Wordpress.com owner Automattic offers a little-known CRM tool. Known as Mesh, it manages relationships through a “personal CRM,” built to be more lightweight than industry standards like Salesforce. This makes it a potential sleeping giant in the big segment that represents the S in SMB.
Before going into Mesh’s positioning and news this week, let’s take a step back for context. Automattic runs WordPress.com, which is one of the thousands of hosting companies and software vendors that exist under the broader WordPress platform… which is confusingly administered by WordPress.org.
WordPress.com meanwhile sits as one of the largest WordPress hosting providers. Its branding alone endows a marketing edge – sometimes based on pure confusion when new users show up to build a WordPress website. The company also offers an array of plugins, themes, and other WordPress staples.
That brings us back to Mesh. It’s one of the tools in Automattic’s portfolio – along with WooCommerce, Jetpack, Tumblr, and 27 acquisitions it made in recent history. There, Mesh checks the CRM box as Automattic looks to cover the range of functional requirements for individuals and SMBs.
Strategic Trajectory
Going deeper into Mesh, what are its differentiators and SMB-aligned features? At its core, it’s a typical CRM app that lets users keep track of contacts in their personal and/or professional networks. It also offers smart functions like reminding users when and how to reach out to a given contact.
But beyond all that standard CRM fare, Mesh is known for its UX simplicity and mobile-first design. These are common complaints that surround CRM market leaders. For example, its mobile app offers split-screen and pop-up views that engender multitasking with other apps like messages and email.
This week, Mesh added to these functions with Android compatibility. This isn’t an earth-shattering development – and it could be argued that Android is table stakes for any serious app – but it does boost the app’s TAM considerably. Android is used by almost half of the U.S. smartphone-carrying public.
Mesh’s next moves include unifying fragmented social contacts. By providing one contact interface across social networks, it hopes to reduce chaos. That simplicity is in the app’s DNA, and could resonate with small SMBs in a never-ending battle to compartmentalize personal and professional contacts.
That goal is well aligned with Mesh’s user base, 70 percent of which use it in business contexts. For the same reason, Mesh wants to integrate more conversational AI (as everyone else does), including the ability to ask questions like who they know at a specific company, or who lives in a city they’re visiting.
Expansion & Automation
Back to Automattic’s positioning and how Mesh aligns with a broader strategic trajectory, website hosts over the past several years have been on a mission to diversify their revenue mix. This has occurred as margins contract in the core hosting business – partly due to a race-to-the-bottom price competition.
One answer is to counterbalance those declines with ARPU-boosting recurring-revenue bundles and adjacent products. We’re talking everything from SEO to social marketing – things that are generally on an individual’s or SMB’s list of functions to integrate in the third or fourth step after launching a website.
In addition to greater ARPU, this can achieve a few things for the Automattic’s of the world. For one, it can be a retention hook. Serving SMBs on deeper and broader levels can reinforce ROI and lower churn. This is especially true with functions that complement websites, such as social, CRM, and SEO.
For all these reasons, we expect to see Automattic and others continue to make moves to beef up the bundle. This sits alongside the related initiative to make website creation and management more automated (AI-powered). In other words, expansion and automation are now the name of the game.
