From 2010 through 2015, we at Rainmaker Digital built at a furious pace. Most of that effort was directed at development of the Rainmaker Platform.
During that entire time, StudioPress.com worked tirelessly in the background to bankroll our bootstrapped effort to create a full marketing automation platform without outside investors.
And it worked.
That said, we were always aware of the debt we owed to the StudioPress line of business, and more importantly, the community that had grown around the Genesis Framework. Which is to say, we always planned to come back to it and give it the love it deserved.
The idea for StudioPress Sites dates back to 2014. I wanted to do a “Squarespace for WordPress” that had the ease of an all-in-one website builder combined with the flexible power of WordPress.
In the spring of 2016, Tony Clark decided to run with the project. It began by having candid conversations with our StudioPress customers, and prominent people in the WordPress community.
These conversations revealed that not only did people agree with the need for this solution …
… they demanded it.
An innovative hybrid solution
Delivering another website builder wouldn’t be that tough (we knew how to do it thanks to Rainmaker). But that was only half the equation, which made it a bit trickier.
How do you incorporate the best aspects of a website builder like Squarespace or Wix, without locking people into an inflexible box that doesn’t benefit from the best parts of WordPress?
In other words, we needed