Who Is Louis Reingold? How The Soflyy Founder Made It Big

Albert Einstein. Walt Disney. Bill Gates.

These three industry titans have one thing in common: They’re all dropouts who have managed to make it big. Now, let me add another one to that list: Louis Reingold.

Unlike the first trio, you might not recognize that name. He likely won’t have his name etched in history, but his impact on WordPress will be felt for years to come. He’s managed to create not one but two site builders with a loyal user base.

So, let’s do a deep dive on this dropout turned millionaire. In this article, we’ll explore his past, the products he has launched, the struggles he faced, and what’s next. 

What We Know Of Reingold’s Past

Compared to our other deep dives, we surprisingly know a lot about Louis Reingold’s past, thanks to this event webpage from almost ten years ago. Of course, most of it is just satire on his part, but there are some nuggets of truth hidden in there. Or maybe he did build a time machine at the age of 15; who knows?

Reingold was born to a seamstress and a license plate designer (well, probably not) — both creators in their own right, a quality that Louis inherited. He started coding at the age of 11, and by 16, he dropped out of high school and started using his first-hand coding experience to create online products.

In 2011, he started his first venture: a WordPress plugin that lets you import or export large amounts of data from WP and WooCommerce with precision. WP All Import is still going strong to this day, serving more than 12,000 customers and counting.

Creating Soflyy

With WP All Import and Oxygen Builder (oops, spoilers), Reingold started his own company called Soflyy. He’s fully transparent with what he aims to do with this company, and that is to generate as much revenue as possible without sacrificing product quality. In his own words:

“It seems everyone in our industry has some heroic story about their success, a blog where they share their purported business wisdom, and some page on their website that rambles on about their guiding principles and how enlightened they are.

We don’t do any of that. This company exists to make money, so we try to avoid distractions. We generally avoid blogging, speaking, bragging about our success under the guise of transparency, attending too many conferences, doing interviews, and anything else that would take our focus away from what matters most: our customers and our products.”

Leaving A Mark: Oxygen and Breakdance Builder

Soflyy’s first product is a WordPress page builder called Oxygen. It quickly became a hit and rivaled popular builders such as Elementor and Divi because of its implementation of clean code outputs and features such as:

• Accessible design editor
• Dynamic data
• SEO optimization
• Header builder
• Composite elements
• Page optimization
• WooCommerce integration
• Extensive library of design templates
• And today... TONS of extensions and addons

Years later, Soflyy released another WordPress site builder called Breakdance. This powerful builder is poised to be a gamechanger in its segment, with both standard and new features like:

• Dynamic data
• Element Studio
• Form builders
• Speed and SEO optimization
• Low-code, drag-and-drop editor
• Extensive library of pre-built blocks
• Integrations to plugins and third-party applications such as WPRocket and WooCommerce

Now, you might be asking, “Why not just build functionalities on top of Oxygen instead of making a new builder, especially when some of their features already overlap?”

Well, as it turns out, you’re not the only one with that question.

Just a quick segue before proceeding with the next part while you’re here, I also highly recommend reading our Oxygen and Breakdance Builder reviews. These are insightful looks into what makes each of them special. They're not meant to be the same product with a different name, they have an entirely different audience.

A Bump in the Road: The Breakdance Builder Drama

With the release of Breakdance Builder, both Reingold and the Soflyy team anticipated a successful launch of a new and promising product. But they were in for a rude awakening since, instead of migrating to Breakdance, a large amount of Oxygen users claimed to have moved their business to Bricks Builder.

Why?

There have been many questions regarding Soflyy's integrity as a company since the release of Breakdance left Oxygen users confused and betrayed. They were scared that the company behind the builder that they loved was abandoning them.

As of March 2024, Oxygen is still more popular now than it was when Breakdance was announced and also considerably more popular than Bricks overall.

Thomas Ehrig and the rest of the Bricks team have been known for their community-first approach to development. They have a strong following because they listen — they even have an idea board where users can submit their own feature proposals, and if they get enough upvotes, they will be added to their roadmap.

But I’m getting sidetracked.

For his part, Reingold addressed this drama and acknowledged that it was the result of bad marketing and transparency. He also said that they’re committed to doing better as a company. You can read more about how this drama unfolded and got resolved here.

Things got rather interesting when Bricks had an exploit that impacted tons of WordPress sites that ran with it. I'm not sure how this will impact public perception for the next few years– but it's definitely something interesting.

The Bottom Line

So many have tried to launch WordPress products and failed; Reingold has three. This is a testament not only to his skills as a developer but also to his perseverance and knack for knowing what the community needs.

Sure, he’s had some controversies, but look at his track record. You can't deny a commendable level of success.

All that matters is that he stood his ground and explained why he did what he did. While I don't necessarily agree with everything he does, leaders are mainly successful because they commit to their vision over the noise of those around them.

The world (and WordPress sites, apparently) isn’t built by those who only succeed but by those who have failed and picked themselves up again.

That’s who Louis Reingold is.