Founders Invest in Atarim
Just before WCUS, Vito Peleg announced Atarim has completed its first funding round led by Joost de Valk and Marieke van de Rakt, the founders of Yoast SEO, which was acquired by Newfold Digital a year ago. Other backers include Devin Walker, co-founder of GiveWP (acquired by StellarWP of Liquid Web), Andrew Palmer, co-founder of Bertha.ai, and the former Elegant Marketplace (acquired by inMotion). There was also an angels group led by Matt Russell, co-founder of EasyWP at Namecheap.
Gridpane and Automattic Team Up to Serve Agencies
Gridpane also announced they completed a seed round of funding with a significant strategic investment from Automattic. The influx of capital will fuel Gridpane’s growth through a new focus on marketing and sales after years of development. GridPane and Automattic also will be partnering to launch a completely new, state-of-art, fully managed WordPress Hosting solution.
Gridpane’s mission is “to help WordPress agencies solve their hosting problems and grow their businesses.” They have customers in 100+ countries, and their tools are used on over 100k websites. With plans for every kind of WordPress site — up to enterprise-capable white label managed WordPress hosting for agencies — they are definitely worth a look for growing agencies. Take a look at the UK-based, GridPane client Performant Websites — self-described as a “family business,” they earned a top tier honor in the Enterprise category of the 2022 Review Signal WordPress Hosting Benchmarks. That’s the top in this industry! Congratulations to all involved in these fine WordPress companies and partnerships.
Salary Transparency — Why Not?
Speaking of growth and closely-knit company cultures here’s a great way to build and sustain them: Salary/pay transparency. It is coming state by state in the US, and even in Europe where it has been more of a norm, the EU is moving to strengthen it. Piccia Neri has written a terrific, deep piece for Post Status on Salary Transparency that we’re proud to publish today. Dive in and join the conversation in #club!
Related: Here’s a recent article from the MIT Tech Review that asks, Why can’t tech fix its gender problem? Why not indeed. Why not the WordPress community?
Learning Together in Post Status Slack
There’s a great discussion about Adobe‘s acquisition of Figma in our #club channel.
Also in #club, Carl Hancock and Travis Lopes dropped some great insights and spurred some sharing about PayPal usage/revenue. What we’ve learned:
- Travis: “Our payment gateway mix across all transactions is around 65/35 in favor of Stripe [over PayPal], if not a bit higher.” (After a year with both options offered to customers.)
- Carl: “Historically I’ve heard others say around 30% for PayPal vs. Credit Card break down. We are around 20%. This year it’s trending under that. PayPal has been trending downward every year in terms of payment method used.”
- Travis: “Interestingly, almost all of our PayPal transactions come from non-English speaking countries.”
Of course, this is anecdotal, and there are a lot of factors involved. Different payment methods are more popular in different demographic groups for a variety of reasons.
