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?

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
• Create your own podcast at transistor.fm

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