Hi, I'm Stefano, the CEO and founder of DatoCMS. 2020 is (finally) coming to an end, and it seemed nice to close it by sharing some thoughts with you.
It's been a tough year for everyone, either financially, emotionally, or both.
If I have to speak on a personal level, I've been locked up at home for months, I cannot visit my parents because they're far away, and just a couple of weeks ago I had to say goodbye to one of my closest friends because of COVID. This is bad, but the worst thing is that I'm sure each of you is experiencing something similar at this time.
The only thing that I can tell you (and keep telling myself) is: let's stay strong, this is going to end soon. Soon we will return doing all those things that previously seemed normal, and which now seem like an unattainable luxury. In the meantime, please be as careful as you can for yourselves and your loved ones.
I'm being honest.. in a year like this, working on DatoCMS has been a blessing for me on a mental level. The continuous satisfaction, the enthusiasm received from all of you, the eagerness to do better and better, the daily closeness of the team.. they all have been the driving force that has allowed me to remain positive despite this period of captivity.
We continue to grow month after month. In the last 24 months we have seen a x10 in revenue, with a virtually non-existent churn. Huge companies (and awesome people) that we deeply esteem not only know us, but they choose and trust us despite the many competitors, and they do it because after a careful comparison we turn out to be the best for them. As makers, there is nothing more satisfying than this.
It's so hard to summarize the avalanche of things we've accomplished this year. It seems like ages ago when we released the new Media Area and blurha.sh support for images... yet it was only last December! 🎄
Since then we:
introduced support for video encoding/streaming by integrating with Mux
launched our SDKs for React and Vue (responsive/lazy loaded images with low-quality placeholders + SEO helpers)
released the new website and documentation
introduced a new pricing model that allows to reduce costs as the number of projects increases
launched sandbox environments and migration scripts, to give developers a safe way to manage and maintain their projects over time
rewrote from scratch the Gatsby plugin to improve performance as a Gatsby CMS.
Is that all? No, not really... 😅 we have also:
offered the possibility to organize models with fieldsets
allowed the customization of focal points for images
made the roles and permissions system even more granular
collaborated with Vercel to host the 2020 Next.js Remote Conf (80k registered, 40k attendees) and to release the whole solution as the Virtual Event Starter Kit
Just a few weeks ago we dropped another 💣 with the new Real-time Updates API, which can be used to preview draft content directly on the final website as it gets authored by editors, without even needing a page refresh.
All this, while fixing hundreds of bugs and giving the best support we could.
All this, maintaining an uptime of 99.997%, and scaling the infrastructure an infinite number of times to accommodate growth.
All this, while remaining the simplest and most intuitive headless CMS on the market.
All this, remaining small, bootstrapped and true to ourselves.
For all of this, I need to to say thanks. 🙏
Thanks to my team. Thanks to Matteo, Fabrizio, Irene, Max. And Giuseppe, who recently joined the team as a freelancer and is already doing awesome things. You're five incredible human beings, and you never lack a day of positivity, attention and kindness. It's so rewarding to see us working every day as one person.
Thank you to Cantiere Creativo, the agency from which it all came together, for investing in the project and giving me the opportunity five years ago to step back as CTO to dedicate myself full-time to DatoCMS.
But most of all, thank you so much to you, dear customers. It's you who allow us to continue to have fun and do what we do best.
We have a thousand things in store for 2021. Keep an eye on us. 👀
In the meantime, merry Christmas, and have happy New Year. Try to get some rest this vacation season, we all really need it.