Mautic Open Startup Report #2 - May 2023

A chart showing contributons over time in a yellow colour. There are several peaks and troughs over the months but a general upward trend.

Key points

Significant costs this month associated with becoming an independent open source project and an annual infrastructure contract renewal
Small reduction in income and some delayed income from GitHub Sponsors
Continued strong growth in contributions
Slight increase in download rates, but not significant at this time
A drop in active members on Slack, but substantial increases in other channels

Finances

This month has seen some further expenses relating to the separation from Acquia, and some additional sponsorships for Mautic Conference Global being completed. An annual infrastructure contract was also renewed this month.

Income

Mautic Conference Global	$4500
Open Collective income	$1,100
GitHub Sponsors income	$345*

*Note that some funds have not yet arrived from May’s GitHub sponsors income. This is an ongoing challenge and is due to the way that the funds are received from GitHub Sponsors into Open Collective.

This month we have continued to have some sponsorship deals complete for Mautic Conference Global but this has slowed as we approach the event.

We have a reduction in income of $667 from Open Collective this month however this is due to the mis-coding of one $500 transaction last month which should have been associated with Mautic Conference Global, and a couple of one-time donations that were made in April.

Acquia's seed funding hit some technical challenges reaching us this month due to some complexities with Stripe verification, but this is being addressed between Acquia and Open Source Collective and the first instalment will arrive soon.

Expenditure

Legal services	$3,530
Infrastructure	$1,067.97
Host fees	$594.50
Domain registration	$384.11
Marketing	$24.46

We had some further expenses this month which relate to the transfer of ownership of the Mautic trademark and domains from Acquia to Open Source Collective. This is reflected in the Legal Services and Domain Registration line items. These are one-time expenses on the legal side, and recurring expenses on the domain registration side. There is one further expense to come next month on the legal side of things, but otherwise this is now complete.

Happily, all the trademarks and domains are all in our possession at this point in time. A big thank you to Pam Chestek for her legal support, Ben Nickolls at Open Collective, and Jason Wagstaff at Acquia for all their support with this lengthy process.

We have also renewed one of our annual infrastructure contracts for the HeyOrca software we use for collaboration on creating content for and responding to posts on social media, at $774 per year which incorporates a heavy discount for being an Open Source project. Thank you to HeyOrca for enabling our Marketing Team to work collaboratively and help spread the word about Mautic more effectively!

We have started to incur some costs from the promotional activities around Mautic Conference Global where we are running some paid social advertising to drive up ticket sales. This will be offset by the ticket sales and sponsorship income from the event, which has exceeded its breakeven point.

Employment expenses from remote.com have not yet landed with our collective, so this will start to accrue from next month.

Contributions

We are continuing to have strong growth in contributions across the community, which is great to see.

The data below comes from our Community CRM which we use to do our monthly shout-out on Slack and the Forums, the information is reproduced here.

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.

You can always take a look at the data for the last 90 days via this link, and you can now view this month’s report here.

⬆️ = Increase from last month

⬇️ = Decrease from last month

Organizations

These organisations are making Mautic and helping to grow our community.

Most active companies:

Acquia 220 (⬇️ 5.98%)

Steer Campaign 208 (⬆️ 11.23%)

Friendly 197 (⬆️ 105.21%)

low-cost.Marketing 189 (⬆️ 397.37%)

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 96 (⬆️ 29.73%)

Webmecanik 71 (⬇️ 10.13%)

twentyZen 54

Ionutojica 53

Dropsolid 52 (⬇️ 69.41%)

Codefive 45

Top contributing companies:

Acquia 93 (⬇️ 9.71%)

Steer Campaign 56 (⬆️ 19.15%)

Webmecanik 13 (⬇️ 7.14%)

Codefive 13

Friendly 12 (⬆️ 300%)

Comarch 10 (⬆️ 100%)

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 10 (⬇️ 60%)

Texthelp 8

Aivie 7 (⬇️ 30%)

Dropsolid 5 (⬇️ 84.85%)

Individuals

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

Most active members:

Mohammed Abu Musa 208

Joey Keller 197

Jan Linhart 195

Yosu Cadilla ツ 189

Dirk Spannaus 54

Ionuţ Ojică 53

Lenon Leite 45

Mattias Michaux 42

Daniel Lord 41

Dwayne Taylor 39

Top contributors:

Jan Linhart 80

Mohammed Abu Musa 56

Lenon Leite 13

Joey Keller 12

Zdeno Kuzmany 9

Daniel Lord 8

Tejas Navghane 7

Volha Pivavarchyk 6

Robert Parker 5

Artem Lopata 5

Welcome to our new contributors this month 💖

Paul Sanduleac

jvir

Bob Herman

Redon Skikuli

KreativeKrise

Khalid Zamer

bgit-c

magdalenaleonow

putzwasser

Stefan

Chris Woelk

Top supporters

Joey Keller 7

Daniel Lord 2

Bgit-c 1

Matic Zagmajster 1

Redon Skikuli 1

Dwayne Taylor 1

Tejas Navghane 1

Jan Linhart 1

Modifiedcontent 1

Bob Herman 1

Supporters are folks who have had conversations with people directly before they make a contribution, so most likely helping with that process.

This month we had 11 new contributors 🚀 (⬆️ 37.50%) and 71 new members joining the community 💖 (⬆️ 18.33%).

Usage of Mautic

We are starting to see a gradual upward trend in the number of downloads of Mautic that are happening through mautic.org/download.

A chart showing a red line of all downloads and a blue line of unique downloads. The lines have slight peaks and troughs with a large drop in September 2022 - November 2022. There is a small uptick in the last months on both lines. — All downloads of the Mautic application from mautic.org/download. Source: m.mautic.org

It’s important to bear in mind that this only tracks contacts who have consented for us to hold data on them. If they subsequently do not re-consent or request to be removed, their records will be removed. Therefore there might be some small fluctuations in numbers over time when comparing against previous Open Startup reports.

According to the data from builtwith.com, there are currently 29,693 live instances worldwide, a small dip from last month’s figures.

Community Health

We are continuing to average around 200-250 active members across the community each month, which is down slightly from 240-260 in the last quarter of 2022. When we consider the trend over the last two years we can see that active members have reduced, so this is something that we should look at addressing.

A chart showing an area with three colours - pale green for returning visitors, dark green for active members and dark blue for new members. There are some slight reductions in all over the last six months. — All active members since January 2020. Source: Savannah CRM

Diving into the data, the drop in active members seems to be most notable on Slack. Other channels seem to be maintaining or even increasing activity.

Members active on Slack

Chart showing three areas in pale blue (active), dark blue (new) and pale green (returning) showing members engaging on Slack. — All active members on Slack since January 2020. Source: Savannah CRM

Members active on the Forums

A screenshot showing a chart with three areas, pale blue (active), dark blue (new) and pale green (returning). All three are fairly stable. — All active members on the Forums since January 2020. Source: Savannah CRM

Members active on GitHub

A chart showing three areas, pale blue (active), pale green (returning) and dark blue (new). There is a small decrease in the last six momnths in active and returning members activity. — All active members on GitHub since January 2020. Source: Savannah CRM

On the other hand, some channels are seeing substantial growth, such as PR reviews from people testing and reviewing new features and bug fixes. This is a very important area to see increasing engagement in, because it means we are able to release fixes and features in higher volumes and more frequently. Much of the recent increase in engagement has been in preparation for the Mautic 5.0 release which is on the near horizon.

Members completing GitHub PR reviews

A screenshot showing three areas, pale blue (active), pale green (returning), and blue (new). There is a substantial growth in active and returning, and regular peaks in new member activity. — All active members engaged in PR reviews since January 2020. Source: Savannah CRM

Likewise activity on Jira with people working on tasks has also risen. Jira issues can be anything from chunking down very large code-based tasks into smaller individual tasks to things which are completely unrelated to code, like writing blog articles, creating visuals for conferences, writing copy for social media, and more. It’s great to see this area increasing as well, which shows a steady rise in folks getting involved in other areas of the project.