Oleksandr Yusypenko

Most people call me Alex. I live in Modica, Sicily, and I make a WordPress product company work — lately, more and more, with AI woven into the everyday work.

I’m Ukrainian, born in Odesa. For the last nine years I’ve worked in the WordPress ecosystem — themes, plugins, marketplaces, and everything it takes to run a product company: from support tickets to release pipelines to the monthly numbers. Before that I spent years on the front line of customer support for a big US e-commerce store, and before that I was a bank account manager reading small businesses through their balance sheets. All three turned out to be the same education in different clothes.

These days most of my work circles one question: what does a small company look like when AI is genuinely part of it — not a demo or a press release, but the daily work of developers, testers, marketers and support people. I build those systems, run them in production, and live with the results.

Now

• Solutions architecture and operations at ThemeREX — a WordPress product company with a large theme portfolio: releases, marketing, partnerships, and the AI systems underneath all of it.
• Small personal systems on the Claude API — a morning briefing, automations for the boring parts of life.
• Italian lessons, and running Sicilian roads before the heat arrives.

The story so far

• 2010Alfa-Bank Ukraine, SME accounts. Learned to read a business through its numbers.
• 2011CARiD, a US auto-parts e-commerce. Four years of support and billing — talking with customers every single day.
• 2015TemplateMonster: partner relations, affiliate tools and ready-made stores, the developer certification center, communication and marketing.
• 2017ThemeREX. Marketing first — SEO, content, email and affiliates for a portfolio of 900+ themes, several plugins and a custom development studio.
• 2022The war. We left Ukraine; Modica, Sicily, slowly became home.
• 2025Moved into solutions architecture and operations — and began rebuilding how the whole company works around AI.
• 2026The company runs AI-first: development, testing, content, support — systems I designed carry a real share of the daily load.

Things I’ve built

• An internal marketing platform (Laravel + React + LLM APIs) that runs six publishing channels with light human oversight.
• A sales and analytics portal that reconciles marketplace and direct-sales data every day — including the refunds other reports quietly miss.
• Commercial WordPress plugins — among them a suite that went through WordPress.org’s security review to publication, and a booking platform with payments.
• SEO/AEO tooling, end-to-end test suites, and a small “life OS” on the Claude API that briefs me every morning over coffee.

Writing

• Cursor vs Claude Code: which AI coding assistant should you choose? · Feb 2026
• Install Claude Code: step-by-step setup and quick start · Feb 2026
• Older notes on customer service and running an online business live in the blog.

Away from the keyboard

Running on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays — 5 to 10 km at around 5:00/km — skiing in winter, and old cities and warm coasts whenever there’s an excuse: Vienna, Pisa, Paris, Romania, Turkey, the Dominican Republic. English at work, Ukrainian and Russian by birth, Italian in progress.

Say hello

The contact page reaches me, and so do LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.