inSourceCode fills online niche, working with congressmen and the RNC

When Jayson Manship and Matt Turow decided to plug into WordPress three years ago, they ended up hitching their fortunes to what would become one of the world’s most popular blogging platforms.

They didn’t officially launch their own company, inSourceCode of Noblesville, until February 2011. But in the 18 months since then, they’ve expanded their full-time workforce from two to 11 and quadrupled the size of their workspace to 1,600 square feet.

It all started when Turow and Manship met in October 2009 through a Craig’s List ad requesting “3 to 4 developers in the Indianapolis area for a conservative, right-leaning organization.”

The organization was the Republican National Committee, and Turow and Manship were brought in to work on the GOP.com Web site from Indianapolis.

Todd Van Etten, RNC’s new media director for the 2010 cycle, said they were looking to head in a different direction toward an open-source content management system.

“Indianapolis was just kind of a whim, we put out (calls) in different markets and when we got Jayson on the phone we just said ‘Yeah, this is the right thing,’ ” Van Etten said. “We could trust that they knew what we were doing, understood the larger vision and wouldn’t mind working remotely.”

After working 16 months for the RNC, they opened inSourceCode and started getting work from members of Congress.

“We were doing state websites for Republican committees,” Turow said. “They were on an old system and we decided we could do it better.”

InSourceCode was the first company to launch a WordPress site within Congress. It hadn’t been done before, Manship explained, because of the strict security standards for Congressional websites.

After they successfully launched the site, WordPress came to them to find out more about how they did it.

Recently, WordPress named inSourceCode one of its nine VIP companies worldwide for their Feature Partner Program.

What does that mean for this growing Hoosier firm?

“Nowadays anyone can claim to be an expert, but when you get validated by someone like WordPress who says, ‘These are our experts,’ it makes it a lot easier to show people you know what you’re talking about,” Manship said.

As a VIP, the company either does work for WordPress or WordPress refers companies to inSourceCode.

“We’re working with technology platforms to integrate their services into our WordPress.com VIP platform, connect them with our VIPs,” Paul Maiorana said in a statement on the WordPress VIP blog site.

InSourceCode is one of only two shops in the Midwest to make the list (the other is located in Chicago), and one of only seven in the U.S.

Since 2011, inSourceCode has grown to 11 full-time employees with a one-man office in Washington, DC, where most of their business is still located. Manship said they hope to hire five more full-time employees before the year’s end.

Eighty percent of the company’s business is high-end WordPress systems. InSourceCode either scales, designs or migrates content to a website for a client and passes it off to an IT team or continues maintaining the site for the organization.

They typically charge $25,000 to $250,000 for their services. That wide range accounts for the variety of needs special to each client. Manship projects inSourceCode will bring in approximately $1 million for revenue by the end of their calendar year.

The company has had no formal marketing campaign. Manship attributes their success to word-of-mouth recommendations, WordPress referrals and a friendly Hoosier spirit.

“We have that ‘extend a hand and help your neighbor’ mentality,” Manship said.

Something Turow and Manship would both like to see is a growth of business here in the Indianapolis area.

InSouceCode’s client list includes The Indiana State Museum, Hallmark Homes, Sidestreet Deli and University of Indianapolis Admissions, to name a few.

Some of the WordPress launched sites in D.C. include HumanEvents.com, JudicialWatch.org and sites for the Heritage Foundation.

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