How We Doubled Our User Base And Grew Revenue By 173% In Just 1 Year

Matt Studdert

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Published: October 22nd, 2022

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Matt Studdert

Founder, Frontend Mentor

$30K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Frontend Mentor

frontendmentor.io

from London, UK

started May 2018

$30,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

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Want more updates on Frontend Mentor? Check out these stories:

1. We Built A $180K/Year Learn-To-Code Community (2021) ➜

This is a follow up story for Frontend Mentor. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 3 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

Hey! My name is Matt Studdert, and I’m the founder of Frontend Mentor, an online learning platform for front-end development. We help people improve their coding skills by gaining hands-on experience building projects and giving feedback to others. In our original Starter Story article, you can read about the early days of growing Frontend Mentor.

Frontend Mentor has a freemium offering where developers can choose to take free challenges or upgrade to a subscription to take premium challenges and get access to the project design (Figma/Sketch) files. We’ve also recently soft-launched a Hiring Platform to help companies discover developers from within the Frontend Mentor community. It’s still very early days for it, though, so we’re not publicizing it too much at the moment.

We’re generating over $26K in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) at the moment and looking to grow that significantly with the introduction of the Hiring Platform.

Here’s an example of some of our latest coding challenges:

Talk to customers. If you’re not talking to customers, you don’t know their pain points and how you can help alleviate them. Without a way of getting reliable feedback, you’re essentially just guessing what to do next.

Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?

We have done a lot since our last article! Firstly, we’ve continued to grow the community. This time last year, we were just over 200,000 registered members on the site. As I write this, we’re now over 450,000. This growth has predominantly been word-of-mouth from people sharing their progress in completing our challenges. We make it as easy as possible for people to share their solutions on platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn, which leads to new people discovering our site through their network. We’re yet to implement a thorough content strategy, although this isn’t far off.

The biggest change has been the launch of our new Hiring Platform. We’ve only just launched and are getting feedback on the first version. So it’s not contributing to MRR yet, but it’s got a lot of potential going forward. The idea is that developers on the Learning Platform can set themselves as available for work. Doing so means they’re eligible to be discovered by recruiters on the Hiring Platform who are looking for developers to interview and hire.

We’re focusing on companies looking to hire junior developers to start. Approximately 80% of our developer community have 0-2 years of professional experience, and our platform gives them hands-on coding experience to prove they can build projects.

Our mission is to become a major on-ramp to the tech industry for developers worldwide. We want to give people the opportunity to showcase their skills and get hired by incredible companies.

The first offering on our Hiring Platform is Talent Search, which allows companies to search for developers who are available to hire using specific criteria. Here’s how it looks:

What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?

The biggest challenge has been a lack of time and resources for myself and my co-founder, Mike. As the community has continued to grow at a rapid pace, we’ve found ourselves stretched with our workload. Only two of us are working on Frontend Mentor full-time, with two more working part-time. Our goal is to start growing the team to help spread the workload and help us stay focused on the areas we can add the most value.

Hiring new full-time team members is quite daunting but also exciting. I’ve not managed a team before, so I’ve been reading up on management and leadership quite a bit just to give myself a solid foundation before we hire. There’s only so much you can do to prepare yourself, though. We’ll just have to dive in, give the new team members as much support as we can, and adjust as needed.

The high level of subscription churn we see is also something we’re keen to improve. We’re currently seeing around 13% churn each month, which is very high. Luckily, we have a high number of new subscriptions, but reducing churn would massively improve our MRR going forward. The tricky thing is that most people’s feedback for canceling is because they got hired or took the premium challenges they wanted and have no further need to continue the subscription. So they’re positive reasons, which is great but also shows we need to add more recurring value to the platform beyond just the premium challenges. We’ve got a couple of ideas, which we’re excited to experiment with.

I do not doubt that learning to sell B2B will also be a big change for us with the Hiring Platform. The way we bring new people to the site will be very different from how we currently do with the Learning Platform. But it will be a fun challenge to take on!

This growth (225%) has predominantly been word-of-mouth. We make it as easy as possible for people to share their solutions on platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn, which leads to new people discovering our site through their network.

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

Your company is never too young to implement proper security protection and testing. We had the unfortunate experience of falling victim to a DDoS attack. Luckily, we use Cloudflare, so it wasn’t as dramatic as it might have been without it. But it made us think more about how people could potentially target Frontend Mentor as we continue to grow.

We also ensure our code is well-tested. I know a lot of people who forgo testing to focus on speed. But not having well-tested code can slow you down in the future and reduce your confidence in shipping new features when the code base has grown. Since we’re now at a point where we have lots of people on the site at any given moment, we need to focus on not unintentionally breaking things and messing the experience up for our users!

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

The primary focus for the coming year will be to find a product-market fit with our Hiring Platform. If we can get to a point where we have a steady stream of community members getting hired by companies, we’ll be very happy. We want Frontend Mentor to be the go-to place to discover incredible junior front-end talent. Once we’ve achieved that, we can expand our focus to all experience levels and then more roles than just front-end development.

We’re especially excited to help increase the confidence of companies when hiring junior developers. The market for juniors is notoriously tough, so by providing a platform for people to improve and showcase their skills, we’re hoping to help more juniors get hired.

As a company, I’m excited to start growing the Frontend Mentor team and provide an exceptional work environment for everyone in the business. We want to create a company that is a joy to work within.

What’s the best thing you read in the last year?

The best book I’ve read this year is The Great CEO Within by Matt Mochary. Matt is a well-known Silicon Valley CEO coach who gives great advice on running a company. It’s helped me get in the right mindset to plan for future hires and how we might run the company as we grow our team.

Matt is also featured on an excellent podcast series I recently found out about called The Unicorn Launcher. It’s a well-produced podcast providing an unfiltered look at how two founders grow their company with the help of Matt’s coaching expertise.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?

My main piece of advice is to talk to customers. It’s something a lot of people say, but it’s crucial. If you’re not talking to customers, you don’t know their pain points and how you can help alleviate them. Without a way of getting reliable feedback, you’re essentially just guessing what to do next.

Also, as soon as you’ve gained initial traction, start finding ways to get your product in front of new people. Test different strategies and find what works for you. For the Learning Platform, we’ve had great success making it easy for people to share their progress by doing collaborations with other platforms, like this collab we did with Scrimba. I do not doubt that we’ll need to adapt to add new channels to bring recruiters to our Hiring Platform!

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

We’re not looking to hire for full-time positions just yet, but as I’ve mentioned above, we’re not too far off. Keep an eye on our Twitter account for updates on when we do start looking to hire new team members!