Fernando Tellado – Founder of AyudaWP

My name is Fernando Tellado, the Founder of AyudaWP. I live in Spain, I have three kids and two dogs, and my passions are country life, music, and helping those who are starting with WordPress.

For many years I worked in a multinational company, but fortunately, I discovered that if I stayed there I would not fulfill my life dreams.

So I decided to leave it and start writing and sharing knowledge, which has always been what I have liked to do the most.

The Journey Began

Before discovering WordPress I had participated in the old BBS and managed one of the biggest forums for Macintosh users in Spain, Macuarium.com, as well as writing articles for technology blogs.

After trying many content management systems, from PHPNuke to Mambo and Joomla, and even Blogspot.

I discovered WordPress and was hooked by its ease and orientation towards the writer, as well as the customization possibilities if you knew how to code.

I never studied programming, but thanks to the open-source code I was able to learn a lot quickly by analyzing the themes and plugins that others had created.

The Need for AyudaWP

AyudaWP Logo

I created AyudaWP mainly as a simple method to store everything, I was learning about WordPress and to share it easily with others.

Because in those years (I’m talking about 2007) there was practically no information about WordPress in Spanish.

By the way, by forcing myself to use WordPress, I also used the blog to practice everything I was learning, so the benefit was doable.

Almost without realizing it, a couple of years later, the blog started to receive a lot of visits, coinciding with the growing popularity of WordPress.

Unintentionally, I started to receive proposals from companies and universities to teach WordPress, create plugins, customize websites, and everything related to having an online presence, using WordPress, of course!

I wanted to continue to maintain the blog as a source of free information, so I decided to create a company from which to offer the services I was being asked to provide.

My luck was that in those years, there were not many people who knew WordPress, and although I had no formal training in programming, based on so much analysis, study, and testing for years.

It could be said that I was one of the people who knew the most about WordPress in Spain.

At the same time, it has always been clear to me that what made me known, the ‘Blog’, should continue alive and with the same philosophy as always: to share everything I know about WordPress.

Even today there are many people who believe that I share on the blog only small snippets of all my knowledge about WordPress.

Anyone who has been visiting it for a few years will have seen the evolution of its contents, and will easily detect when I started to learn more about WooCommerce, performance, and even programming.

Just compare my older posts with the most current ones.

In any case, I have never lost the focus of always thinking first of the new WordPress user, and therefore I try to make the guides and tutorials always very simple to understand and apply.

Currently, the company’s most stable source of income is the maintenance service, with a high level of customer loyalty.

Another of the most demanded services, and the one that gives me the most satisfaction, are online consultancies, in which I help my clients live on the security, performance, and optimization of their websites.

All of the services I provide to my clients are available from the site:

• servicios.ayudawp.com
• mantenimientosweb.com
• campus.ayudawp.com.

Myself with my Brilliant Team

Although the company has had its own offices, and we have also worked in coworking spaces, since the pandemic we have been working from our homes, and it doesn’t look like this is going to change for the time being.

This does not mean that I do not miss our offices, to which we put a lot of love and creativity.

AyudaWP Coworking Space

Advice for Business Owners

I am not the one to give advice about online business, because I have made many mistakes, but perhaps I would advise avoiding creating companies with friends.

My first mistake, although the main risk for any startup I think is overconfidence, the fact of thinking that, because you have reached a good level of customers and turnover, that will remain so without making any changes.

If I have learned anything in these years of entrepreneurship are 3 things:

1. Focus only on what you are really good at.
2. Don’t stop doing what made you grow.
3. Don’t get complacent, always promote your business.

But above all, do not believe all those who tell you which niches are more profitable or with which to make a millionaire in a few months. 

Their business is to sell you that idea, there is nothing else.

WordPress & Beyond

My next challenge in terms of WordPress services is to strengthen the maintenance services, train more people in this work, and forge a lasting business, which depends less and less on me.

I also want to focus more on business consulting and entrepreneurship, sharing everything I’ve learned, through trial and error, over the many years I’ve been making a living on the Internet.

I will continue to offer services related to WordPress for many years because WordPress has a present, but above all, a future is very promising!

Despite its still shortcomings and some mistakes in its development and growth, WordPress is now starting to show its true potential as an online business model based on free and open-source software, offering huge opportunities to freelancers and small businesses.

My Love for the WordPress Community

I’ve been giving many hours of my life to the WordPress project for more than 10 years.

On a daily basis, I translate several plugins, themes, and WordPress core, as well as being the global translations coordinator for WordPress Spain and the support forums in Spanish.

I also participate in the organization of meetups such as:

• WordPress Villalba
• WooCommerce Madrid
• WordCamp Madrid
• WordCamp Europe
• WordCamp Spain Online

I have the honor of having given talks at all the WordCamps held in Spain, as well as at WordCamp Costa Rica and WordCamp Europe.

I have great friends in the WordPress community, both in Spain and other countries, whom I consider almost like my other family.

Because, as I say half-jokingly half seriously, I see them more often than my cousins 😀

I will not name names because there are many, and I do not want to leave anyone unmentioned.

For the same reason, I couldn’t say which WPfounders testimonial has inspired me the most because all of them are highly inspirational and shared by people worth learning from.

How I Keep Myself Updated

I read a lot about WordPress every day. I use services like Feedly and GetPocket to organize my daily and continuous learning about WordPress.

If I had to choose a couple of essential sources for learning WordPress, which continue to help me today, they would be the WordPress support forums.

Where volunteers provide daily solutions to concrete and real problems from real users; and the WordPress Make Core blog, where they share all the details and updated documentation about current and future versions of WordPress.

If you work with WordPress, especially the Make Core blog is an absolute must.

I Have a Life Other Than the Work

I have to admit that my job is also my hobby. I dedicate many hours of my “free” time to contribute to the WordPress project.

But I also have other hobbies, like watching good movies, listening to music (daily), and walking with my wife and my dogs.

I am currently finishing the construction of my future home in a small town near the mountains of central Spain, and I plan that in one or at most two years I will be living and working from there.

It is really, at the same time, enriching and stressful to create your own home, but I believe, trust and hope that it will have been worth all the effort and illusions put into this life project.

I like to travel, especially to learn about the history and architecture of other countries and cultures, but as I have already traveled a lot throughout my life, I am already 57 years old, and very well spent.

I feel less and less like traveling and more like enjoying simple things, like having a coffee listening to good music watching the mountains, playing with my dogs, and even arguing with my wife 😀

 Caption: Mika (Jack Russell) and Mae (Spanish Work Mastiff)

I Reward Myself by 

The main rewards I give myself in life are to enjoy a quiet life in which to enjoy every little moment, treasuring those little things that make every situation special and unique.

I enjoy chatting quietly with friends at WordPress events, making jokes to my friends in Madrid, or simply eating something prepared the old-fashioned way, with time and good ingredients.

Life is simple, but we tend to make it complicated.

Connect With Me

• LinkedIn | Twitter  | Blog