We are delighted to announce today that we’ve crossed over a major symbolic threshold for Ninja Forms and the WP Ninjas! As I was stumbling about this morning coordinating the usual semi-conscious ritual of getting myself and my sons ready for school and the office, James (our CEO) pinged our team Slack channel with the news:
There are now over half a million active WordPress ninjas in the wild! We’re really proud and super excited by that thought! What started back in 2010 (before, really) as a thought project in the minds of James and Kevin (our CTO) on how they could contribute to the WordPress space has now become a reality that’s actively installed on more than 500,000 WordPress dashboards around the world!
We can’t really express how much of an honor this is for us, and we’d like to take just a moment to reflect on some of the high points of our journey and our trajectory.
A Ninja Forms Timeline
- 2010: wpninjas.net launches.
- 2011: Ninja Forms Lite (v1.2.4) released on WordPress.org, Ninja Forms Pro made available through wpninjas.net
- 2012: A smashing 404 copies of Ninja Forms Pro sold, & 20k downloads of Lite
- 2013: Ditched the Lite/Pro model, consolidated into our free core Ninja Forms + extensions model. Surpassed 20k active installs of Ninja Forms with 189k downloads by year’s end!
- 2014: Passed the 500k download mark
- May 2015: Passed 200k active installs
- Dec 2015: Passed 300k active installs
- Mar 2016: Passed 400k active installs
- April 2016: Passed 500k active installs
Needless to say, that trajectory is a pretty exciting one for our company! Naturally I wanted to graph it:
It’s not a terribly pretty graph since WordPress.org doesn’t provide a complete dataset, but my totally ballparked and non-scientific little red line there sure does curve prettily towards the future!
We’re obviously super excited about this, our future as a WordPress company, and the future of WordPress side by side with the fantastic community that makes it the juggernaut that it has become. As the incremental launch of Ninja Forms THREE continues, we hope to share with you an ever-improving WordPress form building experience for years to come. Thanks for reading and happy blogging!
Eric Greenspan says:
Happy for your success. How many of them got screwed by your ridiculous 3.0 policy of not upgrading the add-ons we bought to help you achieve this success? I asked kindly for a swap to Zapier and your reply was “no.” This translated to me that you could care less about your customers. I would’ve spent a bundle with you but now I know you’re one of “those” types of companies. Your business model is ridiculous. Screw the people that support you. Unreal. Later.
Zachary Skaggs says:
Eric,
There is no policy of “not updating addons for 3.0.” We are updating every addon to 3.0 and we have made that very clear from the beginning of this process. For more information on our upgrade schedule, you can see the blog post here: https://ninjaforms.com/ninja-forms-three-extension-development-master-list/
Your response to our support team, however, was incredibly unprofessional and immature. You threatened our support team and our company, and since you have chosen to make this support discussion public I now need to address things publicly.
FIRST – We explained in detail why we were not able to swap these extensions for you. In truth, we would gladly exchange the extensions for you even though you are months outside of your refund window if they were our property. Both Zapier and Insightly are created by different collaborating developers who own those extensions. What you are demanding we do would damage their personal businesses by robbing them of the commissions earned for creating their extensions. Your response to our support team was “that’s not my problem, it’s yours” which shows a massive amount of disrespect for our collaborating developers who are the ones who would really be impacted. I HAVE however offered an extension to your license of a few months to give you more time with the 3.0 version when it is completed.
SECOND – When you did not get your way you told us “Now 1000s will know what I think of Ninja forms. You chose the wrong person to say no to” and threatened our business and reputation. I don’t even know what to say to this. We apologized and gave you a very detailed reason as to why we could not accommodate your request, and you response was to threaten us. This is incredibly unprofessional and quite frankly shocking from a developer and entrepreneur of your caliber.
THIRD – You chose to make good on your threat by coming here to spread false information to our users, including that you were simply told “no” from our support team (which is not even remotely true), and that we have a policy of not updating any of our extensions to 3.0 (also not true, with further documentation linked above), and then insulted the 500,000+ users, developers, and more who a part of our Ninja Forms family by saying “Screw the people that support you.”
The truth of the matter is that you made a purchase in February and received a product that works perfectly with Ninja Forms. No features have been removed, no promised functionality is missing. It works as advertised. It is simply not YET compatible with Ninja Forms 3.0 which is only available as a very limited public release candidate. The 3.0 compatible version will be releasing soon.
The other truth is that we care very deeply about our customers success and satisfaction. When possible we accommodate almost any reasonable request. Your request (though certainly outside our normal support offerings) was not unreasonable, but to fulfill it means damaging our relationships with our collaborating developers which we are not willing to do. They are all amazing people, incredibly responsive to and caring for our customers, and we need to do right by them and the hard work that they’ve poured into their extensions.
I really am sorry that we couldn’t find a middle ground in this dispute, but I do believe we have met our support obligations and have been responsive, courteous, and professional through the entire exchange.