From €44,000 to €72,000/monthly: Consolidate and Expand
Six month ago, on 1 November, I finished my article with a clear objective for Weglot: reach 70,000€ in Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR).
That was not an easy target to reach within 6 months but we managed to pass the 72,000€ MRR this week. A number I would have thought impossible to believe in 2 years ago…
To achieve this, we couldn’t only wait for customers to keep coming. It was clear that with our current customer acquisition rate, growth would still go on but if we did nothing, growth would have slowly faded and our MRR would have plateaued.
To ensure we kept growing at a fast pace, we had to do two things:
- Consolidate our strengths: Keep shipping the best service in WordPress and Shopify in 2018. It means to keep building the best multilingual plugin for WordPress & Shopify but also having a very reactive support team and being very fast in our development cycle to add new features and strong improvements for the future.
- Explore: Start exploring new technologies for Weglot. Multilingual implementation is a problem that concerns all technologies, not only WordPress and Shopify. Thus, we are starting to launch Weglot for other CMS and frameworks.
But in order to achieve this, the first action we needed to do was to expand our Weglot team.
Get the best people
Back in October, the team was composed of 6 people: 4 full-time employees and 2 interns. We were only 2 developers: Floran and I. Floran was alone developing the Weglot platform & API. I was developing the WordPress plugin, the Shopify app and helping our support team on the most technical cases. It was clear that if we wanted to actively develop WordPress & Shopify while expanding in other technologies, we would need more developers. So we were on the lookout to recruit 2 more developers.
As we had already gone through the struggle of the hiring process when we recruited Maximilien and Floran, we thought that this time it would be easier. But it wasn’t. We spent more than 3 months and a lot of energy to find the right developers.
We used a simple process to recruit them:
- We contacted potential candidates using multiple sources (Linkedin, online services, etc…)
- Once a candidate fit and seemed to like the job, we had a 20-minute phone call with her/him to ensure compatibility
- We then sent her/him a test code to do online with some PHP, Javascript and SQL
- We had her/him come for a 1-hour interview in our office
In December, when we interviewed Baptiste we knew we had finally found the right developer! Baptiste joined us last month and is working on new integrations for developers (PHP, Symfony, and more to come!).
For Thomas, it was really different: we had met Thomas 2 years ago, at our first WordPress event in Paris. At that time, we had just launched Weglot and were discovering the French WordPress community. Thomas was developing a WordPress plugin and we had talked together. We had stayed in touch over these past 2 years. I knew Thomas was a talented, business-oriented developer as he had launched several plugins. When I saw that there was an opportunity to hire him, we immediately made him an offer, knowing what he could bring to Weglot… So we were really happy when he joined Weglot a month later!
With Baptiste, Thomas, and the help of Mehdi, a talented freelance developer who contributes to our Javascript library, we went from 2 to 5 developers!
And with a team of 5 developers, we had a lot more resources to start consolidating our main products and expand Weglot to new horizons.
Consolidate WordPress and Shopify
With WordPress being still our main focus, it was important to maintain our top quality product and even keep improving it. With Thomas onboard, we now release a new version of our Weglot plugin every month. We added code reviews and automatic testing to ensure the high quality of our WordPress plugin. Thanks to this fast production cycle, we were also able to add features directly suggested by our customers (through customer support) to our next releases. In the past six months we added many features like the translation of emails and improved our WooCommerce compatibility.
Last month, we became the most (more than 640 reviews) and the best (4.9/5.0) rated multilingual plugin across all the WordPress plugin directory. This was a long-term goal for us and I’m very proud of the team for this.
We also increased our participation in the WordPress community, sponsoring many meet-ups across Europe and WordCamps like the ones in Paris, London, the Europe WordCamp, or the WP Tech camp in Lyon.
With the help of Mehdi, we also worked hard on our Shopify App, redesigning the application with a new admin area, including a wizard setup and a drag & drop feature to position the language button.
Expand in new technologies
Being able to use Weglot in any technology has always been on our minds: Weglot’s mission is to take the hassle out of making a multilingual website, regardless of the technology you are using to build your website. So expanding to other technologies was just a matter of time and resources. With 5 developers and good traction in WordPress and Shopify, we were able to create integrations for Jimdo and BigCommerce, two small CMS that were lacking multilingual solutions.
Our main focus is now on more developer-oriented solutions. Baptiste has developed a great PHP library that can translate any PHP website. We packaged this library into our Symfony bundle. The Symfony bundle makes it easy for you to make your Symfony website multilingual in just a few minutes. Previously you had to internationalize your strings before even starting to translate, which could take days or weeks. Not anymore. The Symfony bundle is still in beta but already functional and we are actually using this bundle to translate our own website: weglot.com!
Over the next few months, we will launch our own developers’ platform with more resources and documentation to fully use Weglot’s capabilities.
In terms of MRR, the objective is to reach the symbolic 100,000€ MRR in the next 6 months.