Seahawk Joins GoDaddy Pro

April 12, 2016 is Seahawk’s unofficial founding date. That day Ryan James enrolled Seahawk Media Group, the small agency he had started in a dorm room, in GoDaddy Pro, GoDaddy’s program for web designers and developers.

GoDaddy Pro is where Seahawk found the gap it was built to fill: web hosts needed fully white-label pro services they could trust, scale and offer to their own customers. Over the next three years Seahawk moved up through the program, and grew up with it.

GoDaddy, then and now

When Seahawk joined, GoDaddy still flew its classic logo, flames and all. The GoDaddy Pro badge changed with the program.

GoDaddy’s mascot, Buddy, inspired a running joke at Seahawk: GoBaby, our own take on the famous head.

April 12, 2016 · Enrolled in GoDaddy Pro

It all started in GoDaddy Pro Connect, the Hire a GoDaddy Pro directory, where businesses found WordPress designers and developers to work on their sites. Seahawk Media was listed there.

Growing up with the program

Seahawk was in GoDaddy Pro as it grew. We were there when GoDaddy launched delegate access and Clients for managing client accounts, Pro Sites after GoDaddy acquired ManageWP, and Rewards.

Fun fact: Pro Connect began as Elto, a small Fiverr-style marketplace for WordPress work that GoDaddy acquired. Jeff King was rounding up agency tools and perks to make GoDaddy Pro compelling enough to bring agencies, and the sites they host, to GoDaddy. GoDaddy also licensed content from Troy Dean’s WP Elevation to teach agencies how to sell care plans with tools like ManageWP. GoDaddy kept ManageWP running as its own product, and built a white-label version of it, Pro Sites, into the GoDaddy Pro dashboard.

WP Elevation is where Ryan learned to sell WordPress care plans for recurring revenue, and Pro Sites is where he ran the care. That was Seahawk’s start in WordPress maintenance, the work it went on to make much better with WP Maintain.

Along the way, the GoDaddy Pro team sent Seahawk thank-you packages: an embroidered GoDaddy Pro fleece, and a box of Make Your Own Way swag with a cap, bottles, notebooks, pens, stickers and GoDaddy LEGO minifigures.

July 15, 2017 · GoDaddy Pro Plus

Ryan hit 2,500 Reward points, and GoDaddy Pro welcomed Seahawk to Pro Plus: double reward points, a listing in the Pro directory and faster support.

July 10, 2018 · GoDaddy Pro Council

Seahawk was invited to the GoDaddy Pro Council on a referral from Judd Jacobs, who led the product team for GoDaddy Pro. Ryan had been introduced to Judd through his conversations with Scott Wagner, GoDaddy’s CEO.

One thing Ryan will always remember from those early days is how willing Scott was to take feedback from a scrappy young college student while running a massive global company. Thank you to Scott Wagner, Rachel Makool and Judd Jacobs, who championed Seahawk in those early days.

March 1, 2019 · GoDaddy Super User Program

GoDaddy Pro also brought Ryan and Gautam Khorana together. On March 1, 2019, the same day as the Super User invitation, Seahawk acquired Gautam’s agency, The SiteCook, to form Seahawk Global. Read the full story of how Seahawk Media formed.