Are we still talking about this?
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Ha! Just trying to give the people what they want. Wordpress, Facebook, Words with Friends
I actually ran into an interview with the creator of Happy Tables (Noel Tock on the Product People podcast. He made a pretty good point that Wordpress isnāt suited for a lot of apps, but because Happy Tables basically does what Wordpress does (a tool to host / spawn other websites) it turned out to be quite a nice fit. In the podcast he talks about how they went through different ways of customizing it and how they are now pretty happy with the setup.
Definitely an interesting perspective and worth investigating, even if itās just to broaden our horizons and think of Wordpress as just that little less shit.
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Sorry, Iām late to the game here. 
We actually discussed this twice on the Product People podcast:
I think building a prototype or MVP with Wordpress actually makes a lot of sense. I was able to build a quick prototype of an Applicant Tracking System (http://teamscout.me) with Wordpress. I was able to show a working demo to potential clients: I quickly realized that it did not solve a major pain point for them.
That being said, I do run a recurring revenue business on Wordpress: itās a community site called JFDI.bz
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I run my SaaS on WordPress - RestaurantEngine.com (same space as Happy Tables).
My take is WP is a good choice only if publishing / content management is a key part of the app. Sure, WP can be a platform for many other, non CMS use cases, but those seem more of a stretch and would probably require so much custom code you might as well build it from scratch anyway.
In my case, WordPress was my bread and butter for years prior to starting Restaurant Engine. My familiarity with the platform (and how to tailor to my needs) was partly what made launching (and bootstrapping) the product possible.
If youāre not a fan of WP to begin with, or youāve had frustrating experiences with it, then itās not a good choice for you. The last thing you need is an unfamiliar platform getting in the way of you launching ā even if technically, it could be a good fit.
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WP is in my opinion the best route for an MVP, why on earth would you build a hugely scaleable product before testing your market??
I built a relatively complex web app which has workflows, user management and with an ecommerce / subscription facility.
I did built some custom plugins but overall itās definitely the cheaper route, my last MVP was on Cakephp, took forever.
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Hello @mijustin
thx for your reply!
Both linked videos are not available any more. Would you also be so kind to shed some light on, how did you develop your mvp with wordpress? How does your code architecture look like? Which plugins did you use?
Thx for your answer in advance!
-Gregor
I guess if you are a non programmerā¦ wp is probably the easiest way to slap parts together to sort a do what you wantā¦ but its code usually sucks big timeā¦ some of those plugins are very very uglyā¦
I can whip out something with Laravel in no timeā¦ actually, I prefer starting from scratch than battling the WP code messā¦ It is also easier to maintain afterwardsā¦
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The perceived benefits of Wordpressās existing membership/authentication system and the plugin ecosystem is not worth the time and energy you would have to spend to customize & maintain it.
Even if you are using existing plugins, you need to be critical of the code quality. A lot of the free plugins are not optimized properly and definitely not something that you might want to use in a production-level SaaS application.
You would be much better off starting with Laravel (if you are using PHP) or Rails. Both these frameworks have a healthy gem/package system and you can find a package for almost anything you might want to build. Extending & building things from scratch is also much easier.
To me, using Wordpress for anything other than a simple CMS/blogging platform feels like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
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Sorry, here are the updated URLs:
- Building your MVP with WordPress: Part 1 and Part 2
- Interview with Noel Tock
Exactly!
Most of these membership plugins are ugly, inflexible, and all bring their own baggage. They are so painful to use, writing your own code seems easier in contrast.
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I did consider building infocaptor on top of wordpress and invested significant time learning how to build plugins. My main attraction towards wordpress was the membership portion and thought I could convert each post or page into a dashboard or report so it would be fairly easy. Plugin building turned out easy but in the process I learnt that it has too much overhead for processing each step.
I wanted the option to sell it as self hosted and that is where the wordpress license killed it. It was simply too much to just use the membership portion.
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I had my membership site on a hosted platform. For a long time I considered
(and wrote code for) moving it to a custom-built app of my own.
Then, earlier this year, I chose to rebuild the site on commodity WordPress
and (carefully chosen) off-the-shelf plugins.
Itās one of the best business OR development decisions Iāve ever made.
Iād say AMA, but I donāt know how much time Iāll have to answer questions.
Now that Iām not distracted by how Iām going to add new features to the
site, Iām going pretty full-throttle on growing the business these days 
EDIT: That said, my service is a membership training site. I canāt speak to building a full-fledged custom app on top of WordPress. Although after the positive experience Iāve had so far, at least the CMS side of any future project I create will probably be WordPress.
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What ever works is greatā¦ if it brings value to your users and you thatās fantastic. It is more of an ecosystem than an application frameworkā¦ As a developer, I see the whole blogging backend as a hinderanceā¦ I am just about to ditch it even for blogging ā¦ thatās how fed up of it I amā¦ lol
However, if you can find the lego blocks that work for what you need itās cheapā¦ and if you outgrow it then it becomes a rich manās problem and income solves everythingā¦ you can then get it replaced with a purpose built appā¦
I guess we are not saying it is not useful ā¦ it can be a great entry pointā¦ but it is severely limited in many regards especially if you compare it to something built on a real app framework (which Wordpress is notā¦).
Glad itās working for youā¦
Very interesting discussion - I too am thinking of building on top of something like Wordpress, Expression Engine or Craft. Not only could I plugin in membership functionality, but full eCommerce setup, subscriptions etc. Of course this is attractive when youāre trying to build an MVP quickly. But I also have to wonder, would Laravel Spark not be a better solution?
Craft would be a good start depending on the product. Why would you want to inherit someone elseās code though? Using something like Laravel and Spark might be a better option. You donāt start from scratch but you have a lot more flexibility than starting with a cms
I think the main reason, as discussed above, is to simply leverage the communities of these platforms and possibly get an MVP out the door much more quickly. Sure, perhaps a Craft-based solution might not scale as cost effectively as a homegrown solution, but I would be interested to see financial statistics on how they compare, if such statistics exist.
On another note, I spent some time in the Meteor community before they pivoted the framework to where it is today (React + GraphQL) and back then people always raised scaling issues with regards to Blaze (the templating library) and its performance and how Meteor managed realtime with MongoDB (they were tailing the oplog; operation log, and doing complex data diffs on the server before pushing updates to the clients instead of just handling it all in the service layer, which wouldāve been a much better solution; see Feathers.js) and the community leaders constantly said - scaling isnāt an issue and if it is, then itās a good problem to have. The other side of that debate was that as soon as you hit scaling issues, you either threw money at the problem (a basic Meteor app easily cost much more to run than a Laravel, Wordpress, Craft etc. based app to begin with) and when money could no longer help with scaling issues, you began to strip out Meteor altogether. Food for thought for sure.
Another avenue Iām exploring is utilising Firebase. You get realtime & easy, CDN deployments for a very reasonable price and since theyāve been bought by Google, they now offer Google storage and are beta-testing Firebase integration with Google Cloud Functions for when you really need a backend process (much like AWS Lambda). Having all of this functionality under one roof might be beneficial to some and help get to market quicker or simple get an MVP out the door quicker.
Any SaaS app where you are just taking some configuration settings from your customers (i.e url, color choices, some input text) you could use WP for. Hellobar from what I understand is probably doing very much the same thing, and the actual runtime of the app is probably using a CDN and the end user just pastes the .js file on their site. If you then require some analytics on top of that you could create a 2nd api service to capture that data. So yes you can WP but like you said it depends what your SaaS is ultimately doing.
Iāve built countless WordPress sites (small brochure to high traffic), and I would not recommend building any type of SaaS on top of it. WordPress is just too bloated for anything not blog-related. Instead of quickly setting up routes/controllers like you would in Rails or Laravel, you would have to create separate post types and page templates just to get the same functionality; what should be a quick and easy job turns into a chore.
WordPress offers little support for custom routing logic (e.g., redirects) and authentication, all of which end up turning into spaghetti code if youāre not careful. And then letās not even get started with how you would implement custom models/tables and business logicā¦
In the end, itās faster to set up authentication/subscriptions using a modern framework like Rails paired with Stripe or a similar payments platform than to scour the web for a WP plugin that does the same, but is just opinionated enough to become a headache when implementing the actual SaaS portion of your product.
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