Meet Eliot
I’m Eliot Dill, co-founder of PressMeGPT.com. I’ve spent much of my career building, growing, and scaling technology companies, particularly in SaaS, web development, and digital marketing.
I previously co-founded a WordPress software company that was acquired in 2022, and afterward, I served as a VP and General Manager at the larger software organization. That experience gave me a unique perspective on everything from building products and acquiring customers to scaling operations and eventually exiting a business.
I’ve always been an entrepreneur at heart, and I enjoy identifying problems and solving them. PressMeGPT is a natural extension of that passion, combining my background in websites and SaaS and combining it with AI.
What inspired you to create PressMeGPT?
I’ve been involved in web development and digital marketing since the early 2000s, from building websites with Dreamweaver and FrontPage to watching JavaScript evolve from an Internet joke into the foundation of Web 2.0.
I started using WordPress around version 2, when its WYSIWYG editor made content editing easier. I later spent nearly a decade building sites with Divi which in my mind was the best drag-and-drop solution on the market at that time.
Now AI has made creating beautiful websites easier than ever, but I still see two major problems with most AI website builders:
- SEO: Tools like Lovable, Bolt.new, Replit, and Base44 often generate single-page applications that can create SEO and indexing challenges. What’s the point of a beautiful website if nobody can find it on Google?
- Content management: In my experience, clients still want a familiar CMS like WordPress where they can easily update text, images, and pages without relying on a developer.
I initially built PressMeGPT to solve my own problem. When a friend asked me to build them a website and I wasn’t able to easily use AI with WordPress, I saw an opportunity to bring the same “build-with-words” AI experience to WordPress.
It turns out plenty of others wanted the same thing.
What makes PressMeGPT different from other AI website builders available today?
Most AI website builders focus on generating a brand-new website from a prompt, often locking you into their own hosting platform or proprietary builder.
PressMeGPT takes a different approach. We’re focused on helping people recreate, convert, and customize websites while giving them ownership and flexibility through WordPress.
You can start with an existing website, a screenshot, a Figma design, or an idea. Our AI can recreate the design, and you can continue refining it through a conversational interface.
One of our biggest differentiators is that we support multiple WordPress export formats, including classic WordPress themes, Gutenberg block themes, and Elementor templates. You’re not forced into one particular page builder.
We’ve also invested heavily in the accuracy of website recreation. Rather than relying on a single method, we analyze websites using multiple methods including screenshots, HTML, CSS, and Markdown to better understand both their appearance and structure.
Another feature I’m particularly excited about is our ability to preview generated websites inside an actual WordPress installation before exporting them. That helps bridge the gap between an AI-generated mockup and a real, usable website.
Ultimately, we’re not trying to replace WordPress. We’re trying to make building for WordPress dramatically faster and easier.
What does the ideal PressMeGPT workflow look like from the moment someone has an idea to the moment they have a finished WordPress site?
We’ve tried to make the process as straightforward as possible.
Let’s say you’re a web designer and your client shows you a website they love. Instead of spending hours recreating it manually, you can enter the URL into PressMeGPT, give it instructions on changes, and let AI generate a similar design as a starting point.
Alternatively, you could upload a screenshot or a design you’ve created in Figma.
From there, you interact with the AI to make changes. You might ask it to change the colors, rearrange sections, add a contact form, update the navigation, add pages, or make the design more modern. You don’t need to know how to code to make those changes.
Once you’re happy with the result, you can preview the site in an actual WordPress environment to see how it looks and behaves.
Finally, you export it as a classic WordPress theme, Gutenberg theme, or Elementor template and install it on your own WordPress website.
What previously might have taken days of development can potentially be accomplished in a fraction of that time. And because the end result is WordPress, you can continue editing and managing the website using familiar tools.
What role does AI play in understanding an existing website before converting it into WordPress?
AI is really the foundation of the entire process but it is much more complex than an LLM prompt.
Early on, we relied on a more limited single layer scrape to understand an existing website. We’ve since expanded that significantly.
Today, PressMeGPT uses multiple methods to analyze a website, including visual screenshots, underlying HTML and CSS, and Markdown representations of the content with multiple checkpoints for measuring the results.
Each method provides different information. Screenshots help AI understand the visual design, HTML and CSS reveal the underlying structure and styling, and Markdown helps identify and organize the content.
By combining these approaches, we can give AI a much more complete picture of what it’s trying to recreate.
AI then interprets that information to generate a new website that can ultimately be converted into WordPress.
It’s not always perfect, particularly with highly complex websites, but the technology is improving rapidly, and we’ve seen significant improvements in accuracy by combining these different techniques.
How do you handle websites with complex layouts or custom functionality that cannot simply be recreated from visual elements?
This is one of the more interesting challenges we’re working through.
Recreating how a website looks is one thing. Recreating how it functions is something entirely different. Then actually converting the replica to something WordPress supports without a plugin is a next level challenge.
A screenshot can tell you what a dropdown menu looks like, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you how that menu behaves. The same goes for animations, interactive elements, forms, or custom application functionality. We recently added SVG support, for instance.
That’s why we’ve moved beyond relying solely on visual information. By analyzing the underlying HTML, CSS, and other available information, we can better understand how a website is structured.
That said, we’re realistic about the limitations. A complex web application with custom backend logic, third-party integrations, or proprietary functionality isn’t necessarily something that can be perfectly recreated just by entering a URL.
Our focus is on making the majority of website design and conversion work dramatically easier while allowing developers to handle more specialized requirements with plugins when necessary. But we hope to offer some integrations with popular plug-ins in the future.
I think the best AI products recognize where automation works well and where human expertise still adds value.
What do you think SaaS founders often get wrong when building products around rapidly evolving AI technology?
I think one of the biggest mistakes is building a product around what AI can do rather than focusing on a problem customers need solved.
The question is no longer, “can it be built?The question now is, “Should it be built?””
AI is evolving so quickly that a feature that seems revolutionary today could become a standard in 6 months.
I believe the real opportunity is in creating a complete workflow around a meaningful customer problem.
Ultimately, customer experience, reliability, and distribution still matter just as much as the underlying technology.
Where do you ultimately want PressMeGPT to fit into the future of website creation and the WordPress ecosystem?
WordPress powers a massive portion of the internet, and I don’t think that’s going to change overnight. It has an incredible ecosystem of developers, agencies, plugins, themes, and hosting providers.
But I do think the way people create websites is going to change dramatically.
Instead of spending hours manually building layouts, adjusting CSS, and moving elements around, people will increasingly describe what they want and let AI handle much of the implementation.
My vision for PressMeGPT is to become the bridge between AI-powered website creation and the WordPress ecosystem, so its popularity continues
I want someone to be able to take inspiration from virtually anywhere, whether that’s an existing website, a screenshot, a design mockup, or simply an idea, and turn it into a fully functional WordPress website without having to start from scratch.
I also want PressMeGPT to be a valuable tool for agencies and developers, not just beginners. If we can help a web agency complete projects faster, reduce repetitive work, and serve more clients, that’s a tremendous value proposition.
Ultimately, I see AI changing how websites are built, while WordPress continues to provide the flexibility, ownership, and ecosystem that so many businesses depend on.
What advice would you give founders building in the SaaS industry?
First, solve a real problem. It’s easy to fall in love with an idea or a technology, but ultimately customers pay for solutions, not features.
Second, get your product in front of customers as early as possible. You can spend months building what you think is the perfect product, only to discover that customers want something entirely different.
Third, don’t underestimate distribution. Building software has become easier than ever, especially with AI, but getting people to discover, trust, and pay for your product is still incredibly difficult. A great product doesn’t automatically translate into a great business.
I’d also encourage founders to stay flexible. Some of the best opportunities come from listening to customers and being willing to change direction.
Finally, be persistent, but don’t confuse persistence with stubbornness. Building a SaaS business involves a lot of experimentation, failures, and unexpected challenges. The important thing is to keep learning and improving.
Having built and exited a software company before, I can tell you that success rarely happens as quickly or as smoothly as it might appear from the outside.
Did you enjoy our interview? Do you have anything to say to our community?
Yes! I appreciate the opportunity to share a little about our journey and what we’re building with PressMeGPT.
I think we’re living through one of the most exciting periods in software development. AI is making it possible for small teams and individual entrepreneurs to build things that would have required significantly more resources just a few years ago.
For anyone in your community who’s building websites, working with WordPress, or experimenting with AI, I’d encourage you to give PressMeGPT a try.
We’re still actively improving the product, and feedback from real users has been incredibly valuable in helping us determine what to build next.
Thanks again for having me, and I look forward to seeing the sites everyone creates!
