Post Status

Mark shares a possible future for WordPress as a platform and an industry that is worth considering deeply. Recent acquisitions may give some companies a unique advantage:

“…if you’ve opted into usage tracking, there are a few things that are tracked that can be used in market research… this potentially gives one company access to information about the WordPress market as a whole that no one else has.”

Pippin — referencing Kinsta COO Jon Penland in conversation with Anchor Hosting founder Austin Ginder — emphasizes the threats to WordPress as a platform and community as the WordPress experience fragments across many different hosted versions.

David Mainayar agrees with Chris Wiegman that acquisitions are happening because WordPress has lost its simplicity. This raises the related concern about fragmentation, especially if WordPress core suffers “decay” from a lack of community contributors.

We’re not sure the increasing complexity of the tech and the ecosystem are the major motivator for established WordPress business owners exiting in a sale. One could look at the glass half full — instead of losing something, WordPress has joined the modern web, and even if you prefer the old web, it’s hard to see how this progression could be avoided.

We do think Chris and David are right that web hosts will continue crafting custom experiences that target their own audiences. Echoing Jon Penland and Pippin, this seems to be the one thing everyone agrees on. How it is good and bad, and who it is good and bad for are the important emerging questions.

We think there’s always an opportunity for anyone to start small. These “big” acquisitions don’t necessarily close out a space — not forever. Smaller players can come in and move faster to niche markets than larger companies can. We’ve seen it before. Back to Mark who mentions this too:

“You could build something completely new or just take a new approach to an existing problem. Differentiating yourself from the existing, larger solutions out there will be key if you choose to do this, but again, it can pay off nicely.”

But for small, new players to have a decent shot at success, the WordPress platform has to be everyone’s playing field. As the hosted platform space gets more competitive and more refined in creating unique WordPress experiences, it could wall off certain segments of the market — niche products and their users as well as developers. This would complicate the cooperation needed to move WordPress core forward.

—David and Dan

Pippin’s post about the sale of Sandhills is also a farewell letter. He says he intends to retire from WordPress after the transition — and close his laptop for a long time. There are a lot of reasons why a founder might make their exit, but there are only three ways it can happen, as Pippin notes. His choice is to pass the great products and team he built to a friend — and a customer.

As Syed stresses, he built his own business with Easy Digital Downloads and is intimately familiar with it and the other plugins he’s acquiring. According to Pippin, Awesome Motive has already “built a lot of really cool internal tools and extensions” that he is sure “will benefit the community at large.”

Passions, people, and companies come and go, so it’s good to see continuity amid the change. Syed’s vision and energy bode well for the future of the products Pippin and company pioneered and sustained for so long.

Congrats to Pippin, Sandhills, Syed, and the growing team at Awesome Motive. 👏

—Dan

Redefining Online Learning
It’s been a boom time in recent years for edutech companies, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. LearnDash, which debuted almost a decade ago, was well-positioned to ride that wave. LearnDash co-founder and CEO Justin Ferriman wrote a fascinating account of the year-long sale process of his company — it’s a detailed and thoughtful retrospective on how challenging success can be. It’s worth a careful read if you think an acquisition may be in your future.

As a leader (and arguably the leader) in the WordPress space for online learning, LearnDash makes WordPress an effective Learning Management System (LMS). Their plugin comes with a whole ecosystem of addons and integrations, so it’s no surprise LearnDash would be attractive as a platform for a hosting company to acquire.

Now under Chris Lema‘s leadership at Liquid Web, LearnDash will join the teams and products already acquired for StellarWP‘s portfolio: Restrict Content Pro, The Events Calendar, Kadence WP, GiveWP, and IconicWP. It’s easy to see how this all should add up to a well-integrated platform product and a dominant player in the LMS space, as Chris envisions. But Chris is thinking bigger than LMS — beyond “online learning” toward the complementary features in a seamless system that carries along whole cohorts of people through their day as they play a variety of roles and switch between different tasks and goals.

How this acquisition will shake up other third-party integrations and partnerships with LearnDash — BuddyPress comes to mind — remains to be seen. Chris sees StellarWP as “early” to the online learning space, at least as it exists today in the WordPress market. Will other hosting companies and deep pockets enter it as well or make similar plays to corner a specific niche with an integrated solution?

🗄️ Post Status Archive: Chris Lema has a long history with edutech, and he recounts some of that history in the latest episode of Post Status Draft. We also ran across this 2014 post by Post Status founder Brian Krogsgard, about Chris’s entry into full-time work with WordPress.

—Dan