Time to start over
by Paul CoxIt's safe to say that this idea has been validated now. We have 1000 customers and $42k MRR. When we started we wanted to be the best website builder for churches. We used WordPress to get up and running quickly and put a ton of effort into custom functionality. Basically, you can't install a plugin and rebuild what we have currently done.
I went down the route of building a headless option for WordPress using React for a custom Admin Interface. It worked great but at the end of the day, it was still hacking WordPress to get it to do what we wanted.
A month ago, I decided to start fresh and give myself two weeks to build something custom. I focused on Authentication, Stripe Subscriptions, and a simple UI. It worked great! So well, that I can't imagine not using this moving forward.
Today, I forked my repo and started Version 2 of Version 2.
Wish me luck!
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1
very cool. keep going. churches need this.
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1
Are you moving away from WordPress completely, then?
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Yes. After I ran a test on a new system, the benefits we so clear. We aren't really using Wordpress now for anything more than Auth and a dashboard so moving away gives us more freedom to do more than websites.
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1
I'm curious, what did you move to instead of Wordpress? I'm new to the CMS space and there are so many
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2
It's completely custom. I'm using Node/React/Postgres to build a CMS from scratch.
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1
Nice! I've been contemplating that as well, looking at the CMS landscape it's either Wordpress/Drupal, newer but not quite as robust tools, or paid tools. Do you think you'd do this custom build without the 4+ years of exp with a CMS under your belt?
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2
If I had already had a custom CMS starting point to use, I would have used that. At the time, I was using Wordpress for most all the work I was doing. It let me move quickly and still write custom code. I'm glad I started this way. Now that we have enough customers and revenue we can afford to build the product I really want and that will let us run for the next 10 years.
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