The team at SkyVerge is joining GoDaddy in a full company acquisition. All SkyVerge extensions and Jilt will go under the GoDaddy umbrella. In the announcement from SkyVerge, they gave a hint as to what is next: “While we’ll be building something new at GoDaddy, everything we’ve already built is a big part of that.”
So, it looks like we should expect a new offering from GoDaddy in the coming months. SkyVerge was making about $350k per month at the end of 2019, and likely had an increase in revenue due to COVID, like many WordPress product businesses did. I do not know the purchase price, but I’d be surprised if it wasn’t at minimum $10m, and I would easily believe a number as high as 4-5x annual revenue.
They are bringing on the single largest independent WooCommerce focused company with a broad portfolio of popular extensions, an independently valuable product in Jilt for automated eCommerce email, and a bunch of talented people.
GoDaddy will be able to leverage those existing extensions in their eCommerce hosting packages without having to worry about the underlying licensing fees. Jilt, or perhaps some underlying engineering, could be catered to GoDaddy customers in certain tier packages. And who knows what they are working on, but I’m sure it will be a huge value add for GoDaddy eCommerce customers.
To date, there is still no real fully hosted WooCommerce option. With the right spin, I still consider this a highly valuable market if it can be offered for the right price.
I contracted with the SkyVerge team for about a year and enjoyed doing so. This is one of the best-run small businesses in the industry. I think there are folks at SkyVerge who could easily be groomed into important managerial roles at GoDaddy.
I’m really, really happy for SkyVerge, and GoDaddy is smart to acquire them. At the last Pressnomics, I sat and listened to a handful of GoDaddy folks digging for as much info as they could get out of the team under an Arizona sunset. It was all just casual conversation, but I could tell GoDaddy was very interested and knew just how valuable SkyVerge could be as part of their portfolio. Now, here we are.
