Open Startup Report #19 - September 2024

By Ruth Cheesley · PUBLISHED October 04, 2024 · UPDATED November 01, 2024

Key points

  • Mautic made a small profit this month largely due to the sponsorships for Mautic Conference Europe, however these funds are already allocated for the event costs, so there is a deficit if these funds are discounted. With the financial end of year approaching, the dwindling financial reserves are a cause for concern
  • There's a stead growth in new contributors, with 8 new contributors and 67 new members joining this month, however we still want to see more active involvement from folks around the world to build a truly sustainable project.
  • We've introduced some new ways of tracking, as close as we can, the number of Mautic instances 'in the wild' which shows just over 15,000 active instances calling back to the stats server this quarter (not including SaaS instances and where the callback is turned off)
  • We're still seeing a strong interest in the Mautic Trials with 400-500 signups each month, and we're working to improve their experience. Some are now starting to convert into new customers which will mean some contributions coming back to Mautic.
  • We made a security and bugfix release this month for 5.x and 4.x.
  • There's some exciting projects on the horizon including Hacktoberfest and Mautic Conference Europe which will feature the first ever Mautic Awards event!

    Finances

This month we've marginally made a profit due to the sponsorship income for Mautic Conference Europe, however these funds are already allocated to cover the cost of the event venue and catering, so we actually have experienced a large deficit this month if we discount those funds.

As we approach the end of the financial year this is becoming quite a worry, as we are running out of 'reserve funds' to cover the reduced income from the Mautic Trials and lower than expected sponsorships for our two main conferences.

Income

Description Amount
Event sponsorship $10,250
Corporate membership $1,200
Monthly sponsors $1100
Individual membership $450
Refund of payment processor fees $18.51
Total $13,018.51

Expenditure

Description Amount
Employment $8,977.59
Infrastructure $2,077.34
Host fees $1,300
Payment processor fees $567.23
Postage $36.38
Travel $32.33
Total $12,990.87

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 September 2024!

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

Organizations

Most active companies

Acquia 256 (⬆️ 236.84%)

Dropsolid 212 (⬆️1.44%)

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 133 (⬆️ 114.52%)

Crafting.email 75 (⬆️ 70.45%)

Friendly 62 (⬆️ 19.23%)

Webmecanik 56 (⬆️ 24.44%)

Aivie 36 (⬆️ 16.13%)

Twentyzen 29

Comarch 25

Matic Zagmajster s.p. 21 (⬇️ 16%)

Top contributing companies

Acquia 46 (⬆️ 142.11%)

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 25 (⬆️ 257.14%)

Dropsolid 19 (⬇️ 55.81%)

Comarch 15 (⬆️ 66.67%)

Aivie 15 (⬇️ 25%)

Crafting.email 7

Friendly 5 (⬇️ 28.57%)

Moorwald | Sven Döring 3

Axelerant 3

Rush Agência 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 247

Anderson José Eccel 169

Bill F 95

Ricardo Freire 75

Lenon Leite 66

Joey Keller 62

Ekke Guembel 54

Zdeno Kuzmany 31

Dirk Spannaus 29

Favour Chibueze 28

Top contributors

John Linhart 42

Rahul Shinde 15

Patryk Gruszka 13

Anderson José Eccel 13

Lenon Leite 13

Ricardo Freire 7

putzwasser 7

Aleks0129 5

Ekke Guembel 5

Artem Lopata 5

Welcome to our new contributors this month 💖

Damian.

Emily Wood

Antonio Lazzari

Kirsi Vatanen

ruman-webmaster

ichiko

kingfisher

Aleks0129

Top supporters

John Linhart 7

Joey Keller 4

Favour Chibueze 2

Ricardo Freire 2

Lenon Leite 1

Anderson José Eccel 1

Zdeno Kuzmany 1

Oluwatobi Owolabi 1

Mauro Chojrin 1

Patryk Gruszka 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 8 new contributors 🚀 (⬇️ 20%) and 67 new members joining the community !💖 (⬇️ 5.63%).

Usage of Mautic

This month we've introduced some new charts which we're creating from data that is collected on the Mautic stats server. Mautic instances 'call home' to this server, unless it's turned off in the configuration file or set to call back to an internal source, such as in the case of SaaS providers. For this reason the data is going to be somewhat incomplete as it will exclude SaaS providers, and it may include a small number of test instances used when reviewing bug fixes and features.

The data we receive provides us with some very high level, anonymised information including the version of Mautic in use, the operating system and PHP version in use, etc.

Image
A chart showing the number of active instances of Mautic over time. There's a large dip in 2021 and it's starting to go back up now.
Source: Mautic stats server

This chart shows us the number of Mautic instances that are 'calling home' by quarter that they last checked for updates.

This tells us that this quarter we've had just over 15,000 active Mautic instances calling back to the stats server, and that while we had quite a dip during 2021 in active sites, this seems to be reversing with a lot more Mautic instances coming on stream.

The following chart tells us the difference in the number of active Mautic instances calling home each quarter, so we can track whether there's more or less active instances each quarter.

Image
A chart showing the net difference in instances calling back to the stats server. It's generally trending upwards.
Mautic stats server

We continue to see strong interest in the Mautic trials with an average of 400-500 trials requested each month. We're also now starting to see some of those trials converting into paying customers, which is great news for the Mautic project as we receive a 40% commission on all sales for the first year, which decays over the following years. These transactions should start to appear during Q4 2024.

Community Health

September saw Mautic making a bug and security fix release - 5.1.1 - and a back-ported security release for the 4.x series, 4.4.13. The release team are extremely short handed and are proactively inviting applications from developers who may wish to give back to Mautic by learning to become a release leader alongside an experienced member of the core team.

Work is well underway to prepare for Mautic Conference Europe and it's shaping up to be a great event - we're really looking forward to seeing many of you in Lisbon in November. This has included onboarding an apprentice through a platform the Council are trialling who is focused on marketing to help the Marketing Team specifically with growing the awareness and marketing for both the Mautic Conference Europe event and the first Mautic Awards event..

We're also busy preparing for next month's Hacktoberfest event where we're hoping to bring many new contributors into Mautic to work on both code and no-code tasks.

Lots of exciting things coming up on the horizon!

Conclusion

While the financial concerns are a significant worry, Mautic continues to grow both in adoption and new contributors joining the community. We're greatly looking forward to the upcoming events, Mautic Conference Europe and Hacktoberfest, and the first ever Mautic Awards.