![\"Jonathan](\"https:\/\/wp-rocket.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2\/san-francisco-2015.jpg\")
Jonathan and Jean-Baptiste in front of Automattic office<\/p><\/div>\n
In September 2014, Jonathan and Jean-Baptiste (two of the co-founders and developers of WP Rocket) began a\u00a03 month stay in San Francisco to discover the startup ecosystem in Silicon Valley. They participated\u00a0in\u00a0several meetups at Google, Twitter and of course SF WordCamp.
\nThis transformative\u00a0journey was extremely fulfilling, instructive and motivating.<\/p>\n
Being immersed in this very inspiring\u00a0place\u00a0was\u00a0a real game-changer for our mindset, and how we\u00a0think about our company.<\/p>\n
As a result of this trip, we’ve been able to create the foundation of our startup culture. This transformed\u00a0three guys who were selling a WordPress plugin into a Startup \u00a0of 8 people (today) with a strong company culture.<\/p>\n
We are inspired by startups like Buffer<\/a>, Baremetrics<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0MailPoet<\/a> (in particular Kim, who advised us a lot, kudos to him).<\/p>\n From these startups, we’ve adopted :<\/p>\n We are not just a “company” anymore but definitively a startup, and we believe that we can make the web a better place<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Imagify Work in Progress<\/p><\/div>\n This trip was\u00a0the trigger of our pivot : WP Rocket will be one product among others from our startup and not the only\u00a0one. We want to have a portfolio of products and not\u00a0depend on only one.<\/p>\n This desire\u00a0has been manifested\u00a0with multiple hirings. Lucy<\/a> and Marko<\/a>\u00a0 joined the WP Rocket team on support at the beginning of 2015. This allowed us to have more “free time” to think and work on other projects.<\/p>\n For the past\u00a0few months, Julio has been working on a security plugin. This is going to be a great challenge for us as we experiment with a\u00a0freemium model for the first time, \u00a0and because there are great competitors in the space, like WordFence and\u00a0iThemes Security.<\/p>\n Sebastien who arrived in May, is working with Jean-Baptiste on Imagify<\/a>, an image compression toolkit. This will be our first SaaS which will be a great learning experience.<\/p>\n Imagify should be available in the upcoming weeks, get early access via our website : https:\/\/imagify.io<\/a><\/p>\n Geoffrey, who arrived in May,and Matthieu, who joined us in June, are working on a WordPress theme shop. We want to take on that huge challenge which will be very different compared to selling a plugin.<\/p>\n From left to right: Lucy, S\u00e9bastien, Matthieu et Geoffrey<\/p><\/div>\n To work in a\u00a0mostly remote team can create a lack of human connection. That’s why we’ve decided to organize a ‘startup retreat’ every year .<\/p>\n A startup retreat is a great occasion to be working all together from a wonderful place and having a\u00a0great time.<\/p>\n For this first time, we did it in June 2015 in Spain. We\u00a0were\u00a0all together in a lovely house in the south of Seville to work and enjoy barbecue, appetizers and the swimming pool.<\/p>\n This was a great human experience and it was a good opportunity\u00a0to\u00a0get to know each other better.<\/p>\n We’ve decided to be fully transparent and we explained the process in the blog post : Transparency Matters!<\/a> We are super happy to see that some WordPress business are sharing their revenues as well (e.g. Themeisle, Ultimate Members)<\/p>\n Last year, we announced our\u00a0desire to move our support forum to a HelpDesk. We’ve been using HelpScout<\/a>\u00a0for almost one year, and we are very happy customers.<\/p>\n We’ve greatly improved our\u00a0documentation<\/a> which has significantly deceased the number of support tickets. \u00a0We are always working on new content for the documentation, and are planning to translate it in France, German, Italian in upcoming months.<\/p>\n To get as\u00a0much\u00a0feedback as possible it’s very important to talk to customers. We didn’t have any tools for that until November.<\/p>\n Now we are using Intercom<\/a> which is perfect for that. For instance, \u00a0we are getting a lot of feedback to update our public roadmap.<\/p>\n We’re going to write some dedicated blog posts about that.<\/p>\n Our public roadmap<\/p><\/div>\n Since the first version of WP Rocket, we’ve paid attention to all the feedback\u00a0we get from\u00a0our customers.<\/p>\n Whether it’s about new features or bugs to fix, \u00a0every piece of feedback is important. Thanks to your feedback we’ve been able to improve the plugin a lot.<\/p>\n Since the beginning, we’ve been\u00a0following the same update cycle as\u00a0WordPress with two version types : major and minor. At the beginning our development strategy was to get as much\u00a0info as possible to create a huge major version. At the time we were thinking that having a huge new version could be a sales point to sell WP Rocket.<\/p>\n But we were wrong to follow this update cycle which had many faults. The most important was \u00a0bugs between new features.<\/p>\n Since 2.3, we’ve decided to follow a new strategy inspired by Lean Startup. This allows us to be much more efficient with small improvements.<\/p>\n For a major update we’ve limited the number of new features to\u00a03. This limits conflicts between the new features themselves\u00a0and means that we can fix bugs. For a minor update, when we have\u00a02 support tickets with the same issue, we stop our current development to fix it. If the bug prevents\u00a0WP Rocket from working\u00a0correctly, we deploy a new version with the fix.<\/p>\n Since we’ve used this method, the number of new tickets and the number of bugs\u00a0following\u00a0a new major release have been reduced\u00a0significantly!<\/p>\n Since 2.2, it’s possible to be a beta tester. To do that, simply enable the “Beta” option in the tools tab of WP Rocket.<\/p>\n Every new major update has a 2 week beta test. 8% of our customers are beta testers, so that’s about 2000 websites.<\/p>\n These tests are very important for a plugin like ours. This allows us to have a lot of feedback regarding the new features and conflicts which can appear regarding server configurations.<\/p>\n In\u00a0February, we made our development roadmap available to the public.<\/p>\n We have been inspired by iThemes Security<\/a>. For our public roadmap\u00a0we are using Trello which is a participative tool. This allows anyone to vote for features to be integrated into WP Rocket.<\/p>\n Since 2.5 most of the new features have come from customers’ feature requests.<\/p>\n For more information about that, you can read our roadmap blog post<\/a>.<\/p>\n Today, 4 people are working full time at WP Rocket, which is double compared to last year.<\/p>\n We are currently looking for a 5th person. For more information you can have a look at our job offer : Customer Support at WP Rocket (European Timezone)<\/a><\/p>\n Regarding stats, this “year” (from July 14 2014 to \u00a0July 14 2015) we had a total of 8007 orders (+348%) from 7443 customers (+365%) for a total revenue of $354 097 (+309%) \u00a0and 31 837 websites using WP Rocket (+653%). A few days ago\u00a0we started using statbot.io<\/a> which provides us stats from Intercom<\/a>. This tool gives us detailed information on our new users.<\/p>\n We are concluding this post, by saying\u00a0a big “thank you” to all our customers, people who trust us, and all the team.<\/p>\n We never thought we would arrive\u00a0at this point. Above all, it’s been an awesome human journey.<\/strong><\/p>\n Geoffrey, Jean-Baptiste, Jonathan, Julio, Lucy, Marko, Matthieu & Sebastien<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It is with great joy and emotion that we celebrate the second birthday of WP Rocket. With this blog post, we would like to share our journey and upcoming plans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"kia_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-319933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-inside-wp-rocket"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n
To infinity and beyond<\/h2>\n
![\"Imagify](\"https:\/\/wp-rocket.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2\/imagiy-preview-website.jpg\")
Team Building<\/h2>\n
![\"From](\"https:\/\/wp-rocket.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2\/sevilla-2015.jpg\")
Sharing is Caring<\/h2>\n
\nThe result of this new policy was\u00a0very positive on several\u00a0different points :<\/p>\n\n
Improve our Customer Support<\/h2>\n
A constantly evolving plugin<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-rocket.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2\/trello-roadmap-e1437022166159.jpg\")
Update Cycle Inspired by WordPress itself<\/h3>\n
\nFor a major version, the version number is X.X, for example 2.6. Those versions have necessary new features, but also include improvements and fix bugs.<\/p>\n
\nOn\u00a0average, a new update had 8 new features and bug fixes.<\/p>\nA new methodology combined with Lean Startup<\/h3>\n
\nBy limiting new features, finding the origin of\u00a0a bug and fixing it becomes much easier.<\/p>\nA participative Plugin<\/h2>\n
A great result for this second year<\/h2>\n
\nThese results make us super happy!<\/p>\n![\"graph-2015\"](\"https:\/\/wp-rocket.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2\/graph-2015.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"customers-2015\"](\"https:\/\/wp-rocket.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2\/customers-2015.jpg\")
<\/p>\n