MotoPress is a team of forward-thinking professionals creating and developing free and premium WordPress software. The CEO of
MotoPress Alexander Matienko kindly agreed to an interview with
Website Planet, where he shared some information about the beginnings of the company, its mission, and what is unique about MotoPress as a company.
Please present MotoPress to our audience
MotoPress provides software and design solutions (known as plugins and themes) to WordPress, the world’s most used CMS.
Our products are dedicated to various business niches, with a special focus made on hotel and appointment booking solutions, as well as website builders.
Please describe the story behind the company: What sparked the idea, and how has it evolved so far?
In the beginning, in 2013, it was just me and Oksana, our marketing manager who is still devoting her time and passion to MotoPress (I’m lucky to have such people on my team). Now we’re a team of twenty people!
The reason I started MotoPress was the understanding, and, if you will, believe, that WordPress as a global community can secure the future for every company or developer who can maintain a quality product. And I don’t think I was mistaken, hehe! Take Gutenberg, for example, or how quickly the market share of WordPress is growing to see that my prediction was fair enough.
At that time, I was helping one company to develop a proprietary software (closed source, in-house solution), and had to add visual editing to WordPress.
That helped me see the benefits of the open-source global WordPress CMS over the solutions completely managed by small teams. WordPress is more scalable, feature-rich, and stable, to name a few benefits. I was keen to try WordPress for a real business!
So I decided to switch to WordPress and started MotoPress with Content Editor (it was one of the top heroes in the good old days!), a content-building plugin for now deprecated Classic Editor.
In terms of competition, WordPress is a very saturated space (now and back then). With that in mind, our strategy was to diversify our product line, create solutions for different popular and not-so-popular industries, and keep up with the product and support quality.
As we were growing, we experimented with many things, such as mobile apps, and even acquired a few products built by other companies. For example, we bought the all-around Gutenix theme that is hosted on its individual website, which filled the gap for a multipurpose theme for us (something we always wanted to create but did not have enough time for!).
What services do you offer?
I’d better describe MotoPress as a product company. If you go to our website, you’ll see that we have various categorized themes and plugins, completely free and premium, too. Our designs and WordPress themes, cover numerous industries, including photography, medicine, eCommerce, education, hospitality, and more.
Another primary focus of expertise is the lineup of plugins. The best-selling ones that we put most of our time and energy resources into are two bookings plugins, the MotoPress Hotel Booking and Appointment Booking plugins. Their names speak for themselves!
These plugins allow property owners, such as hotels or BNBs, to rent out their accommodations and accept direct bookings on their websites. And the appointment plugin allows clients to accept reservations automatically.
As I noticed before, we started as a content-building tool. So, at the moment, we’re also working a lot on Getwid, our free extension to the block editor (the new native WordPress content-building tool). It’s worth mentioning that Getwid so far has 50K active users, so it’s definitely our next key point of interest and investment. We also want to have a stake in the absolutely new WordPress editing experiences that started to be released with WordPress 5.0. That doesn’t mean we forgot other popular page builders loved by people. For example, our Stratum solutions are very popular with Elementor users because we give many premium options for free.
We also believe in turnkey products, which are a plugin and a theme in one, that’s why we provide many themes with our native plugins built in. This means our clients get a business-fueled design with the booking functionality pre-integrated, with all the design styles already polished. I mean, our clients have a small chance to spoil the look of their online presence!
As for the services, well, we actually offer a few essential ones for improving the website performance and SEO, but most of the time we help clients get the most out of our products. We also launched a WordPress-independent booking engine service for property owners on the BNBForms platform, but still, we based the core functionality on our WordPress hotel booking plugin.
What is the mission of MotoPress?
One of the practical missions of MotoPress is to bring more automation to the business routines and free up more time for a creative way of living. And of course, helps businesses earn more money and increase the client base!
Also, the aesthetics of the website design is of high importance to us. That’s why we try to provide many turnkey solutions and also love building visually perfect blocks and design patterns for Gutenberg.
What is unique for MotoPress
You can read the testimonials of our customers to get the idea!
Jokes aside, I believe that every company, just like a human being, is unique just by default. But I’d say that, in my opinion, our biggest strength is our team. We love to challenge each other, strive for perfectionism and, by the way, have an award-winning support team!
How do you envision the future of your industry?
I’d break my answer into two parts. One is about WordPress in general and another one is about MotoPress products (plugins and themes) in particular.
First, about MotoPress. I don’t think that the hospitality industry will go anywhere in the near future. Quite the opposite! In the world slowly but surely being taken over by robots and machines (in a good sense), people are going to spend more time on creative pursuits and impressions, traveling and rental accommodation giving both! So that’s why I have no doubts the service and hospitality industries will prosper. And every owner would need a sweet book button for quick and smooth automated reservations.
As for WordPress, on a scale of zero to 10, I give 10 points that WordPress will only evolve, becoming more attractive to solo developers and companies, let alone clients!
The Gutenberg block editor was an utter transformation of the WordPress editing experiences. This was a tipping point for the better, which now means there is room for improvement, investment, and more people involved.
A WordPress company that doesn’t want to drive a wedge between WordPress and themselves should definitely embrace the Gutenberg block editor! At the same time, developers will need to try harder to differentiate themselves from the competition, which means the product quality and huge marketing efforts will be dominant (even though it sounds so classic!).
And the demand for WordPress will only grow. I once made a very good prediction. So why not trust me this time?
