How was Kworq founded and can you give us a brief overview of the company?
Chris: Kworq is a creative agency that was founded over a decade ago by two production people who wanted to build something bigger and make the calls on what path to take next. We’re vertical agnostic when it comes to our clientele, though we’ve done much fashion and sports-related work. We’re really focused on finding clients who truly understand the value of great marketing and what it takes to get meaningful returns. It’s relationship building. The average time our current clients have been with us is 5 or 6 years.What sparked the idea of using a free service stack for building custom websites and who is the target customer?
Guy: Historically, most of our work has been centered on strategy and creativity. However, Chris and I are huge tech nerds and have been building software and hardware-related projects in all our time together. We also build e-commerce/marketing sites or some particular web app when a project or campaign calls for it. For the sites, it’s always the usual suspects. The website builders or WordPress… You guys have articles about this. This is why I was interested to talk to you. I understand why WordPress is so big, but I also can’t believe it still is. One of our earliest projects back in 2013 was a WordPress marketing site. And with all the advances in that time, even today we manage several WordPress sites. But it’s nothing we relish. The CMS is clunky; too many plugins create much bloat. And although it’s open source, it’s far from free. If you don’t want customers to bounce, you need good hosting to get the performance required. WP Engine is not WordPress. Or is it..? Okay, well, like I said, it’s not free. And many times, a company wants to try something out, test an idea; or it’s a startup, or small business that needs a presence beyond their social channels, and no idea the traffic bandwidth… The point being, it should be easy to get a site up that looks good, is easy to manage, and equally important, is free to start and can scale if needed. And when I say scale, I mean not just from a hosting, resources perspective, but also from a development perspective. A developer should be able to take the repo and build upon what is there already.What are the key benefits it offers compared to traditional website builders or WordPress development?
Chris: In our current implementation, all the services needed to deploy a site are freemium source. Cloudflare for their global edge network hosting; Storyblok for their easy-to-use and extensible headless CMS; and Supabase for their Postgres relational database and authentication, if required. Now there are many full-stack templates out there already that, if you’re a developer, can get you up and running pretty quickly if you know your way around whatever cloud services it relies on. Our vision is to provide that same ease to anyone, but instead of locking them into our service, like most website builders do, we will provide a way for users to leave with a copy of the repo for their site. From the start, the freemium services that run the site will be directly controlled by the user. We intend to build in support for Shopify. But that’s not really free to start, besides maybe a trial. However, Shopify is a great example of how to modernize your offering that aligns with this thinking. Actually, you might say Shopify has influenced our thinking. If you have a store with Shopify, you can host a custom Hydrogen site. Hydrogen is their React-based framework that was built on Remix. And Remix is what we built the original StoryPress theme on. Oh, and yeah, that’s what we’re calling this: StoryPress. See the inspiration? And we’re launching it as a separate service, by request to start. More information can be found at storypress.app.What other services do you offer?
Guy: For StoryPress users, we will be offering a full suite of customization services, from further development to content creation and online advertising strategies. Because Kworq’s core business is all about online advertising, we bring that know-how to bear on our offering here. Not entirely sure how the Kworq / StoryPress connection will be promoted, but there is definitely overlap, of course.What is in store for the company going forward? As your client base grows, can we expect new projects or features in the near future?
Guy: Yes, you can expect to see a lot of additional features and services we incorporate as we start to get feedback on this initial offering. So much has changed since COVID, and then since the advent of generative AI, that our business has seen many changes. And we’re very encouraged. For one thing, being able to produce content that much faster fits much better with the ephemeral nature of content and the need to always have fresh stuff out there. And the tools are getting better at a rapid clip. Generative video that can be controlled is already here. We hope to enable many more businesses to feel empowered with the tools and strategies we provide.To learn more about Kworq, you can visit kworq.com and storypress.app
