We're going to start sharing a quick update with the community each month — this is the first one.

It’s been 1,174 days since Ben started the @thepracticaldev Twitter account, 550 days since he purchased the dev.to domain name, and 485 days since I joined him on the project. This time last year, we had closed October with 69,259 sessions and were dreaming of, one day, working on dev.to full-time.

We finished October 2017 with 1,203,378 sessions for the month and are up to 39,539 registered members. And we've long since left our jobs. We couldn’t have done any of this without you, so we wanted to share our story of how we got here, how things are going, and how you can help.

How we got here

In January 2016, I was working at a larger company and was preparing to go full-time on dev.to, but Ben was in a trickier situation because his full-time job was serving as the CTO of a small startup. He and his partner on that project, Peter Frank, had met through Reddit and had worked together for the last four years. Peter knew the dev.to community was growing, so it wasn’t a big surprise when Ben approached Peter with his growing conflict of interest. Ben shared that he was getting more and more distracted by dev.to and that he and I were trying to find a way for me to go full-time.

After some soul-searching, the three of us agreed to combine our efforts and resources. We merged teams (we’re now five people total) and have been operating with friends & family funds ever since. Peter has been an amazing co-founder and we’re really happy with the balance we’ve struck these past ten months. Fun fact: we’re referred to as “PBJ internally.

How things are going

Our primary focus has been growing and building features that are useful to the community while thinking of ways to begin creating a sustainable business model. We intend to hit a sweet spot where we have features that both add value and generate revenue.

An example feature is the new #hiring tag. We are building the #hiring page because so many of you have indicated on your profiles that you’re looking for work. We hope this feature is helpful to you, and we also hope that it’ll help us generate revenue. Companies are free to post jobs right now, but we’ll be charging a fee once we’ve made some key enhancements. It's still very early.

How you can help

A few ways:

• Post on #hiring if your company is hiring and give us feedback on the process. Remember, it’s free.

• Let me know if this post was helpful and what you’d like to see from us moving forward. This is v0 of our ‘monthly report’ and we want to make it better with every iteration.

• Find a post you like, leave a nice comment, and make someone’s day.

Happy Coding!

PBJ