Taylor Otwell: "PHP (and a cheap laptop) changed my life"

April 16, 2019 / 58:24/E54

How Taylor earns a living from a free, open-source PHP framework called Laravel

Jon is away so Justin called up Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel. In this episode we covered:

How Laravel become the most popular backend framework on GitHub.
Surprise! Taylor wasn't really into computers before he created Laravel.
What was Taylor's motivation? Why did he create this, even though there were other alternatives?
What's Laravel's secret? Why did it succeed?
How is Laravel a business? How does it earn revenue?

"Before Laravel, there were a lot of programmers that were burnt out on PHP. These folks hated their job. But after Laravel, they enjoyed their job more. It helped them in a personal way."

Here's the timeline we discussed:

2010: Taylor starts working on Laravel.
2011: Taylor launched version 1.0 of Laravel.
2013: Taylor launches an ebook
2013: Start working on Forge
2013: First Laracon conference (90 people)
2014: Launches Forge at Laracon (240 people)
2014: after a month he had 1000 customers, $90k / ARR almost right from launch. (He thought it would maybe make $2-$3k / month). Plans started at $10 / month.
End of 2014: decided to go full-time on Laravel.
2015: Full-time on Laravel, developed a competitive nature, really driven to see Laravel
2015: Launched Envoyer.io
2016: Launched Spark, as a “SaaS starter kit.”
2016: First full-time employee, Mohamed Said.
2017: Launched Laravel Echo, Passport, Notifications.
2017: Second hire,
2018: Laravel Nova.

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