This company came about because I love building websites. I’m not talking about writing code or designing interfaces, but actually taking things I love and sharing them with the world through WordPress. That’s what I do for fun. Other people knit or bake—I Press.

And here’s the thing about passion projects: they’re supposed to be messy, weird, and completely yours. They’re supposed to break rules because you didn’t know the rules existed. They’re supposed to make people go “wait, WordPress can do that?” Because when you’re building for love instead of a client brief, magic happens.

I’m also unbelievably lonely. Like, I crave human connection like a plant desperately reaching for sunlight. Building websites became my way of screaming into the void—except sometimes, the void screams back. Every site I made was a message in a bottle, hoping someone would find it and think “holy shit, this person gets it.”

That’s when I realized WordPress had the same problem I did: it was lonely too. Surrounded by millions of users but trapped in templates, suffocating under best practices, dying a slow death of optimization and conversion rates. WordPress needed someone to remember what it felt like to be wild.

I was showing Matt Mullenweg (namedrop, boom) my new wapuu site, and his response was: “That site looks so good—that’s the feeling we need on all our themes we offer. Can you do that?”

What kind of arrogant person would tell the man who powers over 43% of the internet that they could make better themes than billion-dollar companies? This guy.

But here’s what I realized in that moment: Matt wasn’t asking me to make better themes. He was asking me to bring back the feeling. The electricity. The “I can’t believe this is possible” moment that made us all fall in love with WordPress in the first place.

So Regionally Famous was born from loneliness, fueled by arrogance, and driven by a desperate need to make WordPress fun again.

Because sometimes the most revolutionary thing you can do is remember why you started.