My name is Krys Lambiase, pronounced however you hear it in your head, but most people just call me “Lambo” except for my wife because that’d be odd. I am the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Bluehost.
I live in Austin, TX, but I moved here from San Antonio, TX, where I spent most of my life learning how things worked or, in most cases, broke. From taking apart vacuum cleaners and unraveling the mysteries of VHS tapes to eventually deconstructing the family computer only to shoddily put it back together.
I’ve had a fascination with how individual components come together to make a greater whole for as long as I can remember.
The Journey Began
Krys Lambiase
My WordPress journey started in college, where I learned how to build mobile apps as a side gig to help pay for my tuition.
I built two apps but had no way to market them, so I created a website on WordPress because I already had a server and figured that downloading a free CMS was the smartest thing to do for my budding business.
I instantly fell in love with all the possibilities WordPress had to offer, but more than that, the community.
I spent many nights on forums chatting with people far more experienced than me, soaking up all the information I could until I launched a site where my fellow classmates could download an app that would allow them to create their own quizzes and send them to friends and family via text for 99 cents.
In retrospect, it was a silly app for 2007, but then Buzzfeed did the same thing in 2010, and suddenly everyone wanted to know what kind of potato aligned with their zodiac sign, so maybe it was not so silly after all.
I got a job at Rackspace Hosting right out of college and started selling email services, which ultimately led me to sell public and private cloud services, which eventually led to me training in how to sell those things.
It also ultimately led me to manage teams that sold those things, which ultimately led me to product marketing so the whole company could sell those things with just words and buttons on a webpage. I worked there for 8 years, and in all that time, WordPress was ever-present.
If a customer needed a website, WordPress was always the first recommended CMS to use. Even as drag-and-drop website builders started becoming more prominent, WordPress was given top billing because of its flexibility to build just about any kind of website.
So, when I was finally offered the position to run product marketing for Bluehost, I was very familiar with WordPress, and even the Bluehost brand for that matter.
The Need for “Bluehost Cloud” and “Bluehost AI Site Creation”
Bluehost Logo
As I mentioned, in college I spent many nights on WordPress forums. Not because I was devoid of friends or parties to go to. Definitely nothing like that.
It’s not like I was just hanging out at home with nothing better to do than chat endlessly about how to mitigate SQL injections and combat comment section spam… It’s that I was just super committed to seeing my vision come to life. Yes, let’s go with that.
In that time, I learned that even the most seasoned WordPress users found its complexity as intriguing as it was challenging to navigate. And for those looking to use WordPress to start or run a business, the time it took to navigate some of those challenges was not always considered a worthwhile investment.
The topics often revolved around site speeds and fine-tuning themes to fit the design someone had envisioned. This is an issue that many WordPress providers have tried to solve.
So, when I was given the chance to be part of the Bluehost Cloud and AI Site Creation initiatives, I was excited to bring a solution to a persistent challenge to the market.
The Bluehost Cloud, like many other managed WordPress platforms, takes care of the underlying, and often mundane, maintenance work required to keep WordPress and the server infrastructure up to date. However, it goes a step further by also removing the question of site speed from the equation.
This platform was built specifically for WordPress performance and speed, and everything I have seen up to this point has been nothing short of impressive. It is built upon WP Cloud, which was created by Automattic, but the Bluehost management layer and plugin bring the whole thing to life in a way that newbies and pros can equally appreciate.
The AI Site Creation aspect of the Bluehost plugin is phenomenal. Answer three brief questions and get a fully functional WordPress website in seconds. Yes, there are AI site builders all over the market, but this is specific to WordPress and is incredibly accurate based on the prompts it is given.
No more blank pages with a blinking cursor, no more struggling with a theme that doesn’t quite fit what you had in mind. Not to mention the fact that we have seen prompts entered that leave much to be desired, and the AI engine still produces a great website in its first output.
The innovation has only just begun with this feature, and being a long-time WordPress user, I couldn’t be happier with what I’ve already seen.
Myself with my Brilliant Team
We work from home, but we are still surrounded by an amazing group of people dedicated to making Bluehost and WordPress work seamlessly together, all while keeping a light-hearted approach to problem-solving and corporate life.
Bluehost Squad
Advice for Business Owners
My advice to anyone looking to start their own business is pretty simple. Don’t do it for the money. Do it to solve a problem. Do it with your customers in mind.
Provide value, peace of mind, and some sort of intrinsic emotional benefit, whether that be just making someone laugh, sharing a passion, or just providing a moment of respite from the deluge of anxieties the world deftly manufactures. Build a business for the sake of serving others first.
One of the biggest mistakes I see new and existing businesses make is putting their needs ahead of their customers. Whether that be small monthly sales targets or annual revenue goals, the moment you forget who you are serving and start only serving yourself, your customers will feel it.
If you think about a business or company as a person, ask yourself if you want to be around someone who acts only in their own self-interest regardless of whatever peripheral value they may provide.
The advice is simple. Do something well and tell people about it, but don’t act selfishly at any point in your growth. Remain authentic, and your customers will love that about you and your business.
WordPress & Beyond
The Bluehost Cloud has many great things to offer customers today, but it has plenty of room to grow. We want it to be the #1 choice for agencies and freelancers to build fast and infinitely reliable WordPress sites for their clients, and as a result, we will remain focused on providing advanced tools to manage multiple sites and clients on an intuitive dashboard.
Things like bulk plugin updates and client permission controls are on the immediate horizon, but deep integration with 3rd party tools for invoicing and design reviews is also being considered.
WordPress will continue to evolve, and the Bluehost Cloud will evolve with it. I think with the advancements in Artificial Intelligence and drag-and-drop design capabilities, the next 5 years will be very interesting in the WordPress space.
But again, keeping the user at the forefront of our minds will be the perfect guiding light for any development.
Stay in Touch
My Love for the WordPress Community
Krys at WordCamp
I’ve attended several WordCamps and love talking to other members of the community. It’s inspiring to see the work that people are doing in the plugin space specifically.
One of the best things about WordPress is its global community working together to create something that is as flexible to the imagination as it is accessible to anyone willing to use it.
I think one of my favorite people to talk to in the community is Dave Ryan. He’s a big contributor and always has fun ideas for better ways to help customers navigate WP-Admin’s tools.
How I Keep Myself Updated
My top resource for staying up to date with all things WordPress is the WP Tavern forums. The sheer wealth of knowledge there is incredible. I use it to keep updated on releases and upcoming developments, but also just to stay abreast of who is making waves in the space.
I Have a Life Other Than the Work
In my free time, I play video games, listen to the Foo Fighters at obnoxious volumes, help my wife grow veggies in the garden, play with my dogs (Pita and Pumpkin), and write short stories that span many genres.
Krys’s Dogs Pita and Pumpkin
I’m not much for travelling to exotic locations,, mainly because I can’t stand being in an aeroplane for longer than 3 hours in any one direction. So, most of the places I go to are in my head, and I like to write about what those places are like and what happens there.
I love coming up with characters and dialogue and often find myself inadvertently having conversations between two people about topics I’ve never explored.
Writing, dreaming, and pretending help remind me that creativity is innate in all of us, and business is just a mechanism for applying a point system to that creativity, but the intrinsic value of creativity is agnostic of any point system.
A painter can sell their painting for any amount of money, but it will never be worth more than what it meant to them while creating it.
I Reward Myself by
When it comes time to reflect on a win or an achievement, or even a colossal failure, I usually reward myself with free time and cheesecake. There is nothing quite like taking a few days off, going full goblin mode on a slice of cheesecake at 8 AM, and then taking the day as it comes.
My days are always heavily planned. From early morning meetings to late evening “quick calls,” work dominates most of my day. So, when I feel it’s appropriate to take some downtime, I make it a point to have zero plans.
I simply wake up and let my mind wander until something sounds interesting enough to set my cheesecake down and put my shoes on for an impromptu misadventure.
