Ah yes, @vegasgeek. If you’ve ever been to a WordCamp, pretty much any WordCamp ever, you’ve probably met John Hawkins of 9Seeds. He is a brilliant WordPress personality, and we’re excited to have him down for WCSD.
With that said, here’s today’s Speaker Spotlight:
Tell us about your firm?
After working far too long in Corporate America, we founded 9seeds in order to focus on doing what we love; building projects with WordPress. The bulk of our business consists of building custom plugins, custom themes or a mix of both for small to mid-sized companies.
How have you integrated WordPress into your solutions?
WordPress -is- our solution! We focus 100% on WordPress development. That being said, we try to remember that WordPress is NOT the golden hammer. If a client comes to us with a project that we feel isn’t the right platform, we’re happy to tell them so and send them on their way. Although, that doesn’t happen very often.
How has WordPress changed your business?
We knew getting in to this that we wanted to focus on WordPress development. Over the past year couple years, we’ve taken on a couple projects that were outside of WordPress. What they proved to us was that it’s far more important to specialize in one area.
What does the future hold for your business and WordPress?
Ultimately we’d like to create a set of products based around WordPress. We have no plans to stop doing client work, but products are the way to go long term.
What are your thoughts on the WordPress community as a whole, including WordCamps?
We consider ourselves WordCamp groupies. Working from home and interacting electronically with the WordPress community is fine, but there’s nothing better than traveling to a WordCamp and hanging out with the amazing people in the WordPress community. By the end of this year, 9seeds will have been involved with more than 30 WordCamp events. Like I said, we’re groupies!
