus Jepson (@mjepson) November 23, 2015

Preparing slides for the @woothemes story at Internetdagarna conference in Stockholm tomorrow #IND15 pic.twitter.com/8DM5pKICe9

— Magnus Jepson (@mjepson) November 22, 2015

When we launched WooCommerce back in 2011, WordPress only powered 13,1% of all websites online, but it has almost doubled that since then, and now powers a whopping 25% of all sites on the Internet.

I think open source generally grows stronger and more secure the more popular it is and more people it has working on it. We all benefit from a common platform we can build on and then differentiate on top of it, instead of reinventing the wheel over and over again for no good reason.

You can read more on Matt’s blog.

Back in 2012 we had a talented designer do some posters for WooThemes dubbed WooVille, and this is one of my favorites. I’m in the process of getting our WooVille comic series printed as posters for my home office. Sitting at 25 people, we managed to double in size over the next three years before we were acquired by Automattic.

Hiring people that don’t live near you or your office is becoming more common, and we have embraced this from the start at WooThemes (and Automattic).

At WordCamp Europe, Tom Wilmot from Human Made did a great presentation on this: