Open Startup Report #13 - April 2024

By Ruth Cheesley · PUBLISHED May 09, 2024 · UPDATED May 09, 2024

Key points

  • We've had a good month for bringing in new sponsors, monthly donations and individual members 🥳
  • While expenses were higher this month, they were anticipated.
  • There were 16 new contributors and 347 contributions in total this month
  • The Mautic trials are well underway with over 500 signups to date

Finances

Income

This month saw two new members coming on board - Acquia at the Gold tier, and the Drupal Association at the Bronze tier. A big thank you to both organizations for supporting Mautic's growth!

We also received just over $1,500 in monthly donations and three individual members joined Mautic this month. We had a small credit from a membership refund and also a single one-time donation.

Thank you everyone for continuing to support Mautic's growth!

Description Amount
Corporate membership $20,000
Monthly sponsors $1,541
Individual members $244.45
Credit from refund $13.98
One-time donations $10
Total $21,809.43

Expenditure

This month we've had some increases in host fees due to the income from memberships. Infrastructure is also slightly higher on account of the renewal of our social media scheduling tool HeyOrca at $894 and multiple domain name renewals ($76.96).

We have the last of the travel expenses covering the FOSS Backstage event, which were approved and paid in April. We've also got the annual renewal of our virtual postbox (which allows Mautic to have a physical address to receive mail). One membership was refunded when it was incorrectly applied to a company rather than an individual, which is also reflected.

Description Amount
Employment costs $8,897.09
Host fees $2179.55
Infrastructure $1334.51
Travel expenses $958.81
Admin $299.69
Events $298.50
Payment processor fees $261.84
Refund $100
Total $14,329.99

Contributions

Organizations

Most active companies

Dropsolid 372 (⬇️ 7.92%)

Acquia 365 (⬆️ 98.37%)

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 185 (⬆️ 69.72%)

Twentyzen 147

Leancept 94 (⬆️ 67.86%)

Stefan Franz 67

Webmecanik 60 (⬇️ 39.39%)

Comarch 52 (⬆️ 57.58%)

Matic Zagmajster s.p. 44

Friendly 44 (⬇️ 30.16%)

Top contributing companies

Acquia 79 (⬆️ 125.71%)

Dropsolid 48 (⬆️ 92%)

Devsadda 26 (⬆️ 420%)

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 22 (⬆️ 266.67%)

Webmecanik 19 (⬆️ 72.73%)

Comarch 17 (⬆️ 21.43%)

Friendly 5 (⬆️ 400%)

Leancept 4

Twentyzen 3

Druid 2

Contributions are as defined here with the addition of Jira issues being closed as completed, GitHub Pull Request reviews and Knowledgebase articles being written or translated, which we track through Savannah’s API.

Want to appear on this list? Get contributing, and drop me a line with your company name, domain and the folk who work for you and we’ll make sure that you are attributed correctly!

A big thank you also to all the individuals who are helping us build this awesome community!

Individuals

Most active contributors

John Linhart 340

Anderson José Eccel 197

Dirk Spannaus 147

Lenon Leite 124

Jakob Persson 94

Rembrand Le Compte 70

Stefan Franz 67

Mattias Michaux 60

Zdeno Kuzmany 54

Ekke Guembel 45

Top contributors

John Linhart 73

Anderson José Eccel 29

Rahul Shinde 26

Zdeno Kuzmany 18

Lenon Leite 10

Patryk Gruszka 9

Rembrand Le Compte 9

Peculiar Umeh 8

Destiny obamwonyi 6

Ekke Guembel 5

Welcome to our new contributors this month đź’–

Destiny obamwonyi

Peculiar Umeh

Tosin Akinbowa

Tom-Woef

marcus42

Asme

Jakob Persson

Ivan Kosutic

Princekumar Abhangi

mcphil

adrianoxy

Patrick Robertson

Gowtham Chandrasekaran

jjarrett

Satyam Verma

Xabi Tranche

Top supporters

John Linhart 8

Dirk Spannaus 3

Jakob Persson 3

marcus42 2

Andy Towne 1

Anderson José Eccel 1

mcphil 1

jjarrett 1

Tosin Akinbowa 1

adrianoxy 1

Usage of Mautic

Mautic Trials

We continue to see growth in Mautic installs via Composer, with over double the number of installs in April compared with December 2023.

Since launching the Mautic Trials at the end of March, we've had over 500 signups which shows a strong interest in Mautic.

With the addition of the Trials call to action button, we also set up some events in our Analytics platform which tells us that this month we have around a 10% click through rate on the homepage trials button, with a 23% conversion rate and 65% completion rate (where the user has confirmed their email address and started the trial).

Image
A screenshot of a chart which shows four steps in a funnel - first open, homepage button click, trial signup and email verified. The rate of completion are 100%, 10.2%, 23.4% and 65.2% respectively.
Chart showing trial signup funnel for the month of April - only tracks where consent for relevant cookies is granted. Source: Google Analytics

These metrics allow us to track the performance of our call to action and improve going forward. We have also implemented at the end of April an open source product analytics tool, Posthog, to better understand how users are exploring their trial environment, so we will also begin to report on these where relevant going forward.

We ask for some basic information on the signup form which you can view in this screenshot:

Image
A screenshot of the Mautic Trials user stats which shows five pie charts representing different metrics
Dashboard showing responses from Mautic Trial users. Source: Dropsolid

It's interesting to see that just over 45% of people trying out Mautic are from businesses with under 50 employees, and that only 41% are considering using it for business purposes.

While we're still gathering feedback and insights from trial users, it's clear that giving people a quick and easy way to 'kick the tyres' is enabling people to more quickly see the power of Mautic.

Thus far we have two conversions to paid accounts and several more conversations happening with trial users - as a recap, the Mautic project receives 40% of the revenue from the first year of all trial users who become a paying customer, so we are hoping this soon becomes an additional revenue stream for the project.

Usage stats

We continue to see stable numbers of people downloading Mautic via the mautic.org/download form, averaging around 1300-1500 per month.

Composer-based installations are continuing to growth month-on-month with just over 3,000 installations being reported by the stats available from Packagist and nearly 19,000 pulls of the Mautic API library.

Image
Screenshot showing a chart with multiple lines tracking the different packages on Packagist. The highest are the Mautic API, Transifex and core-lib / recommended-project.
Chart showing downloads of Mautic's Packagist packages over time. Source: Packagist.org

We've now exceeded 41,000 live instances of Mautic tracking being deployed on websites, which is extrapolated very roughly as an indicator of the number of Mautic instances.

Image
Chart showing all active installs of Mautic over time. It shows a small ramp up in Q3 2019 and a major ramp up from Q2 2023 which has continued to the present date.
Chart showing the cumulative number of websites with Mautic tracking detected, by the date it was first detected. Source: builtwith.com

We continue to see strong quarterly growth in active deployments of Mautic tracking - already sitting at 5% growth on last quarter after only a month - and we're seeing a reversal of the trend we had been seeing of more sites removing Mautic tracking than adding it.

The chart below shows the net added/removed by quarter and you can see that other than a dip in Q4 2023, we seem to be moving much more consistently in the positive direction.

Image
A screenshot showing the net sites that added and removed Mautic tracking over time. There's a large negative drop between Q1 2020 and Q3 2023 but numbers are much stronger in the positive since then.
Chart showing the net number of sites adding / removing Mautic tracking by date tracking was last detected. Source: builtwith.com 

Community Health

Traffic to the Mautic web resources is continuing to return back to around 30,000 new users per month. We also continue to see individuals and new companies getting involved in the Mautic community at a rate of around 10 new companies per month.

This month we saw 16 new contributors getting started with giving back to Mautic and 347 total contributions across the project, which is awesome! Whether that's providing a solution to a forum post, fixing, testing or reviewing a bug fix, writing content or creating images for social and email communications or even helping to pull the stats for writing this report, it all helps to keep Mautic moving forward. 

We're also over the 8,000 total members who have been active in the community!

We're also seeing a very gradual widening of our pyramid of engagement when we consider the project as a whole where people join as a member, then start to engage, then contribute, and then finally move into some of the top contributors in the project.  The following pyramid shows the whole project since 2014:

Image
Screenshot of a pyramid showing 1619 in the widest part - visitor - and 354 in participant, 238 in contributor and 41 in core
Contributor engagement pyramid. Source: Savannah CRM

The aim is that we start to widen the Participant and Contributor sections, so that more people are taking an active role in the project.  This change is happening very slowly, but we have plans for improving our contributor onboarding in the pipeline which we hope will accelerate this further.

Conclusion

We've had a good month in April, with new members and ongoing sponsorships bringing us closer to our financial growth targets. Mautic is continuing to grow in adoption and community engagement, and the new trials provision is enabling newcomers to Mautic to get started quickly, lowering the entry point for new users and curious marketers.

As we start to learn more about how people are using Mautic during their trials I'm excited to see how we can use the information to further develop Mautic as a project.