Have you ever wondered what CMS Shark Tank contestants use the most? We pulled together a list of every contestant to ever appear on ABC’s Shark Tank (Season 1-5) and identified their websites. We ran every site through Builtwith and manually investigated some of the more complex technical set ups. We then dived in and analyzed at a ton of interesting factors like if the site was still active, site-wide SSL implementation, what kind of ecommerce solutions were being utilized. We’ve put together our most interesting findings in this infographic.
So there’s 58 on Shopify, 23 on Magento & 13 on BigCommerce (94 total, on ecommerce platforms, not even mentioning the little guys)… and only 39 of them have SSLs?!?!
What was that about tech-savvy investors?
I completely missed that when reading! That’s really funny.
Did you happen to analyze hosting, site speed, and traffic spike performance after show times? that would be some very interesting data to look over.
Hi Scott, we did not look at hosting – but we do have a bunch of other data points that we are going to be releasing on a more data heavy blog post soon 🙂 Stay tuned!
This is great! And nice work on that infographic!
I did a similar comparison of museum sites in 2013 – while the BuiltWith numbers say that ~ 20% of the web runs on WordPress, the numbers were lower than that for museums – http://arrowrootmedia.com/2013/01/22/what-kind-of-cmss-do-museums-use/
However – that behavior has shifted – we only looked at the main landing pages for the museums, and didn’t look at other things like internal sites, exhibit sites, etc. We’ve personally seen this trend shift, and major museums are moving to WordPress, and consolidating their web properties.
Very interesting Jaki! Thanks for sharing 🙂 Isn’t Builtwith awesome?
Any other industries you’d like to see us analyze?
That’s really interesting Jaki! Been thinking a lot lately about doing some type of Non-Profit walk through if the essential plugins and settings they need to use to get the most out of WP!
@Daniel : I’d love to see that (and yes – I would even be willing to help).
@John-Henry : I think an update to museums and nonprofits would be interesting to see, personally. I’d guess we’d see a higher adoption rate at this point, but am willing to be surprised.
I also read a while back that something like over 40% of political campaigns and candidates were using WordPress. I don’t remember the exact number – but it seemed really high to me. This article, though, supports that notion : http://wpjourno.com/presidential-candidates-wordpress-cms/
You make and phrase a claim in such a way as if a traditional CMS is the central component of a successful startup???
You KNOW just as well as the millions of other technically savvy startups, that for an innovative and tailored platform, WordPress is not the answer. Why in the world would one choose to limit their integration capabilities by hoping a mixture of pre-packaged widgets fits the bill.
CMS..CMS..CMstyle
The fact of the matter is that 90% of successful lean startups are using some variation of git/grunt/terminal/less or sass and submitting entirely custom & evolving branches or variations based on an open source community of innovation.
Take Bootstrap for instance, a great framework to build from, and WP compatible. But have fun learning the ins and outs of WordPress child theme creation to make a subtle visual change. A change that would take minutes working with code directly takes hours in the
geniusWordPress PHP codex. And to anyone who insists WordPress has made things easier for them, I’d love to hear their case scenario.Pretty Infographic tho..
Hi Jordan,
Thanks for taking the time to weigh in and leave a comment. I see where you are going with this, and I think we can chalk it up to some confusion / nebulousness around the word “startup.” I admit, It’s a bit of a loaded word. It immediately makes people think of a “tech startup” filled with developers. I think of those types of companies as “statups” but, I don’t think they are the only type of startup.
In my opinion, most startups (in the US) are not in SF or NYC, they are all over the country, in every town, city and state. Your brother’s friend who makes that amazing cajun jerky and sells it online, or your aunt who makes handmade throw pillows and sells them on Etsy — those are startups to me.
While I do agree that hardcoding your own site and using custom frameworks can be advantageous at the right stage for the right business – WordPress, and other platforms that it competes with, are so accessible and easy to manage that they get wide adoption. Not everything can be done by developers, especially as you scale.
How long do “the devs” really run a website in a startup? Once you start reaching real growth, marketing is going to take it over, and they will need constant changes. What happens once the website gets really big? Or if your company starts focusing on content? Would you want to hard code everything then, and build a completely custom site? Personally, if it’s just a marketing site – I would choose WordPress every single time. Just for the sheer fact that it would drastically cut down on the learning curve/training time as new people came on board and needed to make changes to the site at will.
Intelligent comments and replies like these are very helpful to do-it-yourself startups like me. Thank you all.