GoDaddy continues to gobble up talent in the WordPress space. They’ve acquired WP Curve, and say they intend to keep it a standalone service.
WP Curve is a WordPress support service, offering “unlimited small fixes” that starts at $79 per month. I think of WP Curve mostly based on context from interviews founder Dan Norris did with Andrew Warner on Mixergy, as well as another with Brian Casel, where he talks about starting out in a week (he wrote a book/course on that), and he really came off as a hustler.
Looking back on the interview with Andrew, I found a gem in the transcript:
Andrew: I had the founder of Tweaky on. They changed they their name to Elto and then they sold to GoDaddy. What do you think happened with them? They were doing the same kind of stuff, tweaks to a website one at a time. They didn’t have a subscription as far as I remember. What do you think happened there?
Dan: Well, I’m not an insider. I’ve never met Ned. I’ve got a bit of weird vibe from that whole thing. It sort of seemed like nothing much was going on at that company and then all of a sudden GoDaddy grabbed it. I’m not sure if he’s like Dan Bilzerian now and private jets on Instagram and shit. I have no idea. It seemed like he kind of had a good crack at it and found someone to take it over and they took it over.
Andrew: I’m curious about what that was like. Was it a successful sale? It seems to be. In fact, it’s still running as Marketplace.GoDaddy but in a different way. It’s a place where you go and find a freelancer for your WordPress site.
Dan: I honestly have no idea. You’d have to ask him.
Dan isn’t joining GoDaddy with this sale, but moving on to other projects. I guess he won’t have a chance to talk to Ned.
But like he said, this isn’t GoDaddy’s first acquisition of such a service. They already bought Elto. In that post, I said, “You should probably get used to the phrase ‘acquired by GoDaddy.’ They are making a huge push into the WordPress economy, and they are willing to invest a lot of money while they do it.” I stand by that.
I’m not sure I’d chock this up to being much more than an acquihire or life boat to WP Curve, though it is interesting they are keeping the service active for now. We’ll just have to see where they’re going with this. But it seems a little superfluous to the GoDaddy Pro marketplace that spawned from the Elto acquisition.
