Starting a Wordpress development/design company--thoughts??

Hi Kenton,

Yes, you can definitely run a WordPress business full-time.

I'd suggest you ask people who are successful in running WordPress businesses if you already haven't. You'll probably receive a different response in comparison to those who you initially asked. Not to mention that they'd give you the most useful advice.

There are a few routes you could go:

1. Be a freelancer who develops custom themes for businesses or creative professionals.
2. Build themes and sell them on sites like http://themeforest.net/
3. Develop plugins

I run a consulting business in which one of the services I provide is WordPress development. Most of my projects within the last year or two have been WordPress related - I started offering it in April of 2013.

WordPress aside, any business / freelancer will get paid according to their skills, demand and marketing. If you're missing one of those, you can count that there won't be much money in any type of business. I've been able to stay in business for a few years with just word of mouth marketing but that's rare if you don't have the network for it.

The Treehouse courses are a great place to start to learn initial skills but to truly hone them, you'll have to work on real-life projects.

Feel free to connect with me via social media or shoot me more questions via email. You can get my contact info at http://luisbox.com/. I'd be glad to help if I can or point you to resources that may give a better answer than I can.

Getting started can be a pain but asking for input like you're doing is key in the long run.

-Luis

p.s. This is probably the longest response I ever wrote. Ha!