Small Business Spotlight
Quality Over Scaling: The forgemedia Story
The story of forgemedia — two brothers building fast WordPress plugins, self-funded and 100% independent since 2017.
Where Performance Meets Personal Support
forgemedia LLC is a digital agency that develops WordPress plugins, Perfmatters and Novashare, with a focus on web performance. The company has been self-funded and 100% independent since 2017. Behind it are two brothers, Brian and Brett Jackson, who build the plugins, answer every support ticket themselves, and have never been tempted to become the one plugin that does everything.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
The Brothers Behind the Code
forgemedia is run by Brian and his brother Brett, spread across Arizona and Washington state. Usually, people try to avoid working with family, but for these two it has worked really well.
Brian thinks a big part of that success is that they can be completely honest with each other about whether an idea or feature may or may not be a good one. It also makes for a more relaxed work environment.
Built Because the Web Was Broken
The main reason the brothers started the business was that they saw how poorly things were coded. Unfortunately, many developers still don’t care about performance.
They started Perfmatters as a way to optimize and disable code that shouldn’t be running where it’s not needed. That includes WordPress core, themes, and plugins.
From Kinsta to Going All In
Before forgemedia, Brian was the CMO at Kinsta, a managed WordPress hosting provider. Before that, he was doing marketing at KeyCDN, a content delivery network. Both jobs revolved around speeding up websites, so he’d been in the performance realm for a while.
The brothers each decided to quit their jobs for different reasons. Brian was almost physically burned out. He had been working too many hours, and he also has an autoimmune condition, which makes stressful, high-demand environments even harder. Brett, who was already a WordPress developer, was ready for a change.
So they took a leap of faith and went full-time with their plugins.
Getting Off the Ground
Brian’s background is heavily based in SEO and IT. Early on, he used that expertise to carefully craft forgemedia’s knowledge base articles, not only for their plugin customers but also to rank in Google. Both can be done at the same time
He honestly doesn’t think the same approach would work as well today, given how AI has changed the playing field, but at the time it worked very well. Almost all of their early customers came to them organically, through Google or word of mouth.
A Day Inside forgemedia
Around 80% of Brian’s workday is spent directly helping clients, on everything from optimization to billing tickets. They don’t outsource support, and they don’t use AI chatbots.
The other 20% of his day goes to business tasks: documentation updates, taxes, research, managing their own websites, and more.
Brett spends around 95% of his day coding new features and fixing bugs, and the other 5% on some of the more technical support tickets.
Brian’s favorite part of running the business is probably working directly with customers. Support tickets can get cumbersome at times, but he has always enjoyed helping people.
Working directly with customers is also a great way to keep a pulse on what clients are struggling with. That lets the brothers improve workflows on their end or add new features.
The Unglamorous Side of Ownership
Some of the biggest challenges, Brian says, have been random business-related tasks you never know exist until you’re in the thick of it.
A while back, forgemedia’s payroll software accidentally overpaid into the Washington state insurance program. Dealing with any government agency is always a pain. This one took over six hours on the phone, multiple back-and-forths with CSV exports, and a long waiting period before the issue was resolved and refunded. It went on for two months.
Some days he does miss having fewer responsibilities.
Standing Apart: Real People and a Narrow Focus
Brian sees two ways forgemedia stands out.
The first is customer support. They don’t outsource support or have different tiers of it. That means customers always get to talk with Brian or Brett, the developers of the plugin, when they need help. That’s very different from others. They’ll also go the extra mile and give optimization advice even when it’s unrelated to their plugin.
They never go a week without clearing out 100% of tickets, and during the business week they’ll often respond within a few minutes or hours.
The second is focus. They aren’t trying to be the all-in-one plugin for everything. They have a very specific niche and stay focused on what they’re trying to achieve with their plugins, which keeps them from getting distracted. It sometimes means they grow slower than others. That might sound bad, but it allows them to give a higher quality of support.
Advice for the Next Founder
Starting a business today is a lot different than when the brothers did it, simply because of AI. Things move at incredible speeds. Brian’s advice still holds, though.
Something Most People Don’t Know
In 2014, Brian was officially diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, an autoimmune disease. He has already seen more doctors than most people see in their lifetimes. He doesn’t talk about it very much, because everyone has their own struggles. If you’ve interacted with him, you would probably never know.
He shares it because of what he sees happening with AI. On social media, everyone is hyped about the latest models, or it’s doom and gloom. Brian is most excited about the medical breakthroughs AI will enable for anyone struggling with a medical condition. Over the past five years, R&D on new treatments has already been moving two to three times faster, with work that once took three years now taking about twelve months.
Find forgemedia
forgemedia builds Perfmatters and Novashare, performance-focused WordPress plugins built and supported by two brothers who still answer every ticket themselves. If your site is slower than it should be, this is a good place to start.
Find forgemedia on Byztopia: https://byztopia.com/directory/forgemedia/
🌐 Perfmatters: https://perfmatters.io
🌐 Novashare: https://novashare.io
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