SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1146 How Joomla Pays Bills With $0 Revenue, Opensourced
13 Sep 2018
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
He wishes he knew how big the internet was going to be. He is active. In fact, he's the president at Juma. You've probably maybe heard of it. Big open source community. Been around for about 13, 14 years. He has kind of perfected covering these business expenses with things like sponsors that he brings on board and helps them get free marketing.
A lot of people that donate their time to Juma also obviously have full-time jobs where they're actually getting paid. And usually they're in the Juma ecosystem. This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn.
Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million. I had no money when I started the company. It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs. We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers.
With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Robert Jacoby. He's president of Joomla and has been an expert in content management systems since 1996.
Effective with deployment and management of content using internet technology, he's been a cornerstone of Robert's philosophy and he's helped clients achieve measurable results. He believes Joomla is a huge and growing part of the future of content management. Robert, are you ready to take us to the top? I'm ready.
So we laughed before we started this because you started with, hey, Nathan, just want you to know Joomla makes no money. You know that, right? And what did I say? You said, surprise me. Surprise me. So for those people that are not familiar with Joomla, maybe people who are non-technical, explain what it does.
And then I want to understand how you're kind of fueling the company's growth with no revenue. Sure. So Joomla is an open source project for content management systems. So it's comparable to WordPress or Drupal. Those are probably the greatest examples that we have out there. Joomla is... unknown relatively in North America compared to the rest of the world.
But as a whole, Joomla runs over 3% of the entire global internet. So it's actually only second to WordPress. So I hear server costs, server costs, server costs. When you throw out that number, how are you paying the bills? We don't run it as a SaaS solution. So people who download and utilize Joomla are installing it, running it from other hosts. Yeah. Let me ask this differently.
Do you have kids? Yes. How do you pay for their food? How do you make money? Oh, everyone in Joomla has a real day job. So Joomla is a 100% volunteer non-for-profit. So help me understand, as a creator of this thing, I mean, how do you incentivize people to get on board with it and using their free time to do it for free? So that's a trick.
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Chapter 2: How does Joomla operate without generating direct revenue?
Think of that list. I mean, how many sponsors at that level? Yeah, yeah. If I pay a bronze level and you're going to include me in a list to get distribution to your network, what exposure do I get? So we have tens of thousands of Joomla members. So I couldn't tell you off the top of my head what our global list size is on that. Okay.
And that also gets you visibility on our social networks and Joomla.org as well. Okay.
Chapter 3: What is Joomla and how does it compare to other content management systems?
And give me in general, I mean, am I paying 10 grand for a bronze or 50 grand, 100 grand? Generally, what are the size of these things? So between, let's say, bronze and gold, you're from $5,000 to $15,000. Okay. And is that one time or monthly? Monthly. Annual. Okay, annual. Okay. And then you also say, I noticed across the bottom of your website, it says sponsor Joomla for five bucks.
Is that an effective route? Do you guys get a lot of volume revenue from that? Or is it just a fun side project thing? It's a fun side project. We only started doing that about six months ago. And it's been great for just community people who aren't volunteering or anything that they can just give back a little to the project to make sure the lights stay on. Okay, so let me ask you a question.
We had Matt Mundlick on the show a couple episodes ago, and he articulated kind of how hard it was to take WordPress, which was open source, and really commercialize on top of it and how much he was kind of judged from the community and how he managed that transition. Why hasn't something like a WordPress been generated out of Joomla?
Because the community ā first of all, there's no single person who owns it. the trademarks and copyrights. Yeah, but the source code, when it was open sourced, it belonged to the community, right? Correct. And it still does. So there is WordPress code that's open sourced and GPL. So that's still available and accessible.
There's a fundamental philosophy difference at Joomla to not go the automatic or Acquia route if we look at Drupal. Yeah, but who is we? That's what I'm saying. There's no leadership. I mean, who decides? We're never letting a Matt Mullenweg come in. There's a board of directors and it's voted on by the community.
So you can look at that at the community.jumla.org to see who the board of directors is. Well, I'm speaking a little out of context here because I'm not familiar with exactly how Matt did this.
But I mean, if someone builds an extension of the open source platform, right, that adds a lot of value to the community and they start signing up paid customers, I believe, I mean, I believe that's how WordPress started to actually become a business. What prevents someone from just doing that? They don't need your board approval of an open source community to do that, do they? No.
So that's what I'm saying is why hasn't somebody done something like that and making the argument, hey, we're going to build this extension, but it takes a team of five developers full time. So to pay their salaries, it's 10 bucks a month. I mean, why hasn't that come out of Joomla? Because none of the founders was solely in charge of the... There was no single founder, I guess, of Joomla.
It was always a very distributed project. And as part of that, they didn't want... The original founders did not want a single person being able to kind of like run with it one way. Yes, you can absolutely take all the Joomla source code and GPL and create a new project out of it and create a business entity out of it. But as the originators of this, we have a slightly different philosophy.
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Chapter 4: What role do volunteers play in the Joomla ecosystem?
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Chapter 5: How does the Joomla community incentivize contributions?
So what do most of the day jobs look like of the community? Like, what do you do full time? I am a vice president at Perfect Dashboard. So we are a support company that does automatic updates for Joomla and WordPress websites. A lot of other board members have their own web development shops, extension development shops, or in marketing, design, agency work like that. Yeah.
So these are all, I mean, you are, the company you work for and others in the space on the board, they're commercializing the Joomla ecosystem some way with plugins, extensions, things on top of the open source code, right? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So this, I mean, what is it? There are things like WordPress, you know, commercialized version of this thing happening.
It's just extra value in their extensions. And I mean, so what's the biggest company that you would say would credit the Joomla open source community for its growth? Um, oh, there's a, there's a couple of them. So there's like June shaper, there's OS training. How big are these companies though? I mean, are we talking millions and millions of revenue a year or what? Yes. Okay.
Um, I'll, I'll, and that's a rough guesstimate that I couldn't speak to them, obviously. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. A few other questions here. So, um, how is the open source community growing? Like how do you get new developers exposed to this open source platform? Uh, we reach out to them, uh, and that's, you know, through developer and technical, uh, conferences and events. Um,
through obviously social media, through regular sort of outreach in that regard. And you get developers who are working on something, they're going to tell people about it. And that's how a lot of word of mouth, a lot of open source projects are very word of mouthy like that. And do you just have leverage there?
Because the pitch, like in other words, why couldn't someone else just like start building their own thing? Your pitch is, listen, you contribute to this thing. You basically get the work, the power, the brainpower of 5,000 other developers making it better every single day. You're getting that for free if you contribute yourself. And that's why it works. That's exactly it.
I mean, starting it up from scratch, I mean, we've been around 12 years, almost 13, and there have been tons of open source projects that have come and gone. in that timeframe. Fascinating. Okay. Very good. Um, so what is the, tell me, I want to learn more about your company. So did you found that company that you work at? You think you said as partner dash? Perfect dashboard. Perfect dashboard.
Do you, did you found that company or no? No, I'm not a founder. I've only been there about a year. Okay. Do you ever get the inclination of going off and starting your own thing around this ecosystem? I actually, prior to that, I ran a web agency for almost 17 years. And that was built around and on top of Joomla. What did you grow that web agency to in terms of team size?
Team size at our max, we were at 15. Okay. And in terms of revenue, what, like a million, million two, something like that? So somewhere around there. And why'd you give it up? Uh, it's hard to scale consulting fundamentally. It's, you know, it's a, it's a, you're always knee deep in the weeds on stuff like that.
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Chapter 6: How does Joomla cover its operational costs?
Uh, so that, uh, killed the market right then and there. We also then had an email solution similar to MailChimp. We just didn't have the investment to back it up. Some other people did. Isn't MailChimp's bootstrap, though? That I don't know. No, I think they are. I mean, so wait, you're going to blame that failure on the fact that you didn't raise capital? Yeah. Interesting.
So why did MailChimp succeed? I don't know. I don't know.
Chapter 7: What is the sponsorship model used by Joomla?
I didn't know they were bootstrapped. That I couldn't tell you. I don't know what that was different in their business model. We were still also a consulting firm at the same time. So we were trying to play both sides of the street. And that also probably contributed to some of those difficulties. Okay. Interesting. Interesting. So you're happy where you're at right now.
You're not thinking about going out and launching your own thing and kind of growing right from scratch. We're launching this thing and this has only been around two years. So I've been here for half of it and it's been launching great. What's the team size today? We are at, we're just under 20, I think, right now. All remote? The headquarters are in Poland. Most of the staff is in Krakow.
I would say two-thirds of it is in Krakow proper. And then we have a couple of remote people. That's great, Krakow. Yeah, there's a lot of people that are spinning up dev teams in Krakow. I don't know. I guess the economics there are just perfect for this kind of thing. It's not just economics. The university structure there is really, really good.
So you have a lot of trained people coming out of Krakow. There's a couple of technical universities as well as the Yagolinian University of Krakow. Got it. All right, Robert, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's the last book that you read? Actually, Hamilton. Hamilton, good. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying right now? No.
I've been just following Tim Cook in general because he's interesting to see how different he is than Steve Jobs. Number three, is there a favorite online tool you use to build your business? Favorite online tool to build? build the business right now. Yep. Uh, using a prosper works actually right now. Okay. They are good. And John Lee came on the show recently.
Uh, they are growing very, very fast. If you want to check out that interview with prosper works again, just look up, uh, look up their name plus, uh, Alaska and you will find it. I think they, I don't know if you know this, if I asked you to guess how big they are, Robert, what would you guess? I would guess they're actually kind of small. Um, I'm going to go with around 10. Interesting. Yeah.
So 10 million ARR. Oh, you're talking revenue or staff? Revenue. Oh, revenue. I have no idea. Yeah. Back when I had them on about a year ago, they had just passed $24 million in ARR. They had 67 employees, $10 million in funding. They've raised since then, but they are significantly larger than $24 million in ARR now. Wow. That's fantastic.
That's a fun interview to go back and listen to there with John Lee. All right, number four. How many hours of sleep, Robert, do you get every night? I make sure I get at least seven. Okay, that's good. And what's your situation? Married, single, you have kids? Married one daughter. One daughter. And how old are you? Yeah. 46. 46. Okay. Last question. What do you wish your 20 year old self knew?
Um, what do I wish? How big the internet was going to be. There you guys have it. There would have been plenty of things to jump on. There you guys have it from Robert. He wishes he knew how big the internet was going to be. He is active. In fact, he's the president at Juma. You've probably maybe heard of it. Big open source community. Been around for about 13, 14 years.
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