When Programmer become Founders #2
Discovering Wordpress
My co-founder Gaurav and I have been bootstrapping Origins AI for around eight months, and it’s been nothing short of an adventure.
The Beginning: Teaching AI to Fresh Graduates
Origins AI started with a simple idea: democratizing AI education for fresh graduates. With AI dominating the tech world, we believed there was a gap in bridging theoretical knowledge and practical implementation. Our plan? To build a course that would make AI approachable, actionable, and accessible.
As developers, we could have gone the hard-core engineering route: spinning up our own servers on AWS, building a custom platform with Next.js, deploying CI/CD pipelines, and managing our own infrastructure. But we didn’t.
Why? Because we realized early on that speed matters more than perfection, especially when you’re bootstrapping. Our goal was to validate the idea quickly, so we made a decision that surprised even us: we chose WordPress.
Discovering WordPress and Hostinger
We bought a Hostinger plan. It was simple, affordable, and got us up and running in no time. Using WordPress, we skipped the steep learning curve of custom development for things that didn’t need reinventing. Instead of spending weeks coding, we set up our website and courses in a matter of days.
With WordPress, we used the LearnPress plugin to host our course. The plugin was flexible, allowed us to organize course content neatly, and handled everything from quizzes to certificates. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked, and that’s what mattered.
To make our platform visible, we automated post-generation and focused heavily on local SEO. This turned out to be a game-changer. Within a few months, we were getting 5,000 impressions every month, which meant free publicity and a steady stream of potential customers.
Benefits of WordPress for a Busy Founder Over Next.js for SEO
WordPress and Next.js are both powerful tools for building websites, but for a busy founder, especially one focused on SEO and speed to market, WordPress offers several advantages. Here’s a breakdown of why WordPress might be the better choice in this context:
1. Speed of Setup
WordPress: With its user-friendly interface, pre-built themes, and plugins, WordPress allows you to get a fully functional website up and running in a matter of hours or days. For founders who need to move fast, this is invaluable.
Next.js: While incredibly powerful, Next.js requires a more hands-on approach, including coding, configuring servers, setting up deployment pipelines, and integrating SEO tools manually. This setup can take weeks, depending on your expertise.
2. Built-in SEO Features
WordPress:
Comes with dedicated SEO plugins like Yoast SEO and Rank Math. These plugins provide easy-to-follow suggestions for optimizing pages, posts, and metadata, even for non-technical users.
Automatic XML sitemaps, meta tag optimization, and schema markup generation are just a few clicks away.
Next.js:
SEO features need to be custom-coded or integrated through third-party libraries like
next-seo. While this offers flexibility, it demands developer time and expertise to implement properly.
3. Content Management System (CMS)
WordPress:
Designed as a CMS, it’s built for creating, organizing, and managing content at scale. Non-technical founders can easily update content without touching code.
Ideal for SEO-focused strategies where frequent updates, blog posts, and landing pages are required to stay relevant.
Next.js:
Requires integration with a headless CMS like Strapi or Contentful to manage content efficiently. This adds complexity and cost.
4. Extensive Plugin Ecosystem
WordPress:
Thousands of plugins (many free) cater to almost any need, including SEO enhancements, performance optimization, analytics, and social sharing.
Popular plugins like All-in-One SEO Pack, WP Rocket, and Jetpack simplify tasks that would require custom code in Next.js.
Next.js:
While it offers ultimate customization, it relies on external libraries and custom integrations for similar functionality. This is more time-intensive and demands technical expertise.
5. Cost-Effectiveness
WordPress:
Hosting services like Hostinger, Bluehost, or SiteGround offer affordable plans optimized for WordPress.
No need to hire a dedicated developer for routine tasks, as the platform is accessible to non-technical users.
Next.js:
Requires developer resources for initial setup, ongoing updates, and scaling, which can increase costs significantly.
6. Scalability for Content-Driven Sites
WordPress:
Perfect for SEO-driven content strategies where blogs, landing pages, and optimized posts are key to driving traffic.
The Gutenberg editor and drag-and-drop builders like Elementor make it easy to create visually appealing and SEO-friendly content.
Next.js:
Better suited for highly customized or app-like web experiences, but less intuitive for creating and managing large amounts of content.
7. SEO-Specific Advantages
WordPress:
Fast and simple implementation of canonical URLs, alt attributes for images, and breadcrumb navigation.
Rich plugin ecosystem supports advanced SEO strategies like local SEO, rich snippets, and AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages).
Easy integration with tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Next.js:
Offers granular control over SEO but requires manual implementation for things like Open Graph metadata, structured data, and sitemap generation.
8. Focus on Founder’s Time
As a founder, your time is your most valuable resource.
With WordPress, you can delegate website management and updates to non-technical team members or freelancers.
With Next.js, the technical nature of the platform may demand your personal involvement or require hiring developers for every small change.
The Harsh Truth: Selling Courses is Tough
Despite our initial success with impressions, we quickly realized that selling courses is tough. Customer acquisition efforts were really high, and the return on investment was low. We poured hours into marketing, refining our content, and experimenting with pricing, only to find that the revenue didn’t justify the effort.
The problem wasn’t just us—it was the market. Education is valuable, but the willingness to pay for online live courses in India, especially in competitive niches like AI, is often limited, specially when there are not much open jobs directly dependent on knowing AI. We needed a new direction, something with higher ROI and scalable potential.
The Pivot: AI-Enabled Software Development
This realization pushed us to pivot. We decided to leverage our strengths in development and AI to focus on AI-enabled software development. Instead of teaching, we began helping other founders build and scale their software products.
This new model aligned better with our skill set, had a higher ROI, and allowed us to engage with a more targeted audience. We weren’t just solving problems—we were becoming partners in innovation for other startups.
The Next Challenge: SEO for Software Development
When we pivoted from AI education to AI-enabled software development, we faced a new challenge: SEO for software development. This wasn’t just about tweaking a few keywords. It was about repositioning ourselves in a competitive market, targeting a new audience, and aligning our online presence with the high-quality solutions we aimed to deliver.
Here’s how we tackled this transformation step by step:
1. Your Website Is Your First Impression
As a company offering software development services, we knew our website had to reflect the same quality, attention to detail, and functionality we promised our clients. After all, if we couldn’t present a polished website, how could we convince others to trust us with their software?
What We Did:
Built a custom homepage using HTML and CSS instead of relying entirely on WordPress themes. This allowed us to create a unique design that stood out from generic templates. And not pay premium for any SaaS.
Separated components like the footer, navbar, banners, and testimonials to keep the design modular. This made updates easier and ensured consistency across the site.
Used shared and specific CSS files for components. Shared CSS handled common styles like typography and color schemes, while component-specific CSS allowed us to customize each section precisely.
2. Automation for Efficiency
To manage updates efficiently, we integrated automation into our workflow.
How We Did It:
Created a Python script to generate the final HTML for our pages (combining and minifying). The script automatically updated the content on WordPress while keeping a local copy of the HTML for debugging. This hybrid approach allowed us to combine the simplicity of WordPress with the control of custom development.
Used local SQLite databases to store essential metadata, such as WordPress post IDs, location-based SEO data, and structured schema markup for geographies we targeted. This database streamlined the process of managing and updating large volumes of SEO data, such as Open Graph tags and structured data for search engines.
3. Localization and Targeting
SEO for software development is not a one-size-fits-all game. We needed to localize our content to appeal to audiences across different geographies while maintaining a cohesive brand voice.
What We Did:
Tailored meta descriptions, titles, and structured data for each geographic region we targeted.
Incorporated location-specific SEO metadata into our pages, making it easier to rank for searches in specific areas while keeping the content relevant.
Ensured each page had unique Open Graph (OG) tags to optimize for social sharing and improve click-through rates.
4. Quality Management at Scale
As the number of pages grew, maintaining quality became a top priority. Every page had to meet the same high standards for design, content, and SEO.
Our Approach:
Maintained a spreadsheet to track the status of every live page. This included checks for:
Proper integration of metadata and SEO tags.
Consistent use of branding elements like fonts, colors, and styles.
Functional links, images, and CTAs (Call to Actions).
Verification that location-specific content matched the intended audience.
Conducted regular audits to ensure no page fell below our standards.
5. Iterating and Learning
Building and managing an SEO strategy isn’t a one-time task. It requires constant iteration, learning from analytics, and adapting to what works.
What We Focused On:
Tracked search performance metrics for each page, including impressions, clicks, and keyword rankings.
Adjusted content and metadata based on performance data. If a page underperformed in a target region, we revisited its content, keywords, and design.
Used tools like Google Search Console and Ahrefs to monitor backlink profiles, identify crawl errors, and discover new keyword opportunities.
Results
The level of Automation and flexibility that we have rn, we are able to do 6000$ of SEO work each day on our own within an hour or two max.
The result of this meticulous effort was a website that reflected our expertise while being SEO-optimized for software development. We started seeing:
Improved search rankings for competitive keywords in the software development niche.
Increased traffic from our target geographies.
A significant improvement in the quality of leads, as our website attracted founders and businesses actively searching for solutions we provided.
Lessons from the Journey So Far
Speed Over Perfection: When you’re bootstrapping, speed is your best friend. Tools like WordPress and LearnPress allowed us to move fast without getting bogged down in technical details.
Validate Before You Build: Building something only to find out it doesn’t resonate with your audience is a founder’s nightmare. Validate your ideas quickly and iterate.
Pivot When Necessary: Don’t be afraid to pivot if your current model isn’t working. Recognizing when to change direction is as important as starting.
Leverage Automation: Automating tasks like post-generation and SEO can save time and amplify results, especially when resources are limited.
What’s Next?
As we dive deeper into AI-enabled software development, our focus is on scaling our services while maintaining high quality. We’re rethinking our content strategy, refining our SEO, and doubling down on helping startups achieve their goals faster with AI.
This journey has just begun. If you’re a developer thinking of taking the founder leap—or if you’re simply curious about what it’s like—stay tuned. The road is full of surprises, and I can’t wait to share more of them with you.
Let me know your thoughts, and if you’ve been on a similar journey, I’d love to hear about it.
That’s the second installment in this series. I hope it resonates with you. Here’s to the entrepreneurial journey—messy, unpredictable, but oh so rewarding!