Artur Grabowski and his colleagues at Extendify are trying to make WordPress easier for businesses to use.
Extendify received a $50,000 investment from the Case Western Reserve University Alumni Venture Fund during its Series A funding round last year, said Michael Goldberg, executive director of the university's Veale Institute of Entrepreneurship, in an email.
The WordPress plug-in developer is one of seven companies that has received investments totaling about $250,000 from the $1.1 million student-run venture fund since it was piloted last year, Goldberg said.
Although one in five websites is created with WordPress — which has been around for 20 years — it's still "quite challenging for a lot of users," said Grabowski, the Cleveland-based co-founder of Extendify.
WordPress is a flexible, open-source tool that enables users to build everything from a small cooking blog all the way up to WhiteHouse.gov, Grabowski said.
"That flexibility means it doesn't do the job of building a website for you," he said. "You're responsible for doing that yourself."
But if you own a dog grooming business and want to use WordPress to create the homepage for your website, starting with a blank page can be "quite daunting," Grabowski said.
So in late 2019, Grabowski and his colleagues left Automattic to build a plug-in — software that adds features or extends the functionality of an existing application — to "create much better experiences, especially for small-medium businesses building on top of WordPress," he said.
Because WordPress is "open-source," meaning its coding is open to the public, about 60,000 plug-ins have been developed for the content management system, according to HubSpot.com.
The Extendify founders raised venture funding from traditional venture investors and angel investors within the WordPress ecosystem, as well as from investors just outside of the ecosystem, Grabowski said.
Extendify's employees and contractors, who are distributed around the world, built the plug-in for web hosting companies that offer WordPress to business owners, such as GoDaddy and Bluehost, he said.
"We partner with a hosting company, and the hosting company installs Extendify on top of WordPress," Grabowski said.
When new users sign into WordPress at one of these partner hosts, Extendify asks them a series of questions about their industry, and their website goals and design preferences.
"And in a matter of 60 to 90 seconds, we create a website for them that's 90% ready to publish," Grabowski said. "From that point on, our tool lives with the user as they build their site."
Grabowski and his colleagues also are "investing heavily" in artificial intelligence that can enable the creation of websites, he said.
For instance, some users struggle with writing text for their websites. Grabowski and his colleagues are looking at integrating a chatbot such as ChatGPT with Extendify to generate website text, he said.
