WordPress is hands down the most popular CMS out there. Since it started in 2003, it’s accumulated a market share of 39% of websites on the internet. BBC America, the Washington Post, Walt Disney World, the government of Sweden, and, hell, even your favorite news source (TNW by the way) all use WordPress to build their websites.

But, while the CMS system is powering the websites of so many businesses across the globe, the truth is, a majority of developers actually hate it.

In Stack Overflow’s annual Developer Survey, WordPress was voted the most dreaded platform to work with, in 2019 and 2020 .

But it’s not just WordPress. Traditional CMS systems including Squarespace, Drupal, and WooCommerce, made to be ‘easier for marketers to use,’ seem to be a pain for developers.

We spoke with some developers to find out why.

They’re based on legacy code

About nine years ago, Dominik Angerer, CEO of Storyblok , was working for various agencies as a consultant and software developer on a wide range of CMS systems, from WordPress and Drupal to enterprise contracts.

When one of the smaller CMS systems a client was using went out of business, Angerer and his co-founder, Alexander Feiglstorfer, built their own headless CMS so they could keep using the same frontend design, without having to rewrite everything.

Lack of flexibility

As marketers know, the best brands out there aren’t simply selling products, they’re telling stories. Your website is the canvas where you can paint a picture of that story by choosing specific colors, images, and layouts that can evoke different emotions in your audience.

Doeke Leeuwis, former developer, founder, and Technical Director at Story of AMS , an agency that builds frontend experiences for ecommerce brands, knows this all too well.

“When you’re selling multiple products you really want to have a different experience. Based on different lines of products you might want to have a slightly different color or feeling but the static nature of traditional CMS systems makes it difficult or impossible to make these changes,” Leeuwis said.

This creates a disconnect between what marketers want and what developers can actually deliver. To put this into perspective, Mitchel van Bever, a full stack developer at Story of AMS, shared one example:

He shared one tip for managers and marketeers working with developers on traditional CMS systems:

They may seem like a cheaper option…

One of the biggest selling points of traditional CMS systems is that they’re usually low to zero cost to begin with. This can be pretty enticing, especially for startups and scaleups that want to put funding towards product development. According to Leeuwis:

Not to mention the fact that these systems and their plugins need to be continuously updated, even if the content on your system hasn’t changed. This means continuous maintenance for your development team. And, if you’re an agency, it means having to explain to clients why they need to pay for updates, even if the website hasn’t changed in months.

Larger updates also mean you have to put the website into maintenance mode. As any growing ecommerce brand knows, having your website down for more than an hour can cost you both potential sales and customers who can easily click over to a competitor.

They’re not built to scale

A lot of traditional CMS systems were originally developed to help small businesses and bloggers set up websites, without the need for a full development team. The problem is, once your company starts to scale, your brand and your team can quickly outgrow the system. In fact, although it has 39% of global market share, only 17.7% of Fortune 500 companies use WordPress. As van Bever, explained:

How my childhood ‘startup’ failed miserably

This article originally appeared in our weekly newsletter , where TNW’s CEO Boris writes about being an entrepreneur in tech — everything from managing stress to embracing awkwardness. He also answers readers’ question on any topic every week, send him yours on Twitter !

This week we received questions that are interconnected, so I’ll answer them with one story. This week’s questions:

“What is the first thing you ever sold to anyone?”

“What is an essential step many first-time founders miss to prevent premature (and problematic) growth?”

When I was a kid, I lived in a typical Dutch town with lots of canals. What wasn’t typical about it was how drunk people behaved on the weekends: they would throw bicycles in the canals for the lols.

These bicycles would rust away until the city would drain the canals once every 5 or 10 years to clean out all the garbage. That is, until an enterprising young man (me) found out that you could fish those bicycles out of the canals with a rope and anchor, fix them up, and then sell them.

So when I finally started to receive €2 a week in pocket money from my parents, I was already selling one or two bicycles a week, for €50 each.

As a young entrepreneur, I tried to maximize my earnings, so I asked a few of my fellow students to help me fish for bicycles and fix them up. My thinking was simple:

find and sign up one kid per canal near each bar

have them fish out the bicycles

repair them and sell them

let them keep a percentage and give the rest to me

scale

The goal was to expand to other cities in the Netherlands and maybe to other countries, as soon as we saw more demand and could afford to make that investment.

Unfortunately, that plan failed. As a first-time founder, I failed to realize that my friends weren’t mere clones of myself.

Each person I added to my team had their own talents, peculiarities, and ideas about my business. One of them figured out that returning bicycles to their rightful owners and collecting a fee was also a viable business. I hadn’t considered this opportunity because I was too focused on my clones and scaling my original business.

Another kid realized that fixing up bicycles was worth something in itself, so she focused on that. A third kid came up with the idea of selling better locks to prevent those bicycles from getting thrown in the canals in the first place, which basically killed my business.

I started losing focus on my original goal. I got lost in dealing with all these different personalities and ideas.

After a while my parents and I were invited to the police station, where in no uncertain terms, we were told that fishing for bicycles and reselling them made me both a thief and a fence.

That’s my (mostly) true story of how I made my first sale, and how I made some mistakes most first-time founders make when faced with premature (and problematic) growth.

Wanna ask me something? Shoot me a message on Twitter and your question might be featured in my next newsletter!

Can’t get enough of Boris? Check out his older stories here , and sign up for his newsletter here .

What Spotify’s mess (and its clean up) can teach startups about long-term brand thinking

Did you know Growth Quarters is taking the stage this fall? Together with an amazing line-up of experts, we will share key insights into entrepreneurship during TNW Conference 2021. Secure your ticket now!

Former Spotify boss Jim Andersen caused a stir earlier this year when comments surfaced that reignited the debate about the streaming platform’s motivations.

In his words : “Spotify was created to solve a problem. The problem was to overcome piracy and get artists’ music out there. The problem was not to pay people money.”

Unsurprisingly, this wasn’t well-received. The feedback was swift and sharp, with commentators across the board slamming Spotify’s attitude as harmful to artists and the music industry at large.

And yet, was this backlash fully deserved? A glance at Spotify’s website suggests that its current leadership are singing a very different tune to their former colleague.

The company’s mission in 2021 is “ to unlock the potential of human creativity .” This is accompanied by a list of commitments that Spotify is making, such as equipping artists with the data and training to maximize their streams and earnings on Spotify. In other words, to get artists’ music out there, and to pay them money.

So what’s at play here? Is Andersen a cynic, or is Spotify trying to tape over reality? I’d argue the answer lies somewhere in between. Let’s take a look how Spotify‘s ‘mess’ and its solution serves as a useful blueprint for any startup on the road to scaling into a long-term, much-loved brand.

Laying a roadmap

From easily ordering take-out to seamlessly splitting bills, many of the apps we use every day were created with a singular “solve” in mind. And often, this singular fixation is a core factor in success.

But, as any seasoned founder knows, for every problem solved, another 99 can pop up in its place. And without a clear overarching vision for how to respond, growth can quickly be derailed.

Take Uber. For years its team was driven by a singular cause: build an app that makes hailing cabs easier. What they didn’t anticipate, was that realizing this goal would trigger up a new series of challenges.

Regulatory restrictions, passenger safety, drivers’ rights, disenchanted employees; suddenly, a simple “solve” didn’t seem so simple. And without a clearly defined brand strategy to help focus and communicate their efforts, Uber found itself at risk of grinding to a halt.

Uber’s challenges represent those faced by many startups when they pursue product development without engaging in long-term brand thinking. Defining a brand is about much more than choosing a logo; it’s about establishing clear and coherent principles that direct everything a business does, today and tomorrow.

Shift perceptions

What Spotify has done right is adapt its approach — moving beyond the simplistic technological approach so awkwardly put by its former chief.

When Spotify speaks about “unlocking the potential of human creativity,” they aren’t trying to distract people from the streaming solution they once were. Rather, they’re setting their sights on everything they want to be tomorrow.

By broadening its focus to creativity and putting an emotional need at the heart of its mission, Spotify has a more widely applicable and emotionally appealing organizing principle than a pure technical solve. The brand can position itself as engaging with users and artists in a way that a functional piracy-fighting platform would struggle to do.

Engagements like the Year Unwrapped round up – in which Spotify puts users at the heart of their own story by celebrating their listening habits – and the Loud And Clear resource for artists are an example of putting this emotional promise into action.

Not only do initiatives like this help win brand loyalty by humanizing Spotify beyond a functional faceless tech platform, they also differentiate the brand from other competitors: anyone can create a new streaming platform, few can replicate strong brand love.

Spark innovation

By defining their brand in terms of unlocking creativity, Spotify gives themselves a license to play far beyond the confines of a specific product, platform – or even industry. To quote CEO Daniel Ek’s response when he was asked about the competitors that concern him:

The inference is clear: to Spotify, “creativity” doesn’t stop at streaming songs – it encompasses all forms of self-expression. And viewed through this lens, the businesses’ potential for innovation is enormous. Whether by offering artist-controlled tiers of access, experimenting with forms of visual media, or even dipping a toe into NFTs, the opportunities go far beyond music.

Spotify’s past might have been to solve a single issue, but thanks to a bit of long-term brand thinking, its future is multi-faceted.