I had the chance to sit down with Devon Walker and Matt Cromwell of GiveWP to talk about their sale to Liquid Web.

GiveWP has been the dominant WordPress donation plugin over the last few years. This move makes sense for Liquid Web as they continue to round out a complete managed WordPress solution for their customers.

Liquid Web acquisitions have been on a steady increase lately, with their most recent large acquisition of the Events Calendar plugin.

I hope you enjoy today’s episode with Devon and Matt.

Transcript

Liquidweb acquires GiveWP

[00:00:00] Matt Medeiros: [00:00:00] We were just chatting before we hit record. Devon, you were mentioning that things were getting wrapped up started to get almost wrapped up last week.

[00:00:06] I’m sure this has been a process. When did this start? What does the timeline look like for some kind of acquisition this size? 

[00:00:15]Devin Walker: [00:00:15] We’ve known Chris Lema for a while now. I’ve known him probably 10 years almost.  Around November of last year, I received an email from him that said, Hey, would you be interested in talking about how potentially we could work together, more liquid web? And what does this look like? And throughout the rest of 2020, we kind of went back and forth , “Hey, what does this look like?”

[00:00:36] What it, what does it potentially mean for you? What does it mean for us? And then come the new year we landed on. Okay. Potential acquisition could be in the cards. And then a lot more negotiation around that into the LOI phase. And eventually we settled on something that made sense for the both of us  our company and liquid web, but our entire team.

[00:00:59] And [00:01:00] then once we went through that, we got into more of the due diligence process, which was a very interesting and. A good learning process for everybody involved and then eventually closed on April 30th of last month. 

[00:01:12]Matt Medeiros: [00:01:12] Same brand new parent company, more resources to the customers.

[00:01:17] As people listen to this today, not much is going to change. Matt, Devin turns to you and says, “Hey, we’re thinking about getting acquired by liquid web from a CEO’s perspective, where do you start going to dot the I’s cross?

[00:01:27] The T’s? What was that whole process like as somebody who kind of sees every oversees, everything?”

[00:01:32]Matt Cromwell: [00:01:32] Don’t mess with my tools. I got stuff going here. The biggest thing Devin and I always have been on the lookout for is more resources. The ability to, to inject more energy into the stuff that we’re doing.

[00:01:43]One of the most important resources we have all the time as our team. So that was definitely my very first thing is do they want the whole team? And the immediate question answer to that was, yeah. They understand. And they see that the team makes the product. 

[00:01:57]Most folks, I think listening here know what it’s [00:02:00] like to, to run their companies on their own and bootstrapping all their resources as best as they can. And it, stretches everybody thin, but we’re always trying to look for the best way to support our people.

[00:02:11] And I do feel like this is a win-win across the board for all of our team members.

[00:02:16] Matt Medeiros: [00:02:16] Devin when you first start to have these conversations with Chris and you say, Hey, it’s great to add more resources, but man, this is my baby. I mean, you and I, you were a guest co-host of the Matt Report for a little while years ago, when you started giving WP, we’ve obviously met up at word camps and certain sort of senior journey highlighted your journey.

[00:02:35]How do you start putting up the mental guardrails to say. Okay. This is, this is for the greater good of everyone.

[00:02:41] I’m sort of giving this up. This, this passion, this dream, how do you do that? 

[00:02:47] Devin Walker: [00:02:47] Yeah. Well, one, one major thing was they want the leadership to come along with the product. And so. Matt and myself, Matt C CommonWell here, and me are not going anywhere. We are still fully in charge [00:03:00] of the destiny of our product, and of course we’ll have lots of good advice and good, good mentoring that now we don’t have to pay for 

[00:03:08] Matt Medeiros: [00:03:08] using Chris’s clarity line.

[00:03:10] Devin Walker: [00:03:10] That was, that was painful to pay that bill every month. But no, we, we Yeah, you’re right. Like my ownership and mats ownership. We, we no longer have that any more, but we have great incentives in place to meet certain goals that they’ve set and we’ve sat and and a lot more resources to do that.

[00:03:28] So, while w it was sad to see kind of my ownership go away in the product. It was, at least gratifying to know. We’re we still have. The ability to pull the levers that we’ve always 

[00:03:39] Matt Cromwell: [00:03:39] had. Yeah. It’s a really good question though, because I feel like folks who build things that grow and scale and get larger.

[00:03:50] At some point you do start to recognize that this actually is. Larger than me. And one thing that, I already mentioned, one thing we’re super proud of is our [00:04:00] team. We start to recognize that our team really is the people that have built this over time. And, and no product that has this much success is, is, is just on the back of one person anymore.

[00:04:11] So, But the ability to just say, okay, I’ll just do this different with our business. We don’t have that ability anymore, but give in itself really gets to continue and and go strong and probably stronger than we could have done it on her own. So, yeah. 

[00:04:26]Matt Medeiros: [00:04:26] We’ve the three of us have chatted personally about the business and some of the clients you’ve had, I won’t say the names here, but I’m sure they’re on your website and you can feel free to say some of your notable clients, active WP, but you have some.

[00:04:37] Really notable clients, some really big brands use your product and something like this, like you said, this is, this is bigger than us. There’s no longer can we just play with some of these not plays, not also, not a great word to use, but we can’t just focus on, on, maybe even doing things the WordPress way anymore.

[00:04:55] Maybe we have to broaden our horizons, open up the different technologies and in [00:05:00] a place like liquid web is going to have. Some real broad reaching technologies. Cause they don’t just do WordPress. They do all kinds of things. So, yeah. You start to really sit back and look at this and say, yeah, if we’re going to turn this into a air quo...