From Nurse to Entrepreneur – How Self-Taught Developer Stephanie Wells Launched A Stand-Out Software Company

In 2006, Stephanie Wells was working as a registered nurse. Then, a baby came along and changed everything. 

Today, she’s co-founder and CEO of Formidable Forms, one of the largest and best-reviewed form-building plugins of WordPress, the content management system powering 43% of the internet. 

Here’s her journey – and the business lessons she learned along the way. 

Having a Baby and Discovering Coding

Wells trained as a nurse and pursued her career for seven years until she had her first child in 2007. While she and her husband were overwhelmed with joy at the new addition to their family, it ultimately put a halt on her work as a nurse. 

For Wells, it was an adjustment to go from the fast-paced world of healthcare and being on her feet all day to staying home with her new baby. When her husband Steve got the opportunity to have a training session in HTML and setting up a website, she decided to tag along and kill some time. Rather than just beating boredom, she ended up discovering a new passion. 

A challenge initially, she soon took to coding and started to develop projects of her own – setting up a website for her sister and converting PDFs into email forms for her cousin. 

Setting up as a Freelance Developer

Between jobs in the midst of the economic downturn in 2008, Wells and her husband decided to take on contract work. She got her first job as a project manager and found herself doing hands-on work, fixing bugs to make her deadlines. 

It was while working on a project with an old friend from college that she first discovered WordPress – and its massive range of possibilities. In short order, she found herself learning PHP, building her first plugins, and conquering a whole new field of coding. 

These were days well before the advent of advanced WordPress functionalities that made content management easier. Where Wells excelled was creating simple interfaces to make front-end content management and single page editing easy. Eventually, this became the origin of Formidable Forms.

Sharing her Passion Projects: Launching Formidable Forms  

After working as a freelance developer for several years, Wells realized that many clients had needs that overlapped on the back end. One of them wanted events entry and front-end journaling. Another requested a way to manage staff listings. 

The code she wrote in response to queries such as these eventually evolved into the basis of Formidable Forms. Over time, a solution emerged that she was soon installing on every single site she worked on. 

It was in 2009 that she launched Formidable Forms as a plugin, thanks to the encouragement of her cousin. He’d already launched PrettyLink and given her the run-down on the code for licensing.  

In 2010, the paid version of the Formidable Forms followed – and brought in $2,000 in the first month alone. Together with her husband and co-founder Steve, who has been helping run the company since 2011, Wells has since grown its reach and revenue. 

From Developing Code to Leading a Company 

Formidable Forms owes its success to a few basic principles that users have appreciated – and raved about in reviews – from the start. First and foremost among them is its ultimate flexibility, which has allowed freelancers and web design agencies to create a limitless variety of sites for their clients. 

As Formidable Forms grew, Wells needed extra hands on deck, and hired people to help her. The transition from being a freelancer to an entrepreneur with a team to manage proved to be a challenge. Not an insurmountable one, though, thanks also to the help of Syed Balkhi. 

Balkhi is a seasoned WordPress entrepreneur. He has been deeply involved in the open source community since the late 00’s and runs WPBeginner, a blog that has evolved into the world’s biggest freely accessible repository of WordPress knowledge. Plus, he’s CEO of Awesome Motive, a company that manages his various WordPress plugin ventures, including staples like OptinMonster and MonsterInsights. 

In 2018, Wells joined Balkhi’s WPBeginner Growth Accelerator Fund, and benefited from his long-term insights. “We were growing slowly, but nothing I did seemed to make a difference. Within a month of working with Syed, we were gaining traction. For the first time, I was learning how to manage my team and company instead of just being the developer.” 

A Data-Driven Future 

These days, Wells puts a focus on hiring independent people capable of self-learning – people to whom she can delegate with confidence. She’s prioritizing her tasks, putting an emphasis on leadership, and automating workflows to become more efficient. 

Today, Formidable Forms is thriving, with over 300,000 active installs. Small businesses as well as high-profile clients like Apple, Audi, and PBS are using the plugin to create powerful data-driven applications. 

Despite its wide success and 20+ extensions, though, Formidable Forms still retains its trademark flexibility and easy usability that have made it a long-term user favorite. That’s a constant, no matter what new coding and business challenges Wells will tackle – and conquer – in the future.

 

Image sourced from Shutterstock

 

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