As of this writing, that tweet had almost ~9k impressions, which is by far my most popular tweet (which I would hope it is, given how much effort I put into getting as many eyes on it as possible). We got lots of great responses and outreach based on this tweet, mostly from private Slack teams that I’m a part of and Twitter DMs.
After going through the replies, 2 solid businesses jumped out as being potential good fits for what we were looking for. Both were solidly in our revenue target range and both were plugin businesses that were clearly popular with users.
The first was a collection of utility plugins that had specific functions to do things like protect content, inject ads, accept payments, integrate forms and much more. It had only been launched in the first half of 2020 so was relatively new still, but had a solid trend of upward revenue with plenty of potential for growth. One of the reasons I was so interested in this business was because since there were lots of smaller plugins, there was a greater opportunity to expand in many different directions.
The other business that we wanted to look at pretty closely was Kanban for WordPress. I first met Corey, the owner, at a conference in 2016 where he was speaking about his experiences having run Kanban for WordPress for a year at that point. In the years after that, I’d run into Corey a couple more times at different WordCamps and we’d chat about how Kanban for WordPress was growing and changing into a sustainable plugin business. So when he reached out to me through the
Post Status Slack club and said that he would potentially be interested in finding a new home for Kanban for WordPress, I was very interested. Because Kanban for WordPress had a much stronger history and more historical financials and because I already knew Corey, we decided this was the deal we were going to pursue.