Cloudways: Hi Rohit, thank you for taking the time out for this interview. Could you please tell our readers about yourself?
Rohit: Hey everyone and thank you for having me. I started as a developer working on different projects as a freelancer. After selling some of my own projects, I ended up focusing on buying WordPress businesses and scaling them.
So right now, I am running Astoundify, Woffice, and BeTheme together with my excellent team.
Cloudways: You currently own Woffice and Astoundify. Could you please tell us about your responsibilities there? What are the tools and workflow you prefer to execute your development projects?
Rohit: Yes, right now, these are two of the biggest portfolios that we are working on. We have set up a really good team and we do have processes in place that help us execute our ideas and be customer-centric.
Cloudways: Astoundify has developed some great WordPress themes such as Listify and Jobify. What do you think about the key features that a theme should have? What tips would you recommend before choosing a theme?
Rohit: Truth be told, when you look at a business that is focusing on selling themes, there are different key factors that need to be taken into consideration.
- Speed of theme
- Compatibility with builders such as Elementor and Gutenburg (this generally depends upon the user requests)
- Features
My idea is that we do look a lot over the features that we can offer, but keep it as minimal as possible for the users. We want users to be able to install and activate a theme in a minimum number of steps.
Cloudways: As a software developer, what practices you think a developer should follow while working on new projects?
Rohit: In my opinion, project management and running a lot of people are the hardest things. As the team grows, you hire and onboard new members, and the challenges you face can go up if you are not careful.
Cloudways: What are your favorite programming languages and why? What is the skillset you think a software engineer should have?
Rohit: Well, as we are in the business of selling themes & plugins and we do WordPress, I have to say PHP :).
But if we follow the trends, something like React and Vue is the direction. These are the building blocks of WordPress builders and are part of the WordPress growth. We have to use them to keep up with the direction of the market.
Cloudways: Hosting providers offer best-in-class solutions to users who are just starting out with WordPress. What do you think a user should consider before choosing a WordPress hosting provider? What are your thoughts about managed WordPress hosting?
Rohit: I think nowadays, the most important thing is speed. Everyone cares about speed and it is the hottest trend out there.
We have now started hosting.xtendify.com where we offer hosting to our customers using the Cloudways Platform. This comes after we have already moved all of our websites to the Cloudways Platform. We believe in the quality of the services we get and we want our customers to benefit from them, too.
Cloudways: What are your hobbies and favorite places that you frequently visit?
Rohit: I do some gym and things like that. Let’s be honest, personal life is hard when you actually try to grow and scale a business.
Cloudways: It’s really nice to talk to you! Could you please share an image of your workstation? Our readers would be happy to see this. Thanks for this interview, Rohit! 🙂
Rohit:
Mansoor Ahmed Khan
Been in content marketing since 2014, and I still get a kick out of creating stories that resonate with the target audience and drive results. At Cloudways by DigitalOcean (a leading cloud hosting company, btw!), I lead a dream team of content creators. Together, we brainstorm, write, and churn out awesome content across all the channels: blogs, social media, emails, you name it! You can reach out to me at [email protected].
