Brad Touesnard on Delicious Brains acquiring Advanced Custom Fields

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Today is an interview with Brad Touesnard, founder of Delicious Brains, talking about his recent acquisition of Advanced Custom Fields. A series of questions I’ve provided him, where he’s recorded answers to via audio.

I hope you enjoy today’s episode and learn more about one of WordPress’ most historic acquisitions.

Check the transcript at the bottom of the post and please share this episode out on your social media channels!

Transcription

[00:00:01] It’s the WP minute. This episode is brought to you by easy support videos, support your WordPress users by placing videos right in the WordPress admin. Get it@easysupportvideos.com.
[00:00:12]Today is an interview with Brad two Nard, founder of Delicious Brains, and talking about his recent acquisition of advanced custom fields, a series of questions he’s recorded answers to via audio. Let’s dive right in.
[00:00:24]Can you give us a sense of how you vetted a product company like ACF? What was attractive besides the obvious..
[00:00:29] Revenue, especially recurring revenue, definitely looked at that right away. I looked at the customer base and what their expectations were.
[00:00:40]there is obviously more to it with due diligence, . In terms of verifying all those numbers and making sure everything was accurate , and legit, but the accountants and lawyers handled most of that anyway and just provided reports.
[00:00:57]ACF’s pretty simple company Elliott set up a really kind of simple thing for 10 years by himself. There weren’t a lot of moving parts , to really vet , in this deal, in terms of what was attractive, obviously…
[00:01:10]ACF isa great product that has a passionate and large community of users and customers. The thing that particularly appealed to me is that the customers are the same as our customers.
[00:01:24]I think the thing that was the most attractive, it was like, this is a way for us to really kind of step into more mainstream WordPress world, I think. And that seems to be, I’m definitely feeling that over the last few days as the, after the announcement , was made, the, it was really, it’s almost overwhelming how much noise has been kicked up on Twitter especially around lifetime licenses.
[00:01:53]How do you weigh this decision amongst the existing product lineup at Delicious Brains?
[00:01:58] I’m confident that we can hire folks and handle ACF and scale up what we’ve been doing all these years with our existing products. And, we’ve added, within the last few years we’ve doubled our products.
[00:02:11]this is just an extension of where we’ve been already going. It makes complete sense. It’s kind of a supercharging, right? If we were adding two new products over the next, three years, that’s a lot different than adding, a massive product, overnight. it is a big jolt to the business.
[00:02:30]Can you hint at the size of the deal?
[00:02:32] Nope. Moving on
[00:02:34]Will pricing and existing licenses be honored for customers.
[00:02:38] Yes. We made that very clear in the announcement posts that we won’t be changing pricing anytime soon.
[00:02:46] And if we do in the future existing customers, won’t be impacted.
[00:02:50]Then of course we made the mistake of totally not mentioning lifetime licenses and totally missing that and that was a mistake. I wrote a tweet thread yesterday, everyone seems happy with what we’ve decided to do with lifetime licenses.
[00:03:07]Is this Delicious Brains way of investing in Gutenberg and a potential theme product in the future.
[00:03:12] Definitely not a theme product. That’s not really been something on my mind. I’m not going to write off any ideas, but yeah, it’s just not something we’ve really considered at this point.
[00:03:24]Investing in Gutenberg, that’s a bit of a different question.
[00:03:27]I can see that. ACF blocks is a huge part of ACF and I think it’s a huge part , of the WordPress block editor space.
[00:03:36]I love what Elliot has done there, he’s built a bridge really between, the kind of old school, WordPress developers, the PHP and jQuery, and those developers and, the react folks. It’s very challenging to level up on react.
[00:03:53]We’ve been doing it ourselves and it’s, very tough. I very much sympathize with folks who are struggling to kind of make that leap from, J query to react. That’s a huge leap. Anyhow, I think I think there’s lots more opportunity there to help folks extend the block editor, make custom blocks using ACF. So we’ll definitely, we’re definitely pumped to work on that project, but also I don’t think Gutenberg is necessarily the best tool for every job inside of WordPress either.
[00:04:26]there’s lots of cases where you might want to basically create a database of something. A database of books, a database of staff people or whatever it is. And Gutenberg’s UI is for building websites, but building pages, it’s not, , it’s a layout engine, it’s not designed for entering data.
[00:04:46] So I think that’s also where ACF has shined, right? it’s been a wonderful UI for for entering information. And I think that’s where ACF can continue , to shine inside of WordPress.
[00:04:59]What immediate challenges does a product like this present to delicious.
[00:05:03] The biggest one , is hiring. We’ve been hiring like crazy this year. I think in the last 12 months we’ve doubled the size of the team. We’ve really ramped it up in the last three or four months though, because we knew this was coming.
[00:05:18]The good news is we’re pretty much staffed up. we’ve hired pretty much all the developers we need , for ACF at this point. We’re in really good shape.
[00:05:29]One challenge that we’re facing is scaling management leadership around our products and adding ACF to the mix here it’s going to put a strain on that some more. So I’m looking at that, adding more leadership management resources to the team, considering even having someone like a COO role.
[00:05:52]Someone working with me to scale a company essentially.
[00:05:56]Last question to wrap up. What are you most excited about with acf now joining your suite of Delicious Brains products?
[00:06:04] Bringing our strengths our user experience and UI strength to ACF and improving that UI, making things, just all that much better. Making the developer experience better. Even improving, the backend code. Elliot , would be the first to admit that there’s areas of the code that are old and dusty that could use some attention.
[00:06:28] I’m really excited to ship that stuff to the community. It’s going to be so exciting to push out our first release or our first few releases and see how people react , to the work we’ve been doing.
[00:06:43]Thanks for taking the time to do the interview. Brad, if you’ve not seen Delicious Brains before check out Delicious Brains.com and all of the amazing tools they have there. And of course, if you’ve never, ever heard of ACF before, check out advanced custom fields.com, d...