WooCommerce's Billion-Dollar Rise

A story about how WordPress acquired WooCommerce, which became one of their most successful acquisitions.

"WooCommerce was a small company of about 40 people based out of South Africa. They started as a theme company called WooThemes and developed this ecommerce plugin. They initially created it just to sell more themes, as themes were the big business for WordPress at the time.

We actually looked at buying it years prior, but candidly, the code was really crappy. As Automatic is very engineering-led, we initially passed on it. But it just kept taking off because they did such a good job building something people wanted. Even though the code wasn't scalable or well-organized, they had great product-market fit.

When we finally acquired them, there was private equity trying to buy the plugin too. We won over the private equity because they wanted to join our culture. At the time, they only had 4 engineers - most people were customer support or other roles. We were able to take what we were great at - engineering and scalability - and apply it to what they had done brilliantly, which was creating something people love to use.

Last year, WooCommerce processed over $30 billion in goods and services sold. It's definitely one of our best acquisitions, though we're in an incredibly competitive space with companies like Shopify, which I have tremendous respect for."