How Total Strangers Helped Us Reach Our Biggest Milestone Yet

Last week we reached our biggest milestone yet for The Events Calendar, our flagship WordPress plugin – 5 million downloads!

It’s crazy to realize just how far we’ve come. At this very moment, hundreds of thousands of users are running our plugins on their site. Some of those users are people we’ve met, either in-person or online, but most of them are total strangers that put their trust in our code based on the reputation we’ve built for our company over the past decade.

We’re incredibly humbled, to say the least. We realize this kind of growth doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and we’ve got a lot of folks to thank that have helped us reach this milestone.

Our Thanks to You

You (yes you) are the reason we do what we do. Every time you download one of our free plugins or purchase a premium add-on, you support our continued investment in the development and longevity of our products. When you vote on a new feature request or leave us a review, it helps us determine where to put our efforts next.

Our Thanks to Our Team

We couldn’t ask for a better team to support and grow our suite of event management and ticketing plugins.

Our support team includes the front-line folks you see every day in the support forums troubleshooting issues, offering advice, and making sure you get the most out of our plugins and services. They embody our values of being happy, helpful, curious, and accountable, and we very much appreciate how well they support our users.

We also want to thank the folks that aren’t in the spotlight, but are still hugely important to The Events Calendar, Event Tickets, and all of our premium add-ons. Our developers, designers, QA analysts, strategists, and project managers run things behind-the-scenes, making sure we maintain our schedule of frequent maintenance releases and build new features that maximize value for our users.

Want to join our merry band of pixel makers and help us reach our next milestone? We’re hiring. 

So What’s Next?

Hitting 5 million downloads is amazing, but we’ve still got plenty of room to innovate, improve, and grow.

Even with such a large user base, we’re still committed to reading and replying to every single review we receive on WordPress.org so we can find opportunities for improvement. In our premium forums, we use an end-of-thread rating system to get feedback on our customer support. We also regularly review User Voice suggestions to see what new features people would like us to add to our existing plugins.

We’ve already got some big things planned for 2017 and beyond, as well as several ideas that are still being fleshed out. That’s where you come in – we want to get to know you better so we can develop plugins and services that make your WordPress site even better.

2016 User Survey + iPad Air Giveaway

While we’d love to take you out to coffee and hear your comments first-hand, with as many users as we have, that just isn’t practical.

Instead, we’re asking you to share your feedback via our 2016 User Survey. As our thanks for your time, everyone that completes the survey will be entered into our iPad Air 2 giveaway.

The survey takes about 10-15 minutes and can be completed anonymously if you prefer.