Open Startup Report #18 - August 2024

By Ruth Cheesley · PUBLISHED September 06, 2024 · UPDATED November 01, 2024

Key points

  • Mautic almost broke even financially this month thanks to annual membership renewals and sales from Mautic Conference Global but our goal is to build a stable financial base, so efforts are being made to secure more memberships and sponsorships.
  • The community continues to grow, with 9 new contributors this month and 71 new members joining the community, however we would like to see more engagement from local communities, particularly around starting up local meetup groups
  • There were over 400 requests for trials this month with most coming from Brazil, the EU, USA and India.
  • Preparations are underway for the upcoming 5.2 release with a number of exciting new features on the cards.

Finances

This month we're just about breaking even thanks to some annual membership renewals and the income from ticket sales for Mautic Conference Global. We have invested for a quarter in a system which enables us to have an apprentice working with our marketing team as we're struggling with sustaining the level of contribution in that team, which is so far working really well.

We do need to be focusing on building up a strong financial base, so just breaking even isn't really where we want to be, but it's better than being in a deficit. We're still working hard on outreach to potential members and for sponsorships for the upcoming Mautic Conference Europe as well, to help boost our available funds.

Income

Description Amount
Corporate membership $9,000
Event ticket sales $2,302.47
Monthly sponsors $1,300
Individual membership $900
Refund of Host Fee $10
Cover of payment processor fee $4.70
Total: $13,517.17

Expenditure

Description Amount
Employment $9,000.50
Host fees $1,120
Acadium $997
Travel & Expenditure $982.41
Payment processor fees $530.32
Legal $414
Infrastructure $366.39
Refund $100
Website rebuild $44.68
Total: $13,555.30

Contributions

🔎 You can always take a look at the data for the last 90 days via this link: Mautic 90 day report and you can now view this month’s report here: Mautic | Monthly Report for August 2024!

⬆️ = Increase from last month
⬇️ = Decrease from last month

Organizations

Most active companies

Dropsolid 209 (⬇️ 44.71%)

Acquia 76 (⬇️ 63.64%)

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 62 (⬇️ 62.20%)

Friendly 52 (⬆️ 40.54%)

Webmecanik 45 (⬆️ 104.55%)

Crafting Email 44 (⬇️ 38.03%)

Leeway Academy 41

Aivie 31

Matic Zagmajster s.p. 25 (⬇️ 13.79%)

Comarch 25 (⬆️ 4.17%)

Top contributing companies

Dropsolid 43 (⬇️ 51.14%)

Aivie 20

Acquia 19 (⬇️ 72.06%)

Comarch 9 (⬇️ 25%)

Friendly 7

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 7 (⬇️ 72%)

Webmecanik 5 (⬇️ 58.33%)

escuelita.dev 3

Leeway Academy 2

SimplyPrint 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

Anderson José Eccel 159

John Linhart 68

Joey Keller 52

Ricardo Freire 44

Ekke Guembel 42

Mauro Chojrin 41

Norman Pracht 36

Renato Carabelli 35

Bill F 30

Matic Zagmeister 25

Top contributors

Anderson José Eccel 30

Rahul Shinde 20

John Linhart 14

Rembrand 8

Joey Keller 7

Priyanshi Gaur 7

Patryk Gruszka 6

Abhisek Mazumdar 5

Zdeno Kuzmany 4

Bastian2718 4

Welcome to our new contributors this month đź’–

Bishal Jena

Thomas Mueller

David

Mauricio Etcheverry

Bastian2718

Javad

Shafique

annusdomini

markusvjh

Alejandro Guerrero

Top supporters

Anderson José Eccel 2

Joey Keller 1

ncmon 1

Ekke Guembel 1

Favour Chibueze 1

annusdomini 1

markusvjh 1

John Linhart 1

Mauro Chojrin 1

Alejandro Guerrero 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 9 new contributors 🚀 (⬇️ 54.55%) and 71 new members joining the community !💖 (⬇️ 37.17%).

Usage of Mautic

This month we had just over 400 requests for a trial of Mautic which is remaining pretty steady month-on-month.

In terms of the geographic distribution, we have a new pivot table and chart in the Open Startup Metrics - Mautic - Google Sheets which shows the top three countries are Brazil, with 16.7% of the requests, followed by India at 14.8% and the United States with 11.4%. However, if we consider all the countries in the European Union as one, this tops out the list with 17.69%.

Image
A pie chart showing country breakdown of all trial users.
Location of users signing up for a Mautic Trial. Source: Mautic Trials

There have been some promising conversations with users of the trials, which have a strong potential to become income via our 40% commission - this is likely to start coming through next month.

We had a large spike in web traffic on the mautic.org website in Q2 which resulted in a very large increase in visitors, this is now returning to normal levels however we see sustained spam attacks on both the Forums and the Community Portal which are largely being mitigated by built-in spam protection systems.

The new chart which I introduced last month to show both the cumulative-and-still-active and all-time-cumulative-including-now-active sites with Mautic tracking has seen a substantial drop in the total number of sites actively using Mautic tracking. This is because of the large domain name parking provider was detected as having removed tracking from their entire estate last month, causing an extremely large drop in sites using Mautic tracking.

Image
A chart showing a red and blue line which indicates the number of active all time and currently active sites tracking using Mautic's tracking code.
Source: Builtwith.com / Open Startup Reporting

This further demonstrates the need to expand our statistic gathering.

Community Health

This month we've seen continued activity in preparing for the upcoming 5.2 release, with a lot of exciting new features being tested and merged.

We're also preparing for next month's bugfix release of 5.1.1 which is seeing several bugs being fixed that have been identified in the 5.1 release, alongside some longer standing issues which have been tested and reviewed this month.

Contributions continue to grow each month which is great to see, with some expected bumps taking into account vacation periods.

Image
A chart showing a line graph of all contributions, it's quite bumpy and goes up a lot towards the last year.
Source: Savannah CRM

We're also continuing to see a good balance between new and returning members, which is a sign of a healthy community.

Image
Chart showing green, blue and dark blue lines showing the number of active, new and returning members.
Source: Savannah CRM

We're not seeing so much engagement from our local communities as we would like - especially when it comes to organising local meetups and MautiCamps, but the Community Team is planning a reboot to focus on this aspect in the coming months.

Conclusion

It's been a positive month in terms of funding, with a major corporate membership renewal upgrading to the next tier, however we're still only just about breaking even which is not the position we want to be in.

More focus needs to be on both increasing our monthly income and ensuring that we're reducing our outgoing costs accordingly.

That being said, it's great to see the sustained involvement of contributors and a positive growth in terms of new people joining the project.