Every great company has an origin story. WPRiders is no different but we haven’t really told our story from the perspective of our founder, Marius Vetrici, and CEO, Andrei Oprea.
And you’re probably wondering how we got such an awesome name. We’ll talk about that, too.
Marius, let’s start with you and rewind the tape way way way back to before you had your first “real” job. What got you interested in software development in the first place?
I think I was born like this, with an interest towards stuff that you program and then it executes what you tell it to.
I remember I was 7 when I got my hands on a musical percussion computer. I was part of a local children’s musical band and we had people playing on trumpets, violins, saxophones, etc. I was in charge of that percussion computer that would create drum-like sounds. So, I would program the computer using its keyboard and then it would play real drum sounds that would be the rhythm section for the whole orchestra. That was real magic!
How did you develop your skills?
My father bought me a ZX Spectrum home computer and I started learning the Basic programming language at home.
Later in my high school, I became quite good at algorithms and participated in multiple programming contests. The pinnacle was in 1998 when I represented my country at the International Olympiad in Informatics.
Later I got into university and I kept working as a software developer, while working my academic way up:
- I studied for 5 years and got a dual BSc in Informatics and Economics
- I learned Project Management during a 2-year MSc program
- I embarked on a 7-year PhD program where I researched how to estimate the duration of a software development project.
In all, I’ve learned to code in 10 programming languages over a period of 25 years…whew!
What was software like back in 2000? What types of projects were you on?
It was “down to earth”, i.e. not in the cloud 🙂You had to copy .exe files and run them locally.
My first job was to work on an interface with a touch screen. Before iPhones, that was very cool tech.
Then I worked on some other cool projects, such as software for managing a medical laboratory and a web portal for a stock exchange.
You started off working for some B2B firms (FASMA, Metawings International). What did you learn from those experiences?
I was lucky to have very good mentors and I learned what commercial, scalable software is like: how it’s structured, developed and maintained.
I learned Java, SQL, and Databases.
I also learned what it is like to work with and eventually manage a team of developers. It’s important to understand what it is like to have a boss as well. Ultimately, our clients are our bosses these days.
I also learned how important it is to be transparent with your peers about your expectations and how this could foster a culture of trust.
Then you started your own firm called Soft Mentor…what services did Soft Mentor provide? What did you learn from running your own business?
I started building a POS (point of sale) solution with inventory management features.
It was a very user-friendly software and we sold it to more than 600 companies that used it on a daily basis to manage their inventory and their accounting documents.
Then, we launched another line of business where we would sell off-the-shelf software for developers working with Microsoft C# and .NET.
Lastly, we created one of the first low-code solutions on the planet back in 2005. The low-code term wasn’t even around when we implemented our document management platform at the electronic depositary for the Romanian stock exchange, for the Romanian Government and at a few companies in the US.
What did you learn about the challenges of other businesses in your Soft Mentor days?
On a macro level, I saw that most of the businesses are tough because of the competition. You need to do something with excellence to stand out.
On a micro level, I saw how hundreds of businesses are being run and managed from inside: their operations, the stocks, warehouses, document workflows, and processes and how management of all of that can be the difference between success and failure.
Something about all of that experience led you to conceive of WPRiders, which you founded in 2013. What was the inspiration?
I ran Soft Mentor for 10 years and somewhere around year 9 I eventually sat down and wrote the Company Values.
Later, I wanted to build WPRiders as a place where people would be on the same wavelength, so I sat and wrote down half of the page with the values I’d like us to operate by:
- Accountability (be reliable; deliver exceptional work)
- Integrity (do to others as you’d like others to do unto you)
- We grow together (feedback, learning, developing, sharing)
- Contribution (everyone has to do their part)
This time I knew how important it was to have written values from day zero and how that would impact the type of colleagues we are going to attract as team members.
And it worked: we attracted some wonderful people and as I’m writing these lines, we are celebrating 9 years of working together with our employees being our first priority and building the WPRiders reputation as our second priority.
The timing was really good because WordPress as a platform was really picking up steam and there was a lot of demand for WordPress development work.
So it was a no-brainer to build the right culture and team to provide world-class WordPress development services.
And we’re lucky that we’ve been very successful and have the luxury of turning down projects that don’t align with our core values. Ultimately, we want to build a better world.
We don’t work on projects that create or foster addiction (no cigarettes, no alcohol, no drug related projects), deceptive practices (get rich schemes), no adult websites, no projects that are harming other beings (no violence, guns or ammo projects, no insecticides, etc).
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I joined Elto and then Codeable marketplaces and I saw a stream of people asking for help with getting WordPress to solve more nuanced issues that were slowing down their ability to conduct business:
- I don’t actually have a website and need one immediately
- I sell subscriptions but I can only currently take one-off payments
- My audience speaks multiple languages that I don’t yet support
- User experience issues like a broken mobile experience or annoying slow load times are driving clients away
- I need capabilities needed that no current plugins provide in support of an online marketplace
…and the list goes on.
What I could see over and over was that people couldn’t grow their businesses at the desired speed because of various technical limitations. Many of those people had tried to solve them on their own and via junior web developers and were still stuck.
With my background in computer science, I was able to create the needed functionality from scratch if needed and was better positioned to use integrations because I knew what was already possible.
How did you settle on the name? WP is pretty obvious. What about the “Riders” part? Riders on the Storm?
I wanted something that would balance accountability with freedom: the accountability was in the values, while the freedom was in the original name: “Free Riders”.
I think the more accountable you are, the more people will trust you and the more freedom you will have.
I wanted and still want to help our customers be successful:
- Fantastic online presence
- Ever expanding profitability
- For our owner-operators, less work hours and more family time
- For our startups, the right digital footprint to really launch their dream project
In my opinion, the success we were creating for our customers would endow them with more freedom, more options.
At the same time, for us, those working at Free Riders, I wanted us to be able to work flexibly, beyond a preset schedule. That was in 2014, almost a decade before Covid and the remote work popularization, so we were work culture innovators!
Eventually, I realized that “Free Riders”, although a cool name, meant someone who wanted to hitchhike for free or a lazy person, which was completely opposite to what we were doing: creating value.
So, given the sheer amount of WordPress work that we were already doing, I tweaked the name to WPRiders. Our team are WordPress experts, highly accountable and free to work from a remote place, according to their own schedules. As I’m writing this, we’re spread across 8 countries.
What audience could you help and what problems did you think you could solve for them?
In the early days, it was mostly DIYpreneurs who’d start a WordPress website by themselves. Then their business would outgrow their technical capabilities and they’d eventually look for an expert developer who could take over their website so they could focus on growing the business.
Once we built up a reputation, companies that already had WordPress developers or agencies and weren’t happy heard about us and started reaching out as well.
WordPress was certainly well known in those days but not the dominant player that it is today (over 40% of websites use WordPress). What made you choose that particular content management system as the focus?
I was really lucky that I was accepted as a freelancer on some dedicated WordPress platforms, so I got access to a lot of WordPress work early.
If I focused on Joomla or Drupal or others that have gone by the wayside, I would have had to pivot years ago.
Who were WPRider’s first clients? How did you meet them?
We got early business from Codeable, the WordPress freelancing platform. We hadn’t really figured out our sweet spot yet so we had a quite a bit of diversity:
- A running events directory
- An agricultural job board
- A donation website
- A dating site
What were the core WPRiders services in those days?
People would inevitably come to us with broken websites that were hurting their reputation and costing them money, and I would fix all that.
And then the next phase was about helping them make money in new ways, so we were often asked to add new features, new products, classes, etc.
E-commerce sites always need new products and categories. Learning Management portals need new classes.
All websites need updates as their content count grows.
Many would eventually be very profitable and decide they were ready to take their brand to the next level, so we would build them a new site.
All of those needs are still common today.
WPRiders has served some major clients: fashion brands, banks, global technology companies, and others…what makes you think the decision-makers at those firms chose WPRiders over the 1000s of other firms who offer WordPress management services?
No matter the size of the company, our relationships always start with a heart-to-heart conversation about what “winning” means for that company.
There are 1000s of companies and freelancers who can “do some stuff in WordPress.”
There are very few firms that can reliably make updates and keep mission critical business infrastructure up over relationships that last years.
And then even fewer can also help with digital strategy.
Those big companies are probably better equipped to vet a digital agency than a smaller company, so they know the right questions to ask and we have the experience to back up our answers.
They see we have deep expertise in WordPress development but also that intimately understand how critical it is to do it in a way that creates a world-class experience for the clients of our clients.
Like everyone, I also think they see the people and values behind the code. We’re not shy about our culture and people can really sense who we are. Big companies know that keeping their teams happy is a really big deal so they want to only work with agencies who treat people the right way.
At the end of the day, we do mission critical work and people trust us so they go with us, and we continually earn that trust.
What’s different about serving a company of that size versus a family-owned, local business?
Large companies have very complex processes of deciding with whom to work: they assemble committees, they hire external consultants to vet potential candidates, and all that so relationships generally take longer to move to actual work getting started.
But once the vetting is over, big companies are good at being really clear about the goals and being sure they aren’t bottlenecking anything. We’re given the freedom to do our job and deliver the desired results.
Small family-owned companies decide with whom to work in a simpler way. And sometimes they don’t know what they don’t know and want to interject ideas that may not be in their best interests. We’re always happy to educate our clients.
An alternative to working with a firm like WPRiders is hiring an internal WordPress development team. What are the advantages of outsourcing it?
- We are able to replace a developer faster if they get sick. Usually, our customers don’t need a whole development team, but only a developer. If that developer gets sick, their project is paused, while with us another team member can jump in immediately because we have more developers on our team than they do; we have internal written procedures and documentation about their project and are able to move projects between team members internally quite quickly.
- We have amazing exposure to tons of websites and approaches. We provide services to one of the largest WordPress hosting companies in the world and are always looking at what’s cutting edge and round the corner. Internal teams often end up stagnating because there isn’t really a continuing education function.
- We can scale up much faster than a firm whose hiring department has to focus on all types of job types. We have WordPress developers from all over the world who want to work with us and all these years of vetting.
- We innovate faster for them than they do. I’m excited to focus on research these days so that certainly plays a part but on top of that, we learn, read and research new trends all the time. That’s something our customers don’t always have the bandwidth to do.
WordPress has evolved quite a bit since you started WPRiders. What about it do you think has caused the longevity? How has it kept growing whereas earlier competitors like Joomla and Drupal have largely been marginalized?
I think the learning curve for coding with WordPress was really low. So, a lot of people would find it very easy to learn and use. That’s good and bad because you can also use it in ways that don’t make a lot of sense.
After being a developer myself for 10 years, it took me 3 weeks to learn WordPress to a level that would be far beyond what our clients would have, so that aspect is great and helps talented developers start supporting WordPress.
That also facilitates the novice WordPress user community. For a super simple site with little to lose if it breaks, WordPress is pretty straightforward to manage as a hobby.
The open source community also really helped. The folks behind WordPress.com and certain other infrastructure partners have really been great shephards of the project and kept its core values intact.
Part of open source is WordPress is extensible, so anyone can create a plugin and market it through the plugin store if it passes security checks. That saves companies all over the world billions of dollars that they might otherwise have to spend on custom software development.
After over a decade as the CEO, you decided to change your focus early this year to Founder/Business Developer & Head of Research. Why the change?
It was a mix of personal and professional factors.
This year I moved with my family to Switzerland, where I wanted to keep developing our business by getting to know some more technologically savvy clients in person. Romania has great technologists but Switzerland is a global banking and business center, and I really wanted to be a conduit for that community to help bring new technology to life.
With Andrei having served as COO for 3 years already, the timing was right. The transition was planned quite a while ago and I’m so excited for what we’ll both be able to bring to the organization in our new roles.
What types of projects have come to life from your research?
Ton of WP websites are really slow nowadays and that’s in part because of many poorly written plugins. That creates a terrible user experience and hurts your chances of ranking with Google organically, maximizing your ad spend, and hurts other aspects of your business as well.
That’s why we are building a platform that will automatically check and tell if a plugin is of good quality. We scan source code for quality, security, and efficiency.
Basically, it’ll help non-technical people understand the quality of a plugin without resorting to a developer for a technical code review, so it’s really a tool for the masses that we can also use to help our corporate clients.
On the AI Side, I have been researching Neural Networks and Data Science since my university years. As the interest in tools such as ChatGPT grew, I decided to increase our technical capabilities in that area.
We are launching a productivity Chrome Extension that will help with email writing, as well as translating the messages to other languages without leaving your editor and without the need to copy-paste back and forth between ChatGPT and your GMail.
We are also working on an AI-powered chatbot that can answer questions and suggest products on a WooCommerce store.
Based on the knowledge we accumulate while developing these demo business cases, we are planning to launch an AI Automation line of service, for consulting and automating our customers’ business processes using AI.
What products you’ve developed can clients use to today and how do they access them?
We’re getting close! We’re still testing.
We don’t like to release products before their ready, but if you’re interested in anything I’ve described above, you can join our newsletter and we’ll let you know when BETA access opens up.
With your role change, Andrei stepped up to CEO. Andrei, that’s a good segue to sharing your story. What were you doing before WPRiders?
I’ve always had a passion for technology and web development. Before joining WPRiders, I spent 6 years working as a Senior Web Developer and Digital Project Manager at an agency specializing in branding, brand strategy, and creative development.
That experience gave me a deep understanding of how to blend technical skills with creative solutions to deliver strong digital experiences. It was a dynamic role that helped shape my technical skills. It provided the opportunity to learn and understand the concepts of great design and strengthened my ability to manage complex projects effectively.
How did you meet Marius and what made you think joining the team might make sense?
I first met Marius in 2014 through a mutual connection in the tech industry. We clicked almost instantly, as we shared a similar passion for web development. We worked together on projects before WPRiders was even created.
Years later Marius sent me a job opening he had for a Business Consultant role. I wasn’t looking to change jobs, but I came in for a discussion with Marius (that turned out to be an interview).
I really liked the vision Marius had for WPRiders and it was a great opportunity to put my skills to good use. I could see the potential in WPRiders, not just as a business but as a team committed to building great things, and I knew I wanted to be part of that journey.
From your perspective, what has changed about the company since you started?
A lot has changed. We started as a small team working together in an apartment in Bucharest, and now we’ve grown into one of the top players in the WordPress development space, with team members spread across 7 countries.
Our processes have been refined, we’ve added more specialized services, and our ability to handle complex, mission-critical projects has evolved significantly.
What has stayed constant is our commitment to quality and over the years, we’ve become even more strategic in how we approach client needs, focusing on innovation and building long-term partnerships.
What has changed about WordPress?
WordPress has had an incredible evolution. It started as a blogging platform and it transformed into a complex CMS, capable of powering anything from small business websites to large scale e-commerce platforms.
It has a huge community around it, thousands of plugins, themes and tools, making it more flexible than ever.
And now with what Marius is doing, we’re going to help evolve it even more.
The company has a long history of maintaining mission critical WordPress sites for some huge companies but there are some new services available…tell us about the site development initiative. What made you think it was time for WPRiders to start developing WordPress sites as well?
We’ve always been strong in maintaining, optimizing and developing custom features for our clients, but we started noticing a growing demand from companies that wanted us to build their websites from scratch, leveraging our expertise.
Clients saw the value we generated in maintaining their sites and wanted us to handle the full design and development process. So it made perfect sense to formalize that offering and start delivering custom WordPress websites from concept to launch.
What about No-Code, Low-Code Development. A lot of people don’t even know what it is. How would you describe that service?
No-Code and Low-Code development are gamechangers.
Essentially, they allow businesses to build web applications and websites without needing to write extensive code.
You can think of it as dragging and dropping elements to create functionality. It speeds up the development process and lowers the cost because you don’t need a full engineering team to get a working prototype or even a live product.
It’s a perfect solution for companies looking to get their ideas off the ground quickly.
Who are good candidates for No-Code, Low-Code services?
No-Code and Low-Code are ideal for entrepreneurs, small to medium-sized businesses, and non-technical teams looking to build and launch digital products without the heavy upfront cost of hiring developers.
Startups, in particular, can benefit from it because they often need to move fast, test ideas, and pivot without sinking huge amounts of time and money into development.
It’s also great for established companies that want to build internal tools or automate certain workflows without diverting their core development team.
The main limitation is you can’t power a product that is going to have tons of concurrent users, but if you start on No-Code, Low-Code you can always rebuild the app with custom code once you get traction.
A lot of what makes a company special is its culture. How would you describe the WPRiders culture?
Our culture is built on integrity, accountability and growth.
Everyone on the team is empowered to take initiative, solve problems and contribute to the company’s success. We have a full remote approach which allows us the flexibility to work from anywhere, but we balance that with a strong sense of accountability.
We’re a strong team bonded together by common values.
The company continues to grow. When you’re hiring, what characteristics are you looking for in a future teammate?
We look for people who are not just skilled technically, but who are also aligned with our values.
Our field is constantly evolving and we need people that are excited about staying ahead of the curve. We work as a remote team so good communication is also crucial.
One of many points of concern for a CEO is the client experience. How do you want clients to feel about WPRiders and working with them?
We want our clients to feel confident and supported.
To give them peace of mind, knowing that their projects are in expert hands and they can focus on other important aspects of their business.
From the first conversation to project completion, we strive to be a partner they can trust and rely on. We are proactive, transparent, and committed to their success.
If a reader thinks WPRiders might be a great fit for their needs, how should they explore further?
The best way to start is by visiting our website and scheduling an available time on our live calendar. We offer a free consultation where we can discuss their specific needs and how we can help.
We also recommend checking out some of our case studies to see how we’ve helped other clients achieve their goals.
We’re always happy to have an initial chat to explore whether we’re the right fit.
