My Thoughts On Awesome Motive Acquiring BuddyBoss
Well, Awesome Motive has acquired BuddyBoss. So, now what? Let me share some off-the-cuff thoughts on the whole thing.
Transcript Of This Video
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Well, there’s been some big news from.
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The world of Buddy boss, and I.
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Thought we should discuss it for a few minutes. Well, hello there. And it’s been a bit. I’m just gonna do a quick update here. I know that it’s been, it’s been like a month and a half since I put out a video on YouTube. And by all proper best YouTube practices, that’s not a good idea. I’ve just been really, really busy with client work, but we are working on that. I’ve actually just hired a developer, so we’re bringing on staff basically to help increase throughput on things. It gives me more time to do things like create these YouTube videos and update content on blog marketing academy.com and things like that. And so more is coming. And I also know that we’ve got the membership site series here on YouTube that I am going to definitely continue and see it through. So more on that front. But today, and kind of, speaking of membership sites, let’s talk about Buddyboss a little bit, because Buddyboss is something that I’ve got a fair amount of experience with. I used to use Buddyboss myself. Even now I’ve got a few clients that are still using Buddyboss, a couple of which I’ve even tried to get them to move away from Buddyboss.
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And the reason is because Buddyboss tends to be a little beefy when it comes to requirements. It tends to slow down websites. And so when I see a site that is built on Buddyboss that has all the community functionality, but really the community functionality isn’t really being utilized that much because there’s hardly any activity in the forums, there’s hardly any activity in the groups. But yet you’re running all this overhead. I’m like, hey, how about we just simplify life and get rid of all that stuff? Because here’s the thing. Not every membership site really justifies having all the community functionalities. I know as site owners, we envision this ideal scene. We think, oh, it’s gonna be all these people and they’re gonna. They’re gonna join for the content and they’re gonna stay for the community, right? But here’s the thing. Actually getting a community off the ground and with inertia that it can actually, like, turn into a valuable asset for the business is hard. It’s a lot of work to get something like that going, and it takes some actual strategy. Some people end up literally needing to hire somebody just to manage that community.
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It’s not something you go into lightly. And so a lot of sites, they don’t really need to use Buddyboss, even though they think that they might need.
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To use Buddyboss, or.
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Or they join Buddyboss because they think, oh, I want the app. They want a nice, beautiful app on their phone. Thing is, that’s a whole nother ball of wax you get into with Buddyboss. It can be quite expensive, and it’s probably going to prove to be a real pain in your ass. I’m just being honest with you. And so I have seen three, maybe four of my clients who go in to get the buddy balls app built, and then they end up backing off, and they chalk it up to a massive waste of money because it was so complicated. That’s the world of Buddyboss with the app. Okay, so here’s the thing. All that being said, that brings us to today, as I make this very informal video for you. Buddyboss has been acquired, and it’s been acquired by the company that we all wince a little bit when they buy one. And that is awesome motive. Awesome motive is now behind Buddy boss. I guess the original founders of Buddyboss wanted an exit plan, and they now got one. Awesomotive is happy to provide that capital to them and now owns Buddy ball. So the question is, what does that mean for buddy balls?
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Well, I’m already in a position where I respect the hell out of Buddy boss at what it does. It is still the best game in town. There’s no way out of that. That being said, ah, now awesomotive owns it. Awesomotive has a reputation, and it’s fairly well deserved. For one. I don’t like their marketing practices very much.
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I don’t like the way that they price things.
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They go and they. They have that misleading pricing where they act like if something’s on sale, but pay attention to the scratched out price because that’s your real one. After that first year, you’re paying them full, usually quite expensive rate for it. So I would not be surprised at all if they’re going to end up increasing the prices of buddy boss and they’re going to put in the, probably the typical pricing page that awesome motive likes. And it’s gonna be interesting to see how they, what they do with that. I bet you the lifetime pricing is gonna go away. That’s probably something they should have done anyway. And I think you’re also going to.
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See cross promotional crap now built into buddy boss. I think future versions are gonna start pimping WP code and monster insights. And hey, you need optinmonster. Oh, and by the way, you really need a quality membership site plugin. You’re now you need memberpress because of course they now have that too. You’re going to start to see blog posts on Wpbeginner about the importance of.
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Community driven membership sites. And of course buddy boss comes in.
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And saves the day.
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All this is going to happen, I guarantee it. But I’m a little sore also about.
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Also motive because of what they did to thrive themes. Now, you know, I’ve now moved on to other software and I like what I’m using. In fact, it’s better than thrive themes ever was.
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But that being said, thrive themes was something I was a strong advocate for.
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For a long time. Well, awesome motive came in and they bought thrive themes and they basically assassinated it. Now the software is probably still fine.
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I haven’t used it in quite some.
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Time outside of trying to transition some clients out of it. That being said, they went in there and changed the pricing radically. Thrice sweet. Used to be 228 a year, went up to 299 a year with under Shane’s leadership. Then it went to 599 a year under Osamoto. Now it’s $799 a year. Like, what are they smoking? Thinking that that thing is worth that much money? That literally makes it the most expensive WordPress package I’ve ever seen. That’s ridiculous.
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So no, they, oh, and on top of that, they, content lock in.
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If you don’t renew your license with thrive, they’re gonna lock out, lock you out of your own content. It’ll still show up on the web, but you can’t edit it anymore. Like, come on man, this is WordPress.
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This is not how things are supposed to work.
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And so yeah, I’m disappointed to see that also, motive bought buddy boss, but.
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It is what it is.
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At the end of the day, there are some good things that could come to it. I, you know, I saw a thread on Facebook that was talking about, hey, have any acquisitions actually gone well? And one example that I did mention was from Masamoto. They are now that because they bought case proofs, they now have member mouse. Now membermouse is a tool that I used to use a long time ago and I left member mouse for a variety of reasons, some of which were that they outsourced the renewal payments to their servers, basically so they could control it. They had encrypted code, it was not GPL open source. It was had really poor slow development. It was just like not developing at all. Well, to their credit, after awesome motive.
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Got behind the scenes with that member.
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Mouse did move on to its next major release and they fixed a lot of those problems. They brought the renewals in house. They, it’s now fully GPL open source, so there’s no encrypted code. I mean they actually fixed a lot of the problems that I had with.
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Membermouse, but so things can move along.
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The company does have access to capital, so they’ve got the development resources so they can improve software. They’re good at that stuff. I just don’t like the marketing aspect of awesome modem. I also respect the founder Syed quite a bit. I mean I’ve hung out with him on many occasions years ago. Very, very bright guy and he’s an incredible entrepreneur. But it’s just again, I don’t like the way awesome motive conducts the marketing and then just on an overall health of the WordPress ecosystem. I don’t like the fact that so many major plugins are coming under one brand umbrella. I think it’s, I don’t think it’s healthy for the WordPress ecosystem. I don’t like the fact that they go and they engage in these backroom affiliate deals with web hosts and now you see web hosts like Siteground recommending things like monster insights just so they can get it. Probably some back in commission back there. I mean they should not be modifying the WordPress interface in order to give weight to plugin companies like awesome motive. And they are. I’m seeing it way too often. Even rocket hosting my favorite web host in the damn world, they’ve got a little toggle where you install WordPress to install recommended plugins.
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And what are they? They’re freaking awesome motive stuff. So I don’t like to see this stuff. I wish that the company didn’t engage in that type of stuff. I can understand why they do. If your purpose is to make your business as large as humanly possible, they’re doing a great job at that. But as a user of these tools for so many websites, for my clients, for my own stuff, I don’t like to see it. And just as a general rule, I don’t. I kind of try to avoid awesome motive tools. And now buddy boss is sort of on that mix too. It is what it is. So those are my general off the cuff thoughts about the buddy balls acquisition. I will continue to work with it on behalf of some clients when they want to, but I’m going to be eagerly waiting for some new competitors because I don’t want to recommend buddy boss anymore. It is what it is.