Today, Syed Balkhi (32) is a successful serial entrepreneur whose software powers over 25 million websites worldwide and shapes how billions of users experience the internet. His company, Awesome Motive, and subsidiaries are a fully distributed powerhouse, with over 400 team members from 50 countries around the globe.
The business philosophy that helped him find this success, though, took shape while he was still an immigrant teen in the US, trying to make money online to help out his family. Back then, he discovered open source software, and ever since it has shaped his approach to business in a fundamental way. Here’s how.
A Teenage Tech Entrepreneur, Discovering WordPress
Balkhi was born in Karachi, but his family moved to the US when he was 12. While this opened up tremendous opportunities for Balkhi in terms of access to education, it also entailed serious financial hardship for the family. His father had to work 16 hours a day, juggling three minimum wage jobs, to keep the family afloat.
To help out, Balkhi decided to go looking for a work in a place in which his age or his limited English wouldn’t be an issue – online. He first managed forums, then taught himself to code and started building websites for clients.
Had a blast at our @AwesomeMotive company retreat in Mexico.
— Syed Balkhi (@syedbalkhi) June 21, 2023
Can't believe this is only 40% of our team!!!
Come join us and work on products that are helping shape the web for billions worldwide.
We're hiring - https://t.co/bFLF6sOqT2 pic.twitter.com/P6FL1lcDp3
The turning point came in 2006, when Balkhi discovered WordPress, a content management system that now powers 43% of the internet. Back then, it was still a fledgling software, but Balkhi realized its potential as an open-source platform.
Not only was WordPress completely free to use, a huge community of like-minded people was developing around it, constantly trying to make it better, and help each other in the process.
“The open source community of WordPress is just amazing,” Balkhi reflects. “I think open source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. It gives you the freedom to modify, customize, and distribute however you see fit. That has allowed for a lot of innovation actually across the board.”
Becoming Part of the Open Source Community
Balkhi became active in the community and started to accumulate a massive knowledge base, as well as an impressive professional network.
“I think much of my success is because of WordPress and that community, and the support that I got from it,” Balkhi says.
He began to attend as many events organized by the WordPress community as possible. This included almost monthly WordCamps, as well as the 2010 WordPress Community summit, the first-ever event organized by the WordPress Foundation.
“They invited a hundred of the most influential people in WordPress to get together at Tybee Island, Georgia,“ Balkhi recalls. “These were the formative years of my career. I learned a lot about networking, and I met other WordPress entrepreneurs. I was very new, but there were already established businesses at the time.”
In retrospective, Balkhi’s biggest game-changer happened in 2009, when he launched the WPBeginner blog, a free resource for anyone who wanted to learn WordPress.
Sharing his hard-earned knowledge without asking for anything in return, Balkhi soon built a community that became the basis of his most successful business ventures.
Leveraging Connections and Customer Insights
As Balkhi’s loyal blog audience grew steadily, he soon discovered that many off-the-shelf plugins, which allow WordPress users to add functionalities to their sites, just didn’t scale. Instead, he custom-coded his own solutions.
As a result, Balkhi soon found himself inundated with requests by readers who asked what tools he was using. This gave him the idea of turning his home-made code into a public plugin. To achieve this plan, he teamed up with Thomas Griffin, a developer he’d met at a WordCamp years earlier.
The launch of their first plugin – OptinMonster – was an instant six-figure success.
“It's a compounding of human goodwill,” Balkhi explains. “I offered a lot of information for free, so when I launched a paid software, the community of my readers were grateful – they wanted to support me and what I was doing. They've continued to support me since then, and it's been quite amazing.”
One major way in which the WPBeginner community has supported Balkhi is through the blog’s periodical survey. It asks users what plugin features they want to see, and yields results that Balkhi can convert straight into high-profile business ideas. One of these was the concept for WPForms, which is now the biggest and best-reviewed contact form builder on WordPress.
Over the years, user feedback also led him to acquire and improve several prominent plugins. He was able to rely on his long-term network for smooth transactions. “For example, I bought the All in One SEO plugin from Michael Torbert, who I’d met at the first Community Summit. Years later, in 2020, I ended up buying the plugin.”
Perpetuating the Power of Open Source and Giving Back
Throughout his career, Balkhi’s belief in the democratizing power of WordPress and the open source software community has guided his business decisions.
Crucially, Balkhi’s ventures – from AIOSEO and WPForms to plugins like MonsterInsights – open source themselves. Anyone who is interested can look at the code, learn from it, and improve it further.
“If there's a kid in India or Pakistan, and they want to learn our software, they can,” Balkhi says. “They can download the source code and see exactly how they can build their own ecommerce software. Just like I did: trial and error. And they can have a career 15 years down the line!”
Aware of his own good fortune, Balkhi’s impulse to give back extends beyond the open source community. He and his wife also launched the Balkhi Foundation, which provides scholarships to disadvantaged students, and they have built schools in countries such as Cambodia.
