Hello friends!
As 2022 comes to an end, it's time to continue our tradition (2020, 2021) and look back at all that we have achieved this year.
TL;DR
We continue to carry on nicely, growing organically and executing our vision, one step at a time.
We've released at least 7 new big features that we've been dreaming of for a long time, +50 smaller improvements and fixed an uncountable number bugs.
Revenue has linearly grown by ~70% (we're now at 3.3M of ARR) and profit margins are still extremely healthy (~70%).
We added two people to our team (Silvano and Matteo) in the areas where we felt the most pressure (development and sales)! Now we're eight.
Effort on support and maintenance is still relatively easy to handle, so we can afford to stay focused and continue to improve the product and the ecosystem around it.
Revenue numbers
Let’s start off with what everyone is most curious about. Our ARR at end of year will be approximately €3.3M — a growth of ~71% over 2021:
We are still keeping it at about €400k in revenue per employee, like last year.
Overall, 460 new users became paying customers in 2022, about the same number we onboarded last year. 25 of these were at enterprise level, with some amazing global brands joining Dato. We really like these numbers, as they're showing a nice linear growth over time, and a focus on self-service purchasing, which is what we're aiming at as a company.
For the curious ones, here's a chart showing where our customers are located:
Product updates
There are at least 5 huge new features that we are extremely proud to have rolled out this year:
Overall, we shipped +50 new features and improvements. Here's just a small selection from our internal changelog:
Better developer experience: Strict-Mode for Content Delivery API
Integrations: brand new Vue/Nuxt SDK, improved performance on Gatsby
Clarity for editors: new built-in presentation modes, explicit presentation settings, and a revised revision history UI
Improved management of date/time: better timezones, and date picker
New filtering options on records: per locale, invalid records, and better saved filters
Plugin SDK improvements: event hooks, form outlets, and block usage infos
Multi-locale management: batch insertion of locales and copy of content from current locale
We also dramatically improved the overall performance of the interface and the API when editing records with hundreads of blocks and dozens of locales.
DevOps
The big challenge in 2022 was without a doubt moving to a multi-tenant sharded infrastructure. Our users are currently adding ~20GB of new content every month, so at the end of last year we knew we had to redesign our codebase to split our data into multiple databases.
It was a huge undertaking, but in March we shipped the upgrade, without any interruption of service for our customers. Kudos to Fabrizio, who did an outstanding work. Now the number of projects/clients can scale up to a greater order of magnitude, everyone can enjoy better response times as the load is distributed, and we can also offer isolated databases with ultra-reliable performances to enterprise customers.
On the API side, that's the current load we're handling:
Content Management + Delivery API: ~1.2B requests/month (+170% over last year)
Assets transformation API: ~2.5B requests/month (roughly 1TB of traffic/day, +60%)
Video streaming: ~17k hours/month (roughly 134k views/month)
Development
We like to keep our codebase in good shape.
During the year we worked on many different refactorings and internal chores that were holding us back — some of which were also visible from the outside (one, two, three, four, five, six... well many others).
Our test coverage is stronger than ever, and we even managed to reduce the time to run the suite from 25 to just 3 minutes!
We're still super-committed to bring all of our Javascript code to TypeScript. All the new private/open-source projects are of course 100% TypeScript from the beginning, and in 2022 we reduced our Javascript code from 40% to 20%.
Partner Program
January 2022 was the month where we finally launched our long-awaited Agency Partner Program! The no-size-fits-all philosophy of the program really reasonated to you agency-people.
In less than a year, 65 agencies from all over the word joined the program, and this perhaps is our biggest achievement of 2022. The fact that international, award-winning agencies like AKQA, DEPT, Wunderman Thompson, LG2 and Studio Rotate are enthusiastically adding our CMS to their technology stack is a sign that the product is there.
Here's some of the projects built with DatoCMS in 2022 that we love to showcase:
Plugins
In 2022 our awesome community publicly released 40 new plugins, and built +250 private ones, a clear signal that the new SDK is appreciated.
The most loved plugins released in 2022?
Table Editor (220 installs)
Web Previews (185 installs)
Visual Select (79 installs)
Word Counter (76 installs)
Translate (58 installs)
Our Marcelo recently took some time to release a couple of highly requested plugins as well: Automatic Environment Backups, Record Bin, DALL•E Asset Source, and Record Auto-Save!
Content & community
This year we produced more content than ever before, and our community has grown even more:
We posted 50 product updates, 28 articles on our blog, and 7 newsletters (we like this low number!)
More than 1.6k posts have been submitted to our forum, and 211 new people wrote their first post this year (welcome to the family!);
Support
Overall, we responded to over 12,000 support and sales email requests. Here's a chart showing the number of conversations we've had via email with our customers each month (December is still ongoing of course):
For each conversation there was obviously more than one response sent, so you can do the math.
Compared to last year, we've only grown by +20% which is a lot less compared to the +70% in revenue for the same period. We're very happy with that, as this seems like a sign that our Documentation, combined with Starter projects and the various tutorials we produce, collectively give a clear and thorough view of the product.
A peek at 2023
In product development, the "big thing" that we know we're going to tackle in the first quarter is the release of Organizations, as a way to improve the management of multiple projects owned by different accounts, which is a very sensitive topic especially for web agencies.
In January, we're also going to finally release Inverse Relationships for our Content Delivery API. Right now it's currently in public beta waiting for community feedback.
For marketing, we plan to do a lot more than what we did so far (which is basically nothing). Our approach will probably be a mix of traditional marketing, and special initiatives 😉. We'd really like to hire a senior product marketer in the second half of the year, but first we need to get our own hands dirty, and start experimenting new things. Which we will do immediately starting in January.
On the company front, we definitely plan on hiring a couple more people in 2023 on support and development.
We will continue with our profit sharing program for our employees — we're following the same formula shared by Balsamiq which we publicly thank — and we also hope to put up some structured charitable initiatives to maintain over time.
Regarding security, our extensive third-party security audits showed only a couple of minor gitches during the year, that we promptly fixed. Our big commitment for 2023 is to become certified as ISO/IEC 27001: there will be a lot of paperwork for sure, but we want to give 100% peace of mind to our clients with regards to our security and internal processes.
Thanks for reading this super-long post... if anything surprised you or sparked your interest, don't be shy and reach us in the Community Forum! I'd love to answer any questions you might have.
As always, we hope 2023 brings you and your families health, happiness and success.
Onward! ✊