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 (CWR '07) is the founder of , a company focused on simplifying website creation within the WordPress ecosystem. He transitioned into the WordPress space after gaining valuable experience at Adobe and Automattic. Artur's entrepreneurial journey with Extendify has provided him with unique insights into product-market fit, the importance of adaptability, and the evolving landscape of web development, all of which he discusses in this interview, offering advice to aspiring entrepreneurs and sharing his perspectives on the future of WordPress.

How did your experience at Adobe lead you to work with Automattic and eventually to founding Extendify?

When I was at Adobe, I worked on our investment strategy around our web authoring tools. We were trying to figure out what was next for web authoring—creating websites and so on—in a world after Flash and Dreamweaver. As part of that, I looked at WordPress as a web creation tool, and at Automattic, the company behind WordPress. That’s how I went from Adobe to Automattic. 365betÌåÓýÔÚÏßÊÀ½ç±­ the time, WordPress, which Automattic was developing, powered about a third of the world’s websites. I saw, along with a colleague, an opportunity to build a product to improve the WordPress experience. Since WordPress is open source, meaning anyone can develop on it, we wanted to build an experience layer on top of WordPress. So, really, Adobe exposed me to WordPress, and Automattic highlighted the opportunity in the WordPress ecosystem to build something new.

What was your experience like working at Adobe?

It was fun for a few reasons. There’s an energy around creative tools and everything that goes with them. Our office had cool art, and a lot of the people I worked with had creative backgrounds. There’s also a popular case study about Adobe’s transition from boxed software, where you’d just buy it once, to Creative Cloud, which is subscription-based. That transition was happening while I was there, and it was a hard shift, telling people, “Hey, now you have to pay every month to use Photoshop.� It was fun to work through that.

We also acquired a bunch of companies, including tools for marketers, which was a completely new part of the business and very different from the art and design tools. I was in the San Francisco office, which was a cool space with a great atmosphere. So, for a bunch of reasons, it was a really good experience.

How has your perspective on entrepreneurship changed since founding Extendify?

A lot has changed. The common things you hear are true: you end up doing so many different things because there’s no one else to do them. You’re figuring out everything from product to marketing to HR to finance. That was definitely true for me. It also highlighted how much luck is involved—how many things just happen that weren’t planned but then turn into something. There’s that saying, “You make your own luck,� meaning the harder you work, the more opportunities you give yourself to be lucky. That’s been true for us. We’ve worked really hard, traveled more than I ever have for work, and attended all these random conferences that we thought might not lead to anything. But we’d meet one person who knew another person, and so on. The time you put in really does pay off. But it’s also the hardest I’ve ever worked on anything, even compared to Adobe or anywhere else. It’s paid off, but it’s been tough.

What was the most significant challenge you faced with Extendify, and how did you overcome it?

Figuring out that initial product-market fit. It’s a standard thing people talk about, but those early iterations—on the product, target customer, buyer, business model—were tough. We iterated a lot, and it felt very binary: for a while, it was like, “This isn’t it.� Then, all of a sudden, when we found it, the business just took off. It wasn’t exactly overnight, but it felt like it. People say, “You’ll know when you have product-market fit,� and we definitely did. For us, it was when we shifted from trying to serve the end user to serving the web hosting market as a B2B business. It was instantly clear this was the right path. But until we had it, that was the biggest challenge—figuring out what it was and how to know when we had it. Sometimes we’d get a little revenue and think, “Maybe this is it,� but looking back, that was just noise. Once we really had it, it was super clear, but it took a while.

How did you decide to shift your focus from B2C to B2B?

It was a combination of things. The B2C side was growing, but not fast enough. Then, one of our investors suggested we go to a conference called CloudFest. There, we met with 20 or 30 hosting companies and told them what we were thinking about building for them, based on what we already had. Every single one said, “Yes, we need that now.� Of course, it’s easy to say you want something; it’s different to actually pay for it. But the feedback was overwhelmingly positive, so we thought, “Okay, maybe there’s something here.�

What’s a common misconception that people have about B2B software, or more specifically, about WordPress or that industry that people wouldn’t normally think of?

I don’t know if I have a perfect answer, but one thing I’d point out is that people don’t realize just how dominant WordPress is. Right now, WordPress powers about 43% of the world’s websites, which makes it by far the most dominant platform, more than ten times bigger than the next largest tool, which I think is Wix. What’s interesting is that even web hosting companies sometimes don’t realize what percentage of their revenue comes from WordPress. The infrastructure layer in web hosting is pretty software agnostic; someone can rent a server and do whatever they want with it, and the host doesn’t always know what’s running on it. But for most web hosting companies, it’s usually WordPress, and sometimes they don’t even realize that 70% of their business is WordPress-related. They just see people paying for shared hosting or VPS, but the reality is, WordPress is extremely dominant; even within the web hosting community, that fact can be surprising.

That’s fascinating. How do you see the WordPress ecosystem evolving in the next few years, especially with the rise of AI and more people getting involved in coding and building their own websites?

Our perspective is that WordPress isn’t going anywhere. The hardcore WordPress developers will keep doing what they’ve always done. WordPress changes a bit, but it’s mostly incremental. The big difference, I think, is that tools like Extendify and others are making it so that building a WordPress site is more accessible. Historically, a lot of people would try to build a WordPress site, fail, and then have to hire a developer or designer. The goal now, for us and the community, is to make it so that hiring a developer isn’t the prerequisite. You can build your own site yourself, and only bring in a developer when you want to do something really complex. 

For students interested in starting their own company, is there one piece of advice you’d give based on your experience?

When I was in college—this was back in the early days of Facebook and Twitter—the dominant narrative was that you should start a company right out of college, maybe even drop out, like Zuckerberg. But over time, and through my own experience at Adobe and working with a lot of entrepreneurs, I’ve realized that while you can start a company in college, most successful companies aren’t started by people that young. The opportunity I identified with Extendify, for example, I wouldn’t have even known existed if I hadn’t worked at Automattic and other companies first. Many successful companies are started by people who left places like Google or Facebook, and they came up with their ideas while working on other things, plus they had the experience of working at bigger companies. So, if you have an amazing idea and the resources to execute, go for it. But even if you want to be an entrepreneur, you’re more likely to succeed when you’re a bit older and have more industry insight and knowledge of how things work.

As a follow-up, a lot of people recommend working at a startup right out of college because you learn so much by wearing multiple hats. Do you agree, or do you think it’s better to work at a larger company first?

It depends. If it’s a startup led by a serial entrepreneur who’s raised a Series A or B and is hiring really good people, that’s great. But I’ve seen a lot of startups that are just floundering, run by people who don’t really know what they’re doing. If you’re fresh out of school and working at a company still trying to find product-market fit, you might just be rebuilding things all the time, making MVPs that nobody wants. There’s a metaphor in product development about building a skateboard before a car: you build a skateboard to test if people want transportation, then a bike, then a motorcycle, and eventually a car—but at each stage, you have something usable. Early-stage startups build a lot of skateboards, which is cool, but they’re still skateboards, they’re not polished products. On the other hand, when I was at Adobe, the company was a rocket ship. Our stock price quadrupled in three years, and the environment was probably better than most startups. So, for me, entrepreneurship is a means to an end, not the end itself. If starting something is the best way to achieve my goals, I’ll do it, but I’m also happy to work for someone else if that’s the better path. Some people just want to do startups for the sake of it, and that’s fine, but it’s not my perspective. The idea that you wear a bunch of hats at a startup is true, but there’s also title inflation. Being “VP of Engineering� at a tiny startup doesn’t mean much at a big company. What matters more is whether the company is growing and whether the leadership is strong, not just the stage of the company.

Extendify is one of the CWRU-founded ventures in the CWRU Alumni Venture Fund portfolio.

This article was written by CWRU Alumni Venture Fund Fellow  (CWR '25).