Mautic Open Startup report #1 - April 2023

Community Blog
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Key points

  • Recovering from several canceled monthly sponsorships
  • Strong growth in sponsorship sales for Mautic Conference Global 2023
  • Around 30,000 active Mautic instances worldwide
  • New members in the community dropped for second quarter
  • New contributor members have rebounded from an drop earlier in the year
  • First employee starting
For reference, check the GSheet here to view the charts.

Finances

Overall, Mautic has had a good month financially, raising over $8,500 in sponsorship revenue for Mautic Conference Global 2023 this month.

Income

Mautic Conference Global Sponsorship

$8,250

Open Collective income

$1,767

GitHub Sponsors transfer

$1922 * Note: This month's transfer included some funds from the previous month which were delayed in arriving


 

Expenditure

Infrastructure

$264

Legal

$2,810

Swag postage

$71

Host fees

$1,144

We have incurred some unplanned expenses for legal services which were required to facilitate the move to becoming an independent open source project, of just over $2,800 this month. There is no employment expense represented due to delays in getting the contract finalized, which was only completed at the end of April. I'm happily donating my work time during this transition period.

While we are seeing a slow but steady sale of tickets for Mautic Conference Global, we will not realise the income until after the event. 

This is because the money comes into Open Collective’s central Stripe account and it is journaled across to Mautic’s account once the event is complete and any possible refunds are dealt with. Currently we have raised just over $850 in ticket sales (excluding fees).

Challenges with GitHub Sponsors

While we have had some sponsorships canceled for financial reasons over the last few months, it seems that we - like many open source projects - had a flurry which have come about because PayPal was removed as a billing method from GitHub Sponsors, and the notification to sponsors was easy to miss.

We have been reaching out to the folks who we believe have been impacted by this change and the vast majority have re-subscribed.

Additional fees for sponsoring organizations

GitHub announced last month that they would begin charging additional fees for organizations who are sponsoring through GitHub Sponsors, between 3-6% based on which payment method you use. Naturally, more fees means less money ultimately coming to the open source projects you want to support. 

For this reason, some sponsors on GitHub have chosen to switch to sponsoring Mautic directly through Open Collective, as all the funds collected through GitHub Sponsors ultimately come back there - so it makes more sense to donate directly.

We may have to consider whether it makes sense to continue using GitHub Sponsors going forward if we want to maximize the use of funds that are donated to Mautic.

Contributions

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 234 (⬇️ 59.72%)

Steer Campaign 187 (⬇️ 7.88%)

Dropsolid 170 (⬆️178.69%)

Friendly 96 (⬇️ 34.25%)

Webmecanik 79

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 74 (⬇️ 9.76%)

Moorwald | Sven Döring 53 (⬇️ 31.17%)

low-cost.Marketing 38

lenonleite 35

Bonndigital 32

 

Top contributing companies

Acquia 103 (⬆️ 39.19%)

Steer Campaign 47 (⬆️ 38.24%)

Dropsolid 33 (⬆️ 175%)

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 25 (⬆️ 257.14%)

Webmecanik 14 (⬆️ 22.22%)

Moorwald | Sven Döring 11 (⬆️120%)

Aivie 10

Comarch 5 (⬇️ 72.22%)

lenonleite 4

Friendly 3 (⬇️ 66.67%)

Individuals

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

Most active members

Jan Linhart 196

Mohammed Abu Musa 187

Mattias Michaux 124

Joey Keller 93

Zdeno Kuzmany 55

Sven Döring 53

Rembrand Le Compte 39

Ekke Guembel 38

Yosu Cadilla 38

Lenon Leite 35

 

Top contributors

Jan Linhart 80

Mohammed Abu Musa 47

Mattias Michaux 28

Artem Lopata 18

Zdeno Kuzmany 14

Miroslav Fedeleš 14

Sven Döring 11

Volha Pivavarchyk 10

Rembrand Le Compte 5

Ekke Guembel 4

Welcome to our new contributors this month 💖

Mthobisi Glen Sehlabela

Martina Scholz

Lenon Leite

Simran Sethi

anil_naut111

 

Top supporters

Mattias Michaux 5

Joey Keller 2

Jan Linhart 2

Mthobisi Glen Sehlabela 1

Oluwatobi Owolabi 1

Matic Zagmajster 1

Rodrigo demetrio 1

Ekke Guembel 1

anil_naut111 1

Matthias Reich 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 5 new contributors 🚀 (⬇️ 22%) and 57 new members joining the community 💖 (⬇️ 24%).

Usage of Mautic

Based on tracked downloads from mautic.org we are averaging around 650 unique downloads per month, this does not include installations from GitHub/Composer.

Our friends at builtwith.com have kindly provided us with access to their dataset to facilitate our monthly reporting.

Using the information captured by their platform we estimate that there are currently around 30,000 instances of Mautic live worldwide. This is a metric that we are going to continue to track and measure over time.

Community health

While we are continuing to see new members joining our community, the rate of new joiners has been slightly dropping over the past six months. It’s something that we will continue to monitor over time.

We are continuing to onboard between 5-10 new contributors each month which is wonderful to see, but we really want to start driving these numbers higher.

When we look at the engagement pyramid we can see that the biggest hurdle is from people going from a visitor to a participant. This happens when people are having more discussions in the community. 

For reference, one conversation makes you a Visitor, 10 makes you a Participant, one contribution makes you a Contributor and ten contributions moves you to the top tier of Core.
 

Employee #1 starting

This month also saw Project Lead Ruth Cheesley starting to work full time for the Mautic Community. The contract of employment can be found here, the rate of pay is set at this time in accordance with the hourly rate defined in the Community Handbook.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.mautic.org/blog/community/mautic-open-startup-report-1-april-2023
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