Taylor Otwell: the business of Laravel in 2022

This podcast is hosted by transistor. F m. Sometimes when people get a bunch of money, the the the app gets worse. It does seem that way, strangely. Why? How how come that happens? Maybe they just get complacent or something. I'm not really sure. Or maybe it just gets harder as you scale up the team. How how many people you have that's true too. Yeah. Like, how many people you have at at on Laravel now full time? We're kind of in a transition period because we've recently lost two people, and we're, like, the leanest we've ever been. Woah. So right now, it is one, two, three. It's, like, four of us. Okay. No. Five of five of us. Including yourself? Counting, like, my yeah. Including myself, but not counting, like, my cofounder of Laravel Nova. I guess you could say, like, five and a half to six. Yeah. Yeah. We lost two developers, essentially. One, I think, was just kind of, like, burned out on development. Maybe both were. I don't know. And then the other was kind of in the kind of in a sort of a life transition of moving to a new place, kinda start starting fresh in a new location and, like, was pursuing some opportunities there, I think, in person, not even remote. Oh, wow. So we are bringing on several new people to sort of, get back to, like, our normal, you know, our normal staffing level. Because right now, it's like, if we lose one more person or even if just someone gets sick, like, we're in trouble pretty much in terms of maintaining what we have. Yeah. Is when you say several, do you mean, like like, six? Or you mean, like, two or three? Or Yeah. So right now, I've got, three people signed on. One of them is part time, and they're all starting two of them are starting in April, and then one is not starting until June. So, two of the developers, are starting in April, and they're going to work on, like, Laravel Ford, which is our biggest product, as well as some open source Laravel stuff. And then, a guy starting in June that's gonna help out with Laravel Vapor, which is like our serverless deployment tool for Laravel. Yeah. I try to I I like, ideally, when we were really small, I liked having one person dedicated per project. But as we've gotten bigger, like, it's really ideal to have two or more people per, like, commercial entity that we're serving customers with just so people can take vacations or whatever. Yeah. Is that stuff is that stuff stressful for you? Like, hiring, managing people, how do you manage all that? Yeah. It is stressful. It's partly stressful because I don't like to talk on the phone and, like and when you're hiring, it's like, you know, you feel obligated to have, like, these Zoom calls and these sort of, like, …