My previous two posts of unbundling Craigslist and Excel ended with me wondering:

What other horizontal platform can we unbundle next?

The AWS article I read got me thinking about another platform which I’m more familiar with and which started my whole web development journey – Wordpress. About 30% of websites on the internet is powered by Wordpress. That’s a huuuge chunk of internet real estate that no other content management systems had yet to come close to matching. The next in line is Joomla which stands at a pale 3%. And if you’re familiar with Wordpress, it’s a crazily massive ecosystem of themes, plugins, code scripts. 

Unbundling Wordpress themes

Just looking at the themes alone, is crazy. Just based on Themeforest, a dominant marketplace for Wordpress themes, there’s already thousands for each industry –

• Blogs/Magazines
• Creative
• Corporate
• Retail
• Technology
• Nonprofit
• Entertainment
• Wedding
• Miscellaneous
• Mobile
• BuddyPress (forums, social networks)
• eCommerce
• Real estate
• Education

I’d always felt that this list pretty much maps out all the use cases for websites on the internet. So imagine unbundling each industry out from generic Wordpress system and building out a specific website builder/hosting platform for that industry.

There’s loads of examples of website builders that caters to a specific industry niche, like say restaurants. There’s a market for this because of barrier to learning and time/cost savings. It’s too massive a task for a restaurateur to have to go figure out generic Wordpress to make her website and and fiddle with the different plugins for her table booking system (other than of course, paying multifold more for custom development). So restaurant website builders make sense. 

Just unbundling the industry use cases already has so much business opportunities. You can go even further and segment even more verticals based on each broad one, for example, under Food & Beverage, you can segment into restaurants, food order and delivery, food trucks, etc, each with their own interesting and unique use cases.

Unbundling Wordpress plugins

This is another opportunity here. Just look at Codecanyon, here’s the different Wordpress plugin categories sold –

• eCommerce
• Interface elements
• Forms
• Social networking
• Media
• Gallery
• Advertising
• Calendars
• SEO
• Widgets
• Newsletters
• Memberships
• Forums

Unlike Wordpress theme categories which map industry use cases, the categories of Wordpress plugins map out the common features that every website needs.

There’s already stand-alone SaaS products that serve some of the plugin categories. Typeform is one example for the forms category. Mailchimp for newsletters. Shopify for eCommerce. Or to compare apples to apples, plugins to plugins, you have static form providers like Getform which you can ‘plug’ into your website using their API. Another way to segment further is to create one for your favourite code framework - a forms provider for specifically say, React. The list can go on and on and on……

Treasure throve of startup/product ideas  

I can’t even properly wrap my head around the magnitude of potential ideas by unbundling Wordpress. It’s like an infinite wellspring of startup muses. So much that, I probably have too much inspiration to chew through and need to just selectively look at what I’m interested in or good at. 

So so so much inspiration, so little time.