The WP Minute

Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribeI 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...

Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribeWe have a quick run down this week…let’s Do the Woo! (Hi, Bob) WooCommerce has invested in one-click checkout platform, PeachPay. According to PeachPay’s PR post: Cart abandonment is a significant problem for eCommerce businesses – in 2021, the global average rate has risen from previous years to 78.65%. PeachPay aims to significantly reduce this by providing shoppers with a frictionless, one-click checkout experience. Robert Jacobi covered the investment: So if we do a little math, the investment for PeachPay is no more than $450,000 (assuming that the 30% filled of $1.5 million includes the recent investment). View his link in the show notes to read through his interview with David Mainayar, co-founder and Chief Growth Officer of PeachPay. Other Woo news: Automattic purchased woo.com for an undisclosed sum of money. Yoast has re-shaped their Diversity Fund project in the wake of COVID and the challenges of travel, stating: We want to keep our Diversity fund alive and we want to keep helping people in the WordPress community. That’s why our Diversity fund will now be used to sponsor people that work on a project that benefits WordPress. This can range from teaching a group of people anywhere in the world how to use WordPress to writing patches for Core. Speaking of travel, Will We See In-Person WordCamps in 2021? An Open Discussion on a Path Forward, asks Justin Tadlock of the WordPress Tavern. One commenter states: I don’t see why this is so complicated. If large, indoor gatherings are legal in the host country, then WordCamps should go ahead with no extra restrictions beyond those prescribed by the local law. People can then decide to attend or not. Matt Mullenweg replies: “This is a good way to approach it.” FluentCRM wins Torque Mag’s Plugin Madness 2021 — congrats FluentCRM, but I still can’t wrap my head around putting my CRM into my CMS… I stumbled across WPStackable which is setting its sights on launching a new v3 for Gutenberg soon. Which looks like a competent suite of Gutenberg blocks. Finally, WordFest Live call for speakers is now open, The festival of WordPress kicks off July 21, 2021. This week on the Matt Report, I ran a “play it forward” episode highlighting 3 other podcasts in our space, WP Coffee Talk, Women WordPress, and Hallway Chats. That’s it for today’s episode, if you enjoyed please share it on your social media, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser! ★ Support this podcast ★

Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribeLet’s start with the good news, before we get into the…not so good news. Matt Mullenweg announced that CC Search is joining the WordPress project stating that the WordPress community has long advocated for a repository with GPL-compatible images. I think this is timely and needed with the not-so-recent announcement of Unsplash being acquired by Getty Images. Now time for the not so good news — What the FLoC?! First, what is FLoC? Well, here’s the definition straight from Google: Federated Learning of Cohorts, FLoC enables ad selection without sharing the browsing behaviour of individual users. FLoC provides a privacy-preserving mechanism for interest-based ad selection. As a user moves around the web, their browser uses the FLoC algorithm to work out its “interest cohort”, which will be the same for thousands of browsers with a similar recent browsing history. The browser recalculates its cohort periodically, on the user’s device, without sharing individual browsing data with the browser vendor or anyone else. One might think that sounds…okay? Well, until the Electronic Frontier Foundation chimes in stating FLoC is a terrible idea. “The third-party cookie is dying, and Google is trying to create its replacement.” “Google is leading the charge to replace third-party cookies with a new suite of technologies to target ads on the Web. And some of its proposals show that it hasn’t learned the right lessons from the ongoing backlash to the surveillance business model.” “FLoC is meant to be a new way to make your browser do the profiling that third-party trackers used to do themselves: in this case, boiling down your recent browsing activity into a behavioral label, and then sharing it with websites and advertisers. The technology will avoid the privacy risks of third-party cookies, but it will create new ones in the process.” Alrighty, now I’m a little concerned along with WordPress contributors who want to treat FLoC more as a security concern than a privacy concern. Read through the comments to find the different takes around the community. There’s even a Trac ticket to monitor the concern. Pull up a seat at the Tavern Pour yourself a cold one over some of this week’s notable articles from the Tavern! The upcoming Pattern Directory is set to launch with WordPress 5.8. The Jetpack team has launched yet another project, called Jetpack Boost. Interesting to see them launch this as a standalone plugin since Mullenweg has always flexed on the fact that Jetpack is modular. An interesting conversation around banning companies that run competitive ads against WordPress from sponsoring WordCamps is open, well, until today. Check out the conversation happening in the thread on the post. I think on the surface that makes sense, but then there’s also the grey area of even how Automattic leverages the cross-branding of WordPress. Time for the grab bag! Get Ellipsis https://getellipsis.com/blog/user-personas-for-wordpress-businesses/DoTheWoo https://dothewoo.io/wordpress-core-and-blocks-with-grzegorz-ziolkowski/GravityForms 2.5 https://www.gravityforms.com/two-five/Brainstorm Force https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLY_JnFeW7U ★ Support this podcast ★

Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribeFull Site Editing; we’re almost there We’re almost there with Full Site Editing in WordPress core. During the meeting that was happening the same day our last episode went live, the team made the decisions for WordPress and the parts of Full Site Editing hitting version 5.8: Improvements from Gutenberg 9.9+.Introduce new blocks (Query, Site Logo, Navigation, etc).theme.json mechanism.Template Editor for Pages/Blank Template.Widgets Screen & Block widgets in Customizer.Design tools: Duotone, Layout controls, padding, etc. What won’t make it? Global Styles and Site Editor. If you’re left yearning for some Global Styles, Frank Klein’s got you covered with an in-depth tutorial on his YouTube channel and the fine folks at WordCamp Miami hosted a livestream Mega Meetup which covered all things Full Site Editing. Okay okay, still hungry for more? Gutenberg Times has a complete wrap up, be sure to listen to the latest episode of the Gutenberg Changelog. It’s time to get down to business. Popular WordPress caching/speed plugin WP Rocket is joining group.one a large European internet services conglomerate — including one of the largest web hosts in Scandinavia. WP Media is joining group.ONE as an independent brand. Each company focusing on what it does best to the benefit of our customers. we are maintaining our own identity and organizationour entire team, including the co-founders, will stay the samewe’ll continue to develop and maintain Imagify, WP Rocket and RocketCDN GravityFlow has a fantastically detailed overview on how they put customer service front and center for impressive year over year increases in product renewal. If you’re looking for two interesting (with air quotes) tools to uncover what WP businesses are for sale or you just wanna snoop: Check out PluginRank Acquisition page and Shahjahan Jewel’s PluginStat website for some fun data. Do it Live! With events. I thought it would be useful to mention some events that caught my eye — but you don’t have much time left to register. GoDaddy Pro is hosting a slick looking online event called Expand 2021 kicking off on April 27Elementor is putting on a training about Google’s upcoming web vitals a mere 1 day later on April 28thPage Builder Summit, which you have plenty of time for, is opening it’s doors on May 10th – 14th Now time for the honorable mentions Go to the WP Weekly Sponsor page and support Davinder — he has an opening for you. I can’t stop learning about the no code movement and the opportunities around it, check out my latest Matt Report episode with Kieran Ball Lastly, thanks to Lesley Sim the co-creator of Newsletter Glue, the fantastic plugin I use to put this email together. I know I didn’t have a link last week and she quickly opened up my eyes to some of the amazing templating features it has — using native Gutenberg. ★ Support this podcast ★

Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribeWelcome to the first official episode of The WP Minute and I’m officially slapping the “beta” tag on to this thing. I’m still working out how I produce the show and fill in these posts, for now, here are the links mentioned in today’s episode. Kadence WPhttps://www.kadencewp.com/blog/kadence-wp-is-joining-ithemes/?ref=376Matt Mullenweghttps://ma.tt/2021/04/wix-dirty-tricks/Avishai Abrahamihttps://www.wix.com/blog/2021/04/letter-from-avishai-abrahami-to-matt-mullenweg/Joe Casabonahttps://casabona.org/2021/04/wix-wordpress-marketing/WP Tavernhttps://wptavern.com/will-full-site-editing-land-in-wordpress-5-8-a-decision-is-forthcomingUdaipur Timeshttps://udaipurtimes.com/people/obituary-puneet-sahalot-cofounder-udaipurtimes-rest-in/cid2703347.htm ★ Support this podcast ★

Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribeIf you want to know why I started another podcast in the WordPress space — well — look no further. I’ll cover how I came up with this crazy idea and what I might be introducing next for the show. ★ Support this podcast ★

Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribeWelcome to The WP Minute — its your WordPress headlines before you get lost in the headlines. Listen to the debut trailer to find out more details behind the podcast. If you’re looking for a weekly WordPress news podcast that gets you the headlines in under five minutes or less — you’ve come to the right place! ★ Support this podcast ★