Automattic to acquire WP Job Manager from Mike Jolley

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Written By Brian Krogsgard

15 thoughts on “Automattic to acquire WP Job Manager from Mike Jolley”

  1. Love that you wrote about this Brian. Mike’s done an amazing job on WPJM creating (yet another) successful plugin. I hope Automattic will continue where Mike left and make WPJM even bigger and better.

  2. Just want to point that out that historically Matt’s philosophy on plugins is reflected in the WP.org repository: There are many, many basic plugins that are offered with paid upgrades. And there’s nothing wrong with that really. The growth of WP and WooCommerce can both be attributed to the availability of robust paid solutions. After all, nobody can truly work for free.

    • While the plugin repository itself is approached with a laissez faire stance, Matt’s personal philosophy has been that plugins are not paid. Automattic’s paid plugins have always been a SaaS connection (Akismet, VaultPress, etc), versus “update and support” commercial plugins like WooCommerce or WPJM’s extensions model. I dealt with this much more in the Woo post linked in the article.

      • This is probably why Mojo Marketplace only works with themes when they had an existing plugin marketplace to combine it with (but didn’t).

        As an end-user I can’t say I love every plugin converting to a SaaS model or even just subscriptions and I have yet to hear others really getting enthused by it either (maybe that’s why WooCommerce extensions have such a low renewal rate). But as a dev it makes total sense. Quite torn by the business models and I can also see why it could be a bad thing if the plugin space was dominated by commercial solutions.

  3. Hey Mike, I really like WPJM plugin and had plans to build a product around it. Could you be more clear about how development track of this plugin will shift under A8C.

    P.S. One other thing which is still bugging me a bit is how can one leave $40K MRR generating product and go for a job (which I suppose doesn’t even match half of the product’s monthly income, which is a rough guess). Just curious šŸ™‚

    • Don’t want to answer for Mike but I will šŸ™‚

      For the first question: I think it’s up in the air as to how the development of WPJM will be handled under Automattic.

      For the PS: Mike is a developer that loves to code. I assume he’s got quite a bit of financial freedom already and sometimes things aren’t purely about dollars and cents. Also, he got an acquisition price for probably more than a year of expected income for WPJM, in addition to his salary at Automattic.

      A years worth of revenue or more upfront to then not worry about the product is a pretty enticing option in my opinion, when the product is producing great revenue.

  4. Congrats to both Mike and Automattic another excellent success story and well deserved:) Great write up also Brian keep rocking.

  5. Impressive to read how successful Mike has been! Looking forward to see what a8c will do with WPJM. Great article, just subscribed.

  6. Very excited for Mike. Have been using WPJM for a few years now and have seen it grow from the free plugin to all of these amazing paid extensions. I have the pro extensions bundle for WPJM, and have loved the support Mike has given me through specific questions I’ve had for him. Very glad to see that he got a hefty buyout price for such a great plugin. My project has been in development for a while and WPJM is at its core, I really hope that A8C is able to keep up with the updates and premium add ons! Congrats Mike!

  7. Congrats to Mike…. you nice guy and awesome developer.

    Now, what about the WPJob Manager development in future?

    Finally, great write up from Brian,thanks for sharing the wonderful article

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