It's great to see. Cloud is genuinely the product people needed. Vapour was okay but just wasn't quite it. It's great to see a true product you can just ship on with minimal fuss.
Our goal for 2026 was to 3x Laravel Cloud revenue. Already done. On pace to 5x. ✨
I know some companies are growing a lot faster or a lot slower, but here are some of my learnings so far.
Focus on making the product decisively the best in its category. Easy to be distracted from this, and there are no gimmicks or tricks to get around it. The product is either the best option in the space or it's not. Being the "best" is a blend of a lot of factors - technical superiority, features, price, design, and more. Striking the right balance across all of them gets tricky when your customer base or community is really varied (long-tail community users vs. large scaled companies).
A lot of what goes into the above isn't always visible to end users or even other people in the organization. We spent months getting our scale-to-zero tech for app compute and managed queues really dialed in. Can be hard to explain to non-engineering roles why we spent months on this - and even hard to explain to more technical folks why something doesn't ship for months. But the work is hard and it has to be done right. Now it's one of our biggest differentiators and contributes heavily to "decisively being the best product."
I used to think all meetings were dumb. Most still are, to be honest, but a few are helpful - particularly quick pulse checks on the state of projects. Does anything need to be unblocked? What's the goal today / this week? Maintaining urgency and speed in a remote company is really challenging and takes intentional effort every single day.
I spend a lot of time just sitting and thinking about everything. A lot of frantic energy online and nothing of substance or value ever ships. I'd rather make a few really thoughtful moves than throw a bunch of slop at the wall.
X is an even bigger bubble than I realized. On here it feels like everyone is just building devtools for other devs to build more devtools. None of our largest customers are really on X, none are in SF, and none are devtool related. We have a wide variety of really interesting customers building things to solve all sorts of problems you'd never expect, all around the world.
Anyway, back to work. Still a lot to build. 🫡