Six months ago I was writing my last blog article as we were progressively returning back to the office. France was lifting the lockdown and we had hopes that events would start to ease down after the COVID 19 wave. Unfortunately, we are now in the second wave and I’m writing this article again from my home.

Even if Covid-19 has given us a hard time on the way we work (more on that later), Weglot has been particularly lucky and we were able to achieve again the best 6 months, albeit from far. We grew our Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) from 330K to 472K.

Let’s see what happened in the last 6 months!

Developing the product

We have always listened a lot to users’ feedback and every 2 weeks we have a meeting where we read every feedback on the product and we decide the next product evolutions based on this.

It’s not a surprise then that we developed the “Translated URL” feature as it was the most requested feature on https://roadmap.weglot.com/top. With the hard work from our development team, I’m happy to announce that you can now translate URLs directly from your Weglot dashboard! It’s only available for WordPress users now but will be for everyone shortly.

We also spent some time improving the overall Weglot performance. Using tools like Datadog, we were able to dramatically improve Weglot’s API response time this semester! Moreover, we have released our new visual editor that allows you to manually edit your translations while visualizing what is still automatic. In a blink of an eye, you can check the translation progress of your webpage.

Last but not least, we have developed a feature that allows you to ask Weglot to scan the whole of your website to find and load all translations easily. It’s particularly useful at the beginning if you launch a new language and want to quickly have all translations generated and ready to be edited.

Adapting the way we work

When the first wave was slowly fading off, we started coming back to the office but we kept special measures in place. That included no more than 10 people at the office to ensure our office space was not crowded and that we could maintain a distance while working. So basically half the team was remote and the other half was at the office.

At the end of August, when the number of Covid cases started to rise again, we changed that rule. We decided to let everyone choose if they prefer to go to the office or work remotely. We didn’t want to impose any day at the office as some people live far away and need to take public transportation.

From August to October we were usually around 5 people at the office. Finally, since the end of October, we are again in full lockdown which means 100% remote work.

Our company is well adapted to remote working as we are building online software. Most of our work was already online anyway. As we can’t communicate orally with remote working, we are trying to write more internally to make sure nothing gets lost. So the way we work was not very impacted. It’s more the social part that is difficult.

Being able to see each other and play table soccer or have a beer together is something we’re really missing a lot 😔. However, thanks to our online internal activities like the cooking session or sports training we can maintain social activities!

Evolving our marketing strategies

We have also learned a lot about online marketing this semester. For example, in the beginning, we were very excited about online events replacing physical ones. It turns out it was not really working. In the past, we participated in many physical events like WordCamp every year. It was always nice to be able to talk to users at our booth but it was also a team experience where we would travel together to a new city and have fun all together. With online events, the travel part was of course not there but even the way we can talk to clients with an online booth is not as spontaneous as the physical events.

What worked better however is the webinars we organized. We pick a topic, for instance, multilingual SEO, and we invite people to join and talk about the topic. Everyone can participate and we have had really great feedback so far!

This semester is also for us the beginning of our Enterprise offer. We had more big enterprises this semester with tailored needs and we were able to create a specific offer for them. We will keep developing this Enterprise offer in the future months along with our current “self-service” plans.

Finally, as Black Friday is approaching, we decided for the first time this year to change the way we approach it. We decided to donate 50% of all sales from Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Augustin wrote a blog post about it here: https://weglot.com/blog/doing-things-differently-this-black-friday/

Conclusion

This article is the 9th and the last of my series “From X to Y”. These articles were written as we were growing and I always tried to relate events as they happened and the actions we took along the way.

As I feel most questions I get nowadays are about our early days, I will be returning in 2021 with a more in-depth series of articles about Weglot’s beginning, covering topics like finding the idea, partnering with Augustin as a cofounder, and raising money.

So stay tuned and as usual, I will close this article with our growth curve updated with the last 6 months