Update: WP Remote has now been acquired, read our announcement.
WP Remote, our remote WordPress management web app has been helping WordPress agencies, freelancers, and site owners monitor and update their WordPress sites since we launched it back in April 2010.
It’s a centrally hosted web app. You sign in and add the WordPress sites that you are responsible for managing. WP Remote then monitors those sites, tracks WordPress Core, Plugin or Theme updates that are available and handles those updates either automatically or with a single click. It additionally supports installing and managing plugins across your sites and taking backups. It keeps a log of the things that have been done and will send a daily email notifications when updates are available. It’s primarily designed to help freelancers and agencies maintain the sites they build for their clients.
WP Remote works, is used and is liked.
The people who use WP Remote like it. We regularly get feedback from people telling us they use it because it’s well designed, easy to use, and robust. The fact that it allows an unlimited number of sites to be tracked for free also helps differentiate from the competition.
It’s very well built, having been architected and developed by some of the best WordPress engineers in the world and tested with thousands of users, close to 100,000 sites and likely over a million updates total.
It’s well reviewed, here’s a recent review from WP Seer.
We’re not giving it the focus in deserves
Even though it continues to do well, we just haven’t been able to dedicate enough time to WP Remote. We had ambitious plans for a version 2, we introduced a premium version that we backed out of because we didn’t have the resources to run and grow it, and we’ve got lots of great ideas both from it’s users and ourselves that we haven’t been able to act on. We’re too busy with other things, including Happytables, our client work, events, and more.
We really believe in WP Remote and love it as a product, however focus is important and we’re just not able to give it to WP Remote. We owe it to the product — and its many users — to find it a better home.
The numbers
There are over 18,000 registered users with over 96,000 sites monitored. 1,850 people logged in during the past 30 days. 1,200 of those have more than 5 sites added to their account and 110 of them have more than 50 sites monitored. Our users rely on WP Remote as a key part of their business. In the past 30 days WP Remote was used to perform over 20,000 plugin updates.
Each week between 50 and 100 new users sign up and over half of them go on to add a site.
We introduced a premium plan for a few months and in that time converted around 60 paying customers, we pulled it because we just didn’t have the resources internally to support it with development, support and marketing. There is obvious opportunity in a premium plan with additional features. We have surveys we’ve run with users telling us the premium features they’d like us to build. There are also obvious revenue opportunities that come from partnering with hosts and or premium plugins / services. We’d be happy to share all these ideas with you.
Interested? Make us an offer
We want to find a buyer for WP Remote and everything that goes with it. Someone who can take what we’ve built and continue to grow it. We had promising results from our premium version and with work, are confident that could generate meaningful revenue. There is also lots of opportunities around things like premium plugins, hosting affiliation etc. which we’ve so far only minimally explored.
If you’re interested, we’d love to receive your offer. We’re not interested in equity, just cash. We’re open to all cash deals as well as cash with a rev share. Come at us with something serious and we’ll consider it.
If you’re interested, or have questions, email tom@hmn.md. We’re serious about selling so please be serious about buying. We’ll help get the word out whenever you are ready to relaunch. We’re aiming to make a decision by the end of February 2016.
Disclosure: We’re currently in early discussions with a few interested parties.
Update: We’ve found a buyer, more news coming soon.
Update: WP Remote has now been acquired, read our announcement here https://humanmade.com/2017/08/10/wp-remote-finds-home-maekit/.