The expectations for developer tools have risen significantly since 2011, and if we wanted to take Laravel to the next level, it required ambitious projects and a larger team.

When I first released Laravel, I was very involved in community forums, answering questions and asking for feedback on new features to create a welcoming environment.

I created Laravel to build web applications faster, not with the intention of making it a popular open-source framework.

Open source is now powering almost every business, and it's become the norm to release software on platforms like GitHub. I spend the first hour and a half of my day managing pull requests for the open-source Laravel framework, and I'm still the only person doing that at the company.

I launched Laravel Forge in 2014, and within a month, it was making more money than my regular job, leading me to work on Laravel full-time.

Our core mission remains to build awesome developer tools and nurture a great community through events like Laracon and Laravel meetups.

Even with many flaws, we saw incredible user growth, with 20,000 visitors in the first month, which encouraged us to keep going despite initial setbacks.

After launching, we grew from reaching about a hundred thousand people a month to a million and a half a month.

Highrise has over 5 million downloads and generates over a million dollars in monthly revenue.