About

Small Woorld shares the stories of WooCommerce entrepreneurs around the world.

Entrepreneurship is hard. Each day brings new problems amidst constant self-doubt. Small Woorld offers a tonic for this hardship in the form of interviews with entrepreneurs on their journey.

Within these interviews, we hope existing founders will find encouragement, solace and the occasional laugh. Aspiring business owners will find inspiration.

Origin Story

In July of 2014, Prospress launched its brand and along with it, a blog. The purpose for Prospress as a company was clear: help entrepreneurs prosper with WordPress using WooCommerce.

The purpose for the blog wasn’t so clear. We experimented with a number of different content types to find the best to fulfil our purpose.

Along the way, we interviewed dozens of entrepreneurs kind enough to share their stories with us. These founders operate in different locations across the world. Some have a full-time team and burgeoning revenue. Others are solo-founders fulfilling a dream of building a lifestyle business. Their stores sell everything from craft beer to calorie control meals; designer socks to designer furniture; toothbrushes to chocolate.

In the process of publishing the interviews, we saw that despite their many differences, something united these founders. Their entrepreneurial spirit and the choice to express it through the same free software, WooCommerce, brought these founders together.

We wanted to share this discovery with the WooCommerce community in a format that was more tangible than blog posts. To do this, we attempted to digest this feeling into a book in late 2015. Thus, Small Woorld was born.

Photograph of the Small Woorld Book

From Blog to Book and Back Again

As the book came together, we began to feel these interviews and the Small Woorld mission deserved to become its own living entity. And so, Smallwoorld.com the blog was born.

If you’re creating a business on WooCommerce, we’d love to chat and you should apply to be interviewed.

Behind Small Woorld

Small Woorld is run by the team at Prospress.

Prospress is a tiny company that stands on the shoulders of the WooCommerce giant. We exist to help people prosper with WordPress. To do this, we build content, community and software on top of WooCommerce.

Our most popular software is the Subscriptions extension for WooCommerce. It helps thousands of subscription businesses manage on-going relationships with their customers.

Our Promise

We promise to always keep Small Woorld as a non-profit endeavour focused on bringing the WooCommerce community together and helping entrepreneurs.

For now, Small Woorld does not have any strict editorial independence from Prospress. But we also don’t want to push any corporate agenda through the site.

Some store owners we interview also use our software, and we hope it’s good enough they’ll say nice things about, but we promise to never push that message in interviews or make the content on the site a sales pitch for any commercial products we offer.

We also do not sell the Small Woorld book for profit. For now, we’re only sharing it with friends of Prospress in the WooCommerce community as a small gift. We may sell it eventually or make it publicly available. If we do, we’ll make sure all revenue above cost of fulfilment are donated to a worthy charity.