The Story Behind CommandUI

I’m a developer who usually spends most of his day in PHPStorm, not WordPress Admin.

I’m completely spoiled by its awesome command palette. You can literally do anything with a few keystrokes.

Then I started working on a new website for my company’s then only product Fortress, and suddenly I was stuck in WordPress admin all day.

It was driving me crazy how much time I spent just clicking around and waiting for pages to load.

After a couple of days, I had enough. I figured, “If I spend two hours building a simple command palette for WordPress navigation, I’ll save myself tons of time over the next few weeks.” That’s all it was supposed to be – just a quick tool to scratch my own itch.

When I showed this super basic version to some WordPress friends, they loved it and wanted to use it themselves. So I made a quick three-minute video (which you can still watch here) and shared it in some Facebook groups… and wow.

People almost bit my hand off, demanding I turn it into a real product.

It was crystal clear that I wasn’t the only one with this problem – lots of people had the exact same pain point and, more importantly, were willing to pay to solve it.

I then spent the next three months turning that basic prototype into what’s now CommandUI, and it’s been a wild experience.

Within a couple of days post launch, CommandUI had 500+ paying customers, and I’ve been trying to catch up ever since, haha.