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

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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Show notes:


Taylor Otwell on Twitter

Taylor Otwell's podcast

Laravel.com

Laracon - the Laravel conference

Justin's article: Why many products struggle, and only a few
succeed

Jeffrey Way and Laracasts


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