GoDaddy powers the world’s largest cloud platform dedicated to small, independent ventures. With 18 million customers worldwide and 77 million domain names under management, GoDaddy is the place people come to name their idea, build a professional website, attract customers and manage their work. Their mission is to give their customers the tools, insights and the people to transform their ideas and personal initiative into success.

Do you want to know more about our silver sponsor GoDaddy? We asked the people of GoDaddy a few questions!

How does WordPress benefit your company?

The benefits of the WordPress software and community that surrounds it are self-evident. With a platform that powers over 33% of the web, it’s natural that a provider of domains, hosting and other website related tools and services would benefit.

In fact, GoDaddy contributes to the WordPress community both as a company and through its people.

• GoDaddy has been a global community sponsor for years.
• Aaron Campbell is a full-time contributor. He has led the WordPress Security Team for the last two years and is leading the Contributor Day for WCUS 2019.
• Mike Schroder is also a full-time contributor who joined GoDaddy in October of 2018.
• We’re organizing, volunteering and speaking at WordCamps around the world.
• We’ve launched Primer, Activation, Stout, Mins, and Scribbles, high quality free WordPress themes available for everyone to use.
• Contact Widgets is another community project with 500k active installs.
• We’re sharing studies and research with the WordPress.org team in order to help improve the WordPress quality and user experience.
• We welcomed Rich Tabor, CoBlocks and ThemeBeans to our team in 2019. As part of GoDaddy’s commitment to improving the WordPress experience for everyone, the blocks in CoBlocks will continue to be free and GoDaddy expects that future blocks will be made available to everyone as well.
• We also contribute to other open source projects: https://newsroom.godaddy.net/newsroom/our-contributions/default.aspx

How diverse is your company? What do you do to improve it?

“GoDaddy serves an incredibly diverse customer base and we want to create a workforcethat is equally diverse,” said GoDaddy CEO Scott Wagner. “I’m very proud of where GoDaddy is on pay parity today and also the progress we’re making to close gender and ethnicity gaps. That said, there’s still a lot of work in front of us for broader gender and ethnic diversity. We are focused on reducing unconscious bias – across gender, race and background – to ensure we create equal opportunity across the company for everyone.”

“GoDaddy doesn’t treat diversity and equal pay as one-off programs – they are woven into our people process and company culture,” said GoDaddy Chief People Officer Monica Bailey. “We aren’t afraid of transparency and highlighting our areas to improve because we know doing so makes our industry stronger by learning from one another. We’re committed to making steady progress and won’t stop because the work of reducing bias and ensuring fairness for all employees is never done.”

Do you have any tips for people who want to start their own WordPress business?

It depends on what kind of WordPress business, but whether you’re a web designer or developer, starting a WordPress Maintenance business is a great option for starting out. There are four main steps involved in starting this part of your WordPress maintenance business.

1. Figure out what services you can offer.
2. Arrange the list of services into a menu of standard packages.
3. Create a profitable pricing strategy.
4. Start selling to existing and new clients.

If you’d like to dive deeper into starting a WordPress maintenance business, we wrote an extensive blog post about it here.

What’s your favorite thing you are working on right now inside your company?

Scheduling new WordCamps to attend.

Who (or which company) inspires you in the WordPress community?

There are so many people and companies that inspire others, it’s difficult to choose. A couple that come to mind immediately:

• The HeroPress Project: HeroPress reaches out to people in the WordPress community who feel marginalized as a result of culture, language, gender, or anything else. Their published essays come from people who have overcome barriers which previously kept them on the periphery.
• GiveWP Plugin: The mission of Give is to “Democratize Generosity”. This plugin enables WordPress users to accept donations on their WordPress-powered website with flexibility and ease.