My name is Jason Rouet, and I am the Mediapapa plugin’s Product Manager. I was born around the same time Tim Berners-Lee was publishing the first website, and I live in Cognac, western France. And yes, it is not just the infamous Brandy’s name!
I studied geography, languages, and digital tourism. At some point, building things online became my obsession, I dropped out of university, and I started freelancing. That decision turned out to be one of the better ones I have made.
The Journey Began
Before WordPress became central to my work, I was running forums and online communities in the mid-2000s. I have always been interested in building spaces for people, helping them meet IRL, more than the activities those spaces were organised around. That tendency has never really left me.
I got into WordPress somewhere around version 2.8 and 3.0. I recall trying to bridge a phpBB forum with a WordPress blog so my friends could publish news with a single login.
The real turning point was WordCamp Paris in 2016 and WordCamp Europe in 2017. I walked in as someone who used WordPress. I walked out wanting to find a role for me in that community.
After a decade in WordPress services, freelancing, and working across several agencies, I was ready for something new. That’s when Amaury Balmer and I started talking about the need for Mediapapa to turn into a real business. Nicolas was already building it with the team, and it has a solid technical foundation. I didn’t hesitate: moving to the product side to tackle a universal WordPress problem, the Media Library, was an easy yes.
The Need for “Mediapapa”
Anyone who has managed a WordPress site has opened the media library and felt uncomfortable. Files accumulate. You do not know what is being used. You do not know what can be safely removed. It is the infrastructure every WordPress user touches, yet people prefer uploading through the editor rather than opening the Media tab. It has not meaningfully evolved in years. It just sits there silently.
Mediapapa is designed as a governance layer. It indexes your website, tells you what is in your library, how it is actually being used on your site, and what can be safely cleaned. Safe Replace prevents broken front-ends by dynamically replacing image references, so every step is safe and risk-free.
The hardest part of this work has not been the product. It has been the UX, positioning, and roadmap decisions. Because we take WordPress seriously, we want to fade into the native UI. That means saying no to features that would pull away from WordPress admin philosophy.
Educating a market that has historically ignored media library problems takes time. Think of where WordPress was a decade ago on performance: that is where we are now on the media library. It took years for performance to become table stakes. Same trajectory here.
I am pretty happy about our decision to release Mediapapa for free on WordPress.org. Offering most of our features to the community is deeply rewarding. Seeing organic installs arrive from people we have never spoken to, people who discovered us and scored their library for the first time—that is real proof of concept.
Myself with my Brilliant Team
We are essentially a two-person core team: Nicolas built the technical foundation. I came in as a partner to handle everything else, haha. We are co-owners with clear roles: he owns the product architecture and development efforts, and I focus on product direction, marketing opportunities, partnerships, and growth. Be API is a team of 30+ people that supports us, especially Stéphane on UX, Bilal on marketing, Antoine on the Brand, and Milan on front dev, for example, and of course the board led by Amaury on strategy.
Advice for Business Owners
Mediapapa is still early stages. But I can share a blog post I was lucky to read from Steph Guerin (fr), founder of DashThis. He wrote it a decade ago, and I was lucky to read it when I was a Freelancer. This still resonates with me: the line between entrepreneur and unemployed is very thin. The only difference is having paid customers.
WordCamps, meetups, medias or social mentions all matter, but not if they do not lead to paid customers. Community is essential to connect with other builders and contribute back to the WordPress project that gives us a living.
Just do not confuse exposure with revenue.
WordPress & Beyond
Our focus for the next several months is getting Mediapapa in front of more WordPress practitioners and gathering feedback to iterate to help more people with their media management.
We will be a sponsor of the next WordCamp Europe edition in Kraków in early June. It will be a major milestone as it will act as our international launch. It is also a stress test: we will pitch it to more friends around the community.
Besides this event, WordPress is innovating around AI media generation with WordPress 7.0 about to be released, and we are excited about what is coming for the admin UI by the end of the year. The Media Library redesign is on track, and Mediapapa will, of course, adapt to help users.
My Love for the WordPress Community
I was part of the organising team for three editions of WordCamp Europe. Each one taught me something different about how the community works and what it needs. I also ran the WordPress La Rochelle meetup for a couple of years and am President of WPFR.net, the French WordPress association that has existed since 2008.
All this with the same passion: helping others to get involved and enjoy open source. That was true when I was running gaming community forums at 16, and it is still true now.
For the next WPFounders story, I would love to see a feature on Matthias Pfefferle, creator of the ActivityPub plugin and one of the quiet forces behind IndieWeb adoption in WordPress.
How I Keep Myself Updated
LinkedIn and my RSS reader (still rocking) have replaced Twitter completely for me. Beyond that, I follow a few WordPress.org P2S, some podcasts, and newsletters like OpenChannels and the Repository, plus some Slacks (Making WordPress, French community, Post Status).
I Have a Life Other Than the Work
I have two daughters, Charlie (3) and Zoélie (1), with my wife Manon. Working fully remote has made it possible to be there for every important aspect of their lives. I am grateful for the WordPress project that gave me the life I wanted!
I am still a gamer (a bit more casual now), I love science fiction, writing about fictional worlds and tabletop RPGs. We explore France and Europe by van when we can. This summer, we plan a road trip from the French Basque Country to Galicia.
I Reward Myself by
Working remotely is fantastic. I like the comfort of my home, where I have set up a lovely office for myself. But I enjoy going out from time to time, working at a local coffee shop, or having a craft beer with friends during the day to take a break.
Connect With Me
Mediapapa website | LinkedIn | WordPress.org
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