Newsletter Glue has been sold to Tyler Channell of PaywallProject as of April 2025. Ahmed and I will be moving onto an events plugin called EventKoi.
How Newsletter Glue started
Newsletter Glue began as an idea borne from the ashes of a failed idea in 2020.
I met Ahmed through his Indiehackers post looking for a marketing and business co-founder for the membership plugin he’d built.
I was eager to move away from running my marketing agency and try selling software instead. I got in touch, and we quickly started working together.
Unfortunately, after a few months of effort, we couldn’t even get users for the free version of the plugin. We were on the verge of giving up and going our separate ways.
I wasn’t sad about shutting down the plugin, there were thousands of membership plugins out there, and ours wouldn’t be missed.
However, I did miss a particular feature we’d built in the plugin that let me write a blog post and send it as a newsletter via Mailchimp.
I’d been using that feature for my own newsletter and could not find a replacement plugin that allowed me to keep that “send post as newsletter” workflow.
That sparked a realization…
What if we ditched the membership stuff, expanded on that “send post as newsletter” feature, and turned that into a full blown product?
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To our surprise, it worked.
Where we failed to get even a single user for our membership plugin, we quickly got fifty people signing up to get access to our newsletter plugin – before we even built it!
Newsletter Glue was a go!
Our journey
Over the past 5 years, Ahmed and I learnt and grew a lot. With each Newsletter Glue version, it felt like we also became new versions of ourselves.
v1
In Newsletter Glue v1, Ahmed barely knew the difference between email and web html. And I didn’t know how to design, market or manage a product. I still remember my voice shaking so much on my very first podcast interview that Matt Medeiros had to cut out the start and record an introduction by himself afterwards. Matt was such a great host, and guided me through the whole thing.
v2
By Newsletter Glue v2, Ahmed knew a lot about email templates, but very little about building blocks. Our first post embeds block was built with php! Meanwhile, I was getting our name out there. The pandemic meant that everything took place online, so it didn’t matter that I was far away in Singapore, while most of my audience was in the US and Europe. At the height of covid, I did 30 podcast and online conference appearances in a year, including speaking (virtually, of course) at WordCamp US. I also made many friends in the WordPress community (I’m so thankful for each of you!)
By this point, our plugin was being used by freelancers and also large news organisations. They were both paying us ~$99/year but had vastly different needs. We were at a crossroads and had to pick a direction, or risk being mildly useful to everyone but indispensable to no one.
v3
With Newsletter Glue v3, the choice was made. We would go upmarket, 10x our pricing, and focus on media companies and newsrooms. Now that we knew who we were for, we could confidently build what our customers wanted: A world-class email editor.
By this time, Ahmed had become, in my biased opinion, one of the best block developers out there. We rebuilt the whole plugin in react and made the entire experience more unified with the block editor, while also providing a more WYSIWYG email builder.
Marho Atumu joined us as our technical support specialist. He’s been a game-changer for both Ahmed and I, allowing us to focus on other areas of the product without getting too bogged down with support.
Meanwhile, I focused on the repositioning, which was extensive and scary. It meant I had to change the product, marketing, website, and sales process. Thankfully, it worked. Very quickly, we stopped getting amateur bloggers, and large news organizations came knocking.
The acquisition
This was also around the time I met Tyler Channell, founder of the Paywall Project. He used Newsletter Glue in all his website builds for local newsrooms, and became a real power user.
Over the years, his business grew, and he became one of our biggest customers. We continued chatting and even met at the very first WordCamp Asia in 2023 in Bangkok!
Tyler first asked about acquiring Newsletter Glue in 2024. After some back and forth, we eventually sealed the deal at the start of April 2025.
The handover went smoothly. Tyler and his team have already taken over support and development, while my team is still available for a couple of months to assist with the transition.
Newsletter Glue is in great hands with Tyler. He understands the user needs deeply as his clients are exactly who Newsletter Glue is built to serve and he’s been using the plugin extensively for years. I’m so excited to see what he has in store for Newsletter Glue, and wish him all the best.
Meanwhile, Ahmed and I have begun work on a new plugin called EventKoi. If you’re looking for an events plugin, we hope you’ll check it out.
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