Statamic

The turning point year. A lot happened in 2018. We launched the marketplace, said goodbye to Jaggy, hello to Jesse Leite, built some great features like Bard, rewrote the caching layer, switched from Slack to Discord, and made one small change that very well may have had the biggest impact of any other decision up to this point.

I took Jason off client work. It was clear that someone needed to be full-time, someone who didn’t have to switch context several times a day. No more 3 days on, 2 days off. If I couldn’t whole-ass Statamic myself, then I made darn well sure somebody could. And who better than the lead Statamic developer?

It was like pouring gasoline on the hot-pink-infused fire. Jason crushed it. Bugs were fixed faster, features were built quicker and better, and it was infectious. I found myself being more productive, carried along with the momentum, inspired to tackle things as team I had lost hope of ever building.

In 2018 Statamic’s revenue doubled and by the end of the year all three of us were on it full-time.

Features, features, and more features. We built everything we could and then built some more stuff. We launched and then retired Statamic Unlimited. I pushed harder on marketing, did more things that didn’t scale to build relationships and happy customers, and did some conference speaking.

Spiegel (https://spiegel.de) began using Statamic and we flew to Germany to collaborate with their team.

We were doing everything right to the best of my ability, and revenue shrank. 2016 was simply a better year than 2017, probably in large part to revenue lost from the Unlimited program. It was a flawed model and to be honest, it almost killed us. That’s just how business goes sometimes. Another lesson learned.

At the end of the year I finally took some advice from a friend who told me that I was missing out one of the best marketing tools available: me. I had been trying to build this persona for Statamic that wasn’t quite natural, trying to get the product to speak for itself on its own. I had hid behind the company and hedged my bets to some degree. This friend recommend I just pour my own personality all over Statamic and light a match.

I went for it. Enter the rebrand: the hot pink infused glory of the late 80’s/early 90’s was here. We immediately saw an uptick in buzz, engagement, conversions, mailing list sign-ups, and best of all — sales. We stood out in a world of flat, stark, sterile design. Even if you hated pink (and some people sure did), Statamic became visually memorable (if not pronounceable), and the brand voice was simply my own. It was easier to relate to, easier to understand, and the promises we made were no longer vague.

“Better, faster, more flexible” is not enough detail to convince someone to quit using what they’re using.

People loved Statamic v2. It was a lot closer to my initial vision for what I had hoped Statamic could be. Sites like asana.com, freshbooks.com, and kellyclarkson.com were using Statamic.

Also in 2016 we said goodbye to Gareth and hello to Jaggy Gauran, a talented developer from the Philippines. Jaggy tinkered on Statamic a bit before ending up working primarily on client projects. That situation allowed me to put more of my time into Statamic, and it worked pretty okay.

We grew a bit more that year and my Hopeful Math™ proved that maybe someday soon we could all really do this thing for real, full-time.

Statamic 2 took a year of hard work, sweat, and whisky tears, 4,000 commits, 200 beta testers, and 43 alpha/beta releases. Here's the blog post announcing it in all of its glory.

https://statamic.com/blog/statamic-2

Statamic 2 was a full re-write on Laravel.

Licensing was simplified to $199 per site. Upgrades from v1 were $99 upgrade from v1 professional and $169 from personal. It turns out that was really confusing for people. Whoops.

Most of 2015 was spent building Statamic 2.0 from scratch, carving out every minute we could spare to work on it.

We launched the beta in Q4 and spent a few months refining it with community feedback. We learned a hard lesson – immediately knowing we opened the beta too soon. What would have probably taken 6 weeks of focused work took nearly 4 months while handling support, managing expectations, communicating changes, and replying to repetitive bug reports we knew were there since before beta.

2015 was another year of marginal growth. Nothing spectacular, but respectable. No possibility of full-time yet.

Fred LeBlanc joined as partner shortly after I lost my co-founder Mubs. Mubs always had a special love for building shiny new things, but wasn’t into the marathon of maintenance and organic growth. Not everyone is built for it. We hired our first intern Matt (that didn’t last long), followed not far behind by our first community and support gentleman, Gareth Redfern. His announcement blog post mentioned Google+ circles, whatever those are. Did anyone ever know?

Revenue went right to these fellas. I made my living on client work, hoping that one day Statamic would take off and I could focus on it full time without “distractions”.

Statamic did a bit better than 2012. It didn’t hurt that we had a full 12 months to work with.

Jason Varga joined the team this year and we began working on Statamic 2.0. Slowly.

Statamic grew slowly as we dedicated as much time to it as we could. As a team we tackled interesting client projects to cover payroll.

Overall it was a good year. Statamic grew another 20%. We were a couple of devs on it part-time, which mathematically equaled more than one full-time person, but as I’ve learned over the years…there’s no replacement for whole-assing one thing instead of half-assing two things.

I also lost Fred this year. It was time for a major change in his personal life, so I bought him out and he was able to move on. Statamic was now ultimately my full responsibility.

Pushed very hard the rest of the year. I cut my teeth on marketing this strange new product. I had a degree in marketing rendered useless by the real world. We released regular updates, added features, fixed blogs, wrote blog posts, built a mailing list, and tweeted. Boy did I ever tweet.

By the end of the year Statamic had earned $24,864.50. Not bad for a side project. But it wasn’t a side project. I was putting every spare minute into it. I turned away client work, let go of some other recurring revenue, dipped into savings, all to keep the pressure and focus on.

By the end of the year it was pretty clear it couldn’t support me as a full time gig. Not yet at least.

By the end of the first month, Statamic had earned $3,153. In all honesty, pretty good for a new bootstrapped product in a highly competitive space jam-packed with free solutions.

A flat-file CMS? What even is that? Why isn’t it free? Why don't you just use WordPress?

An exciting day full of congratulatory tweets and well wishes. At the end of it we had earned $970.

We had two licenses: Personal for $29/site and Professional for $99. The difference between licenses was purely intention, something that would prove to be an expensive mistake.

My dreams of overnight wild success appropriately dashed, I reluctantly admitted that a thousand bucks in a day was still a great thing. After all, what if we did that every single day, all year long?