Newsletter Glue, a WordPress plugin that lets users publish newsletters directly from their WordPress site, has been acquired by Tyler Channell, founder of PaywallProject. The sale was finalized earlier this month for an undisclosed amount.
Co-founder Lesley Sim shared the news in a blog post on Thursday, also sharing the news in a low-key post on X. WordPress folks were quick to respond with congratulations, many reflecting on how much they’d enjoyed following her journey. Sim has been a visible voice in the WordPress community in recent years, often sharing the ups and downs of building Newsletter Glue on social media.
Sim told The Repository that the final decision to sell was helped along by the fact she had been going back and forth in negotiations with Channell for months.
“We had three rounds where we talked about it, backed off, then came back again. By the third time, we were both very ready to make it happen,” Sim said.
“By the time we finalized everything, it felt really surreal. I got the final payment, transferred the domain, and it was like—oh, okay, everything’s complete.”
Sim and her business partner, Ahmed Fouad, are stepping away to focus on their next project: EventKoi, a new events plugin for WordPress. Early access is open at eventkoi.com, and Sim said users could expect the same high standards, quality, and adherance to the “WordPress way” as Newsletter Glue.
“It’s turned out to be a much larger thing to build than we anticipated,” Sim said of EventKoi, which she initially tried to juggle alongside Newsletter Glue. “Initially we thought we were done after building a basic calendar, but almost everyone we tested it with asked, ‘How do I buy tickets?’ We realized we had to build that ourselves, which basically meant building an e-commerce platform from scratch.”
The acquisition brings together two products focused on helping small publishers grow sustainably. Channell’s PaywallProject is a fully managed paywall solution now powering nearly 100 local publishers. He was recently featured on the PublishPress podcast, where he shared how the platform grew from a local news experiment in West Virginia into a tool supporting publishers around the world.
In the interview, Channell describes the core goal of PaywallProject as helping publishers grow sustainable digital revenue, especially through soft paywalls, newsletters, and specialized tools like their new AI-powered events calendar. “The goal is to get them to sustainability. That’s goal number one,” he says.
According to Sim, Channell first floated the idea of buying Newsletter Glue last year.
“Newsletter Glue is in great hands with Tyler,” Sim wrote in her announcement. “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.”
Newsletter Glue launched in 2020 as a pivot from a membership plugin that failed to gain traction. One feature—sending blog posts as newsletters—stood out. When Sim couldn’t find another plugin that replicated the workflow, she and Fouad turned it into a standalone product. “To our surprise, it worked,” Sim wrote. “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!”
The timing helped. As the pandemic pushed publishers to invest more in email, Newsletter Glue gained traction. Sim focused on outreach and community-building while the product evolved to meet the needs of media teams. Fouad later rebuilt the plugin in React, and it was repositioned for newsrooms and priced accordingly.
Sim said support and development have now fully transitioned to Channell and his team, and she’s staying on with Fouad for a couple of months to help with the transition.
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