About Us
Find out more about the team and journey behind PersonalizeWP, who is involved, and how we got to where we are today
Where it all started
PersonalizeWP was created by Paul Halfpenny and Oliver Morrison, who also own and run a WordPress development agency called Filter.
Both Paul and Olly have worked together in digital agencies since 2006, delivered multiple projects on all types of CMS platforms, and for diverse clients such as JD Wetherspoon, Crystal Palace, Medivet and Royal Caribbean. Paul takes the lead on delivering PersonalizeWP day-to-day and is responsible for the direction of the plugin, whilst Olly manages operations and finance.
Investment from Emilia Capital
At Wordcamp EU Athens, Paul pitched PersonalizeWP to Joost de Valk and Marieke van de Rakt from Emilia Capital. They loved what they saw and were keen to invest and help build the plugin.
Joost and Marieke are now part-owners of PersonalizeWP and involved in both marketing and strategic direction for the plugin.
Read Marieke’s thoughts on marketing and personalisation in her series, Marketing with Marieke, on the PersonalizeWP blog.
Meet the team
The PersonalizeWP team helps to deliver improvements, marketing and support to the plugin on a day-to-day basis. David Page is the lead developer on the plugin, Allie Tupper is our project manager, Joy Clarkwin is responsible for marketing and Rachel Berry works on outreach and sales. Oli Janes is our designer.
There are also a number of other team members that work for Filter that dip in and out as needed to work on specific features, updates to the website, or to act as additional support.
Our Story
It all started with COVID
PersonalizeWP was born in 2020 at the start of COVID. At Filter, when the world stayed indoors and everything stopped for a brief period of time, we decided to work on new projects to keep ourselves busy, and came up with WP-DXP, a way of showing/hiding blocks based on personalisation rules in the Block Editor.
Talking at WCEU Porto
We continued to develop the plugin over the next couple of years and learn more about how we could use it for our clients. Paul talked about it at Wordcamp EU in Porto.
Pitching at WCEU Athens
In Athens, we were given the opportunity to show the plugin to Emilia Capital in a Dragon’s Den style booth pitch – Joost and Marieke were blown away by the potential and decided immediately to invest.
Releasing the plugin
With the new team in place, we went through a rebrand to PersonalizeWP, developed a number of Pro features around visitor profiles, segmentation and lead scoring, and launched the plugin in March 2024.
Talking about Personalisation
Paul is always keen to talk about PersonalizeWP and how personalisation can help to deliver real improvements. Below is a video of him in action talking about why personalisation is important and what you can do with it.
Want to see it in action? Try out PersonalizeWP now…
If you just want to play around with the plugin and see what you can do, then click on the button and we’ll spin up a new site with in demo mode for you to try it out….
