Post Status

Pippin’s post about the sale of Sandhills is also a farewell letter. He says he intends to retire from WordPress after the transition β€” 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 β€” 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. πŸ‘ β€” Dan Knauss

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 β€” 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 β€” 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 β€” BuddyPress comes to mind β€” 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?

πŸ—„οΈ 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. β€”Dan Knauss

I tend to feel like theme searches being down “feels” right, and I suspect Elementor β€” and other page builders to a lesser degree β€” might be playing a role there. As far as non-WordPress competition goes, James makes a good point:

“With Squarespace and Wix there’s only one way ‘in’ …. [T]his implies that getting the awareness part of the marketing funnel is important to being able to lead customers… and why their brand match terms volumes are so high, and why their investment in awareness makes sense for their solutions.”

Compare that with WordPress where “there’s a multitude of ways which enable discovery and purchase.”