Founder Brandon Kelly owns 100% of Pixel & Tonic
Brandon Kelly · 1097 CMS CEO: How to Move 1 Time License Model doing $1.5m Annually to SaaS · Jul 26, 2018 · at 7:56
Brandon Kelly, founder of Pixel & Tonic (Craft CMS), confirms to Nathan Latka that he is the sole founder and retains 100% ownership.
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“I do.”
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More from Brandon Kelly
Kelly says WordPress is not built for complex bespoke websites
“It's not built for
Bespoke websites.
So inevitably if people do a lot of development with WordPress, they get to a point where they just are tired of fighting with all these built in themes and you know like eventually the site design requirements get to a poi…”
Pixel & Tonic cannot track conference sponsorship ROI directly
“It's honestly, like, there's no way to track the returns. We've tried so we just kind of trust that it's working out for us, and it does.”
Craft CMS shifts to SaaS with $60 renewals and 20% plugin cut
“We're moving away from one off licensing. So for example, if you spend 300 dollars on a license today then a year from now you'd be due for another paying 60 bucks again for more updates. Then beyond that, we also have a commerce product that is kind of the sa…”
Kelly predicts Craft CMS plugin store will support 20 full-time developers
“So it's not, you know, it's no WordPress, but we do expect once the plugin store hits and some of these plugin developers feel more incentivized to actually charge for their work. We'll probably have a good handful, you know, 20 people or so that are making, y…”
Bootstrapping a 10-person CMS company is unheard of outside the enterprise
“Excluding the enterprise CMSs, most CMSs are done by one or two or three people on the side of their day job, you know? And so the fact that we've been able to fund a 10 person company full time working on this thing is unheard of for the most part within our …”
Pixel & Tonic intends to grow Craft CMS independently without outside acquisition
“Right now there's just zero motivation to change any of that. You know, we want to continue growing it. We have a lot of different ideas for how we can grow it. You know, we want to get it as large as we can on our own.”