Taylor Otwell’s journey from solo developer to building Laravel, the world’s most beloved PHP framework. When he created Laravel in 2011, it wasn’t meant to become a massive open-source community – he simply needed better tools for his own projects.
For a decade, he bootstrapped Laravel while maintaining his "underdog mentality" in the PHP world. He stayed deeply involved with the community, spending his first 90 minutes each day managing GitHub pull requests. Last year, he finally raised $57M from Accel to take Laravel to the next level.
From zero revenue to quarter million daily downloads – what drove Taylor to keep building when no one was paying attention? Watch the full conversation to discover the mindset that built a beloved community!
00:00 Intro
02:42 How a Techie from Arkansas Built $57M Backed Startup
07:31 EO Partner Highlight
08:14 Ignore the Haters, Play the Hits For Your Fans
11:31 Why I Decided to End 10 Years of Bootstrapping
13:44 The Secret to Building a Strong Community
15:15 2 Tips for Founders From an Average Developer
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#OpenSource #Coding #webdevelopment #laravel
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