More than Words

By AZAM on March 5, 2008

I was thinking that WordPress would be an excellent Platform for communication. It is widely used Open Source blog software that allow people to communicate online and what developer community for a number of plugins. Well you can’t beat free and you can’t bet against a large following. WordPress will likely evolve into an large open platform with rich applications and interoperability. WordPress is a very simple way to allow you set up a blog for free and provides richer functionality & easy to customize. The ability to independently host and pick whatever applications is quite enthralling. The fact a lot of famous site on the web from fortune 500 to highly trafficked web pundits means you’re in good company.

On Automatic Pilot

Wordpress is like a default choice for many blogger with other blog software and CMS. WordPress is a powerful tool for web development. The ecosystem involved is driving further value proposition and ability to integrate with a number of applications on the web. WordPress has done some great work and the community has built on the strong foundation. It probably too early, but WordPress will become a very powerful platform that will rival others that have been mentioned commonly as the Next Big Thing. The WordPress platform offers a very appealing proposition with being truly open and easy API for development of plugins.

The Plan From Matt

In 2005 Automattic was small. Through some miracle I had convinced Donncha O Caoimh, Andy Skelton, and Ryan Boren to leave their safe jobs, join a company with almost no money in the bank run by someone with no experience, and whose core idea was to give away and open source all our core IP. There were more questions than answers. Would a hosted version of WordPress move beyond the geek appeal the OS project had? How would the virtual company with no office work? Could we develop a service alongside an OS project without screwing both of them up? Should I raise money? Most importantly, would it scale?

Answer: Yes it does Scale! And How

There have been 5,880,790 downloads of WordPress.org since Automattic started (3,852,554 in the past year alone).

Fast forward to 2007: many of the seeds planted started to really bloom. On WordPress.com 1.8 million new users joined, they created 25 million posts, we served 3.2 billion dynamic pageviews, and grew to reach over 100 million unique users worldwide. Akismet blocked billions of spams from reaching blogs. Nearly every major media organization, from the NY Times, WSJ, CNN, Fox, Time, People, and more, have embraced WordPress. Finally the approach of serious acquisition or majority-stake investments brought up the biggest question we’d faced so far: should we sell, or build out Automattic to be an independent company for many years to come.

The Momentum

From VCMike Polaris Ventures

Over the last two years, Automattic’s business has been expanding at a rapid rate. Our most prominent service, WordPress.com has grown to over 2 million bloggers. Their blogs are read by an astounding 114 million unique visitors from all over the world and over 42 million from the US every month (according to Quantcast, that makes us the #12 site in the US, ahead of sites like Facebook and Wikipedia). Revenues have been growing as well, we’ve been profitable as a business, and we’ve accomplished all of this with a fantastic team of fewer than 20 people.

From Seed to First Round

Automatic initially raise 1.1M with lead from Polaris and True Ventures, Radar Partners, Shelby Bonnie cofounder CNET, and CNET (former employer of Matt). Automatic gained Toni Schneider as CEO a partner in True and former Yahoo VP of the Yahoo Developer Network.

In January, Automatic raised 29.5M in Series B round from Polaris putting in 20M along with previous investors True Ventures, Radar Partners and added strategic partner The New York Times an avid users of WordPress in their blogs at the NYT.

New York times partnership makes a lot of sense. It would be very interesting to see future collaborations with content flowing both ways and further development of applications.

NexT Moves

Toni Schneider outline future plans

However, we did set a couple of new goals. One was to put enough money in the bank to have financial security for years to come. Another was to invest more aggressively into our “other” products and services (other than WordPress) like Akismet, Gravatar, and bbPress. Today’s financing will help us achieve both of those goals.

From VCMike of Polaris

Wordpress had gone from an open source publishing tool to a massively scaled web service. As this trajectory became more clear, Matt and Toni began to spend more cycles thinking seriously about the future of Automattic, and now have developed a plan to build Automattic into a substantial Internet platform business.

Setting the Stage: I feel there may be a future face plant

Automatic is becoming a platform for users to communicate. The user base is quite large with WordPress having a free hosted solution and independently self hosted solution. WordPress offers an opportunity to develop their own personal presence and or multi user solution. The users will likely evolve into a social network of users and ability to communicate with one another through various methods and applications. The advantage is that the system is entirely open and free which may lead to a more evolved environment or ecosystem to support various applications and needs. Automatic has recently backed Buddy Press and bringing social aspects into their efforts. Also, Chris Messina, co-founder of Citizen Agency is working on a project focused on WordPress platform.

The DiSo (dee • zoh) is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts. or as Chris puts it: “to build a social network with its skin inside out”.

Matt in his own Words

It’s clear that the future is social. Connections are key. WordPress MU is a platform which has shown itself to be able to operate at Internet-scale and with BuddyPress we can make it friendlier. Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly Free and Open Source alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape.

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