223: How WPBeginner’s Syed Balkhi Rocketed to Success, Aiding Millions of Wordpress Users

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan

New to the US from Pakistan, Syed Balkhi was a lonely and isolated 12-year-old. Unable to speak English fluently, he took to communicating with new friends—computers—and quickly found comfort interacting with these non-human companions. Soon Balkhi was learning how to code and build websites, and that very same year he made his first dollar from a website he created.

Now 27, Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner, the first and largest WordPress resource website in the world, and co-founder of many accompanying businesses. He was also named a top entrepreneur under the age of 30 by the United Nations, his websites receive millions of monthly pageviews each month, and his software runs on nearly 8 million sites serving billions of monthly impressions.

Listen in as Balkhi takes you through the early years of his entrepreneurial journey and how, brick by brick, he built his empire.

Key Takeaways

• How Balkhi decides which versions of existing software to acquire and improve
• Why managing four products independently helps his team increase focus and output
• How to build a business, one small step at a time
• The key factor behind his companies' explosive growth