From €7,000 to €21,000/monthly: 6 months of growth and a €450,000 fundraising
Six months ago, in October, we published an article about Weglot’s beginning and how we went from €0 to €7,000 of Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR). At the end of this article we set the goal for the next 6 months: Reach €20,000 MRR.
That objective seemed a bit frightening at the time, as it took a lot more than 6 months to reach our first €7,000 MRR: We were uncertain if we could reach that €20,000 in 6 more months. But here we are, we have passed €21,000 MRR and we keep growing at a fast pace!
Here are a few of the challenges that we faced and the tips that we learned along the way.
Increase the value of the product
During these six months we listened carefully to users’ feedback and added the features that were most needed to increase the potential of Weglot. Everytime a feature was asked by more than 10 different users each week it meant we needed to add it.
First, we added an “auto-redirect” feature so that visitors could be automatically redirected to the page in their language, without having to click on the language button. Weglot now detects the user’s language and serves the translated page.
We also connected Weglot’s platform with professional translators. We leveraged the power of Textmaster’s marketplace to access professional translators and let Weglot’s users directly order professional translations from their account.
Deliver awesome customer support whatever it takes
Customer support has gradually become a challenge for us as the number of emails we received rose from about 10-20 per day to more than 80 per day during these 6 months. As we are still a small team, it took us more time to answer each of them.
The main challenge is that we really wanted to keep the same level of customer support as in the beginning, which meant that we personally answered everyone: free users and premium users. Even if Premium users have the priority, we still provide an answer to every support request from free users.
To be able to handle this rising amount of requests, we developed some resources & documentation like our FAQ and we gained in efficiency by mapping the support requests into categories.
It’s well known that support is key, and in our case it’s really what brought us where we are.
Done carefully, customer support transforms into acquisition.
Go global
In the last article about the beginning of Weglot’s story, I mentioned that we got some early traction thanks to French WordPress blogs like WP Formation or WP Marmite. But it was harder to get noticed by international WordPress media like US blogs. Many of our contact attempts remained unanswered.
Over the last 6 months, this started to change as we got coverage from major English blogs like WP Tavern, CSS Igniter and Torque. We also tried to be more active on our own blog, connecting with talented WordPress authors and contributors such as WordCandy, Vishnu Supreet, Brenda Barron, Nick Schäferhoff or Gayane Mar.
This gave us more credibility and users from around the world. Today we have users in over 100 countries.
Meet people
Over this past 6 months, we focused a lot on building the best possible product and delivering a delightful experience through an insane customer support. With that little time we had left, we tried to go out and meet people from the WordPress community. We sponsored the WordCamp Bordeaux in March. This was the occasion to speak and exchange ideas with many people from the WordPress ecosystem like Jonathan from the WP Rocket team, Kim from Mailpoet, Thomas & Maxime from Delipress or Eddy from the E-labo agency.
In June, we will be sponsoring the WordCamp Europe in Paris, so feel free to come speak to us :)! We will be more than happy to explain how Weglot works, how we started, or any other questions you might have.
Fundraising
Recently, we just closed a seed fundraising of €450,000 from SIDE Capital.
Raising money or not had been an important question for us. For a long time we grew organically from what we had: Augustin and I in a small apartment.
But over the past few months, we started to be overworked by the amount of support or the number of features we wanted to add to the product. We got a bit frustrated not to be able to improve the product as we wanted to through lack of time. So we understood that if we wanted to keep growing at a fast pace, we would need to scale up our 2-person company and raising money was the perfect way to do it. This would bring more talented people into the company and this would enable us to ship quality products faster: the money would be invested to increase our team and improve our product.
Our ultimate goal is ambitious, we know it, but quite clear now: We aim to become the best multilingual plugin for WordPress.
We strongly believe that making a multilingual website should be a no-brainer.
In the next 6 months, our objective is to reach 40,000 MRR