The 2023 Year In Review & What’s Coming in 2024

From 2019, everything happened so fast in my business and personal life. So I decided to start publishing yearly reviews and plans for every year. Reading these posts 10 years from now will be fun for me too.

Let’s take a look at everything that happened in 2023.

Personal Highlights & Travel

Since starting WPManageNinja, everything in my life has revolved around it and it’s kind of my personal and business life blends.

I love traveling and I want to visit all the continents and enjoy the beauty of the different geography, culture, and foods.

Started new year eve in Oman. It’s such a beautiful country in the Middle East.

I love traveling and I want to visit all the continents and enjoy the beauty of the different geography, culture, and foods.

After our office’s annual general meeting and retreat, I visited the north side of Vietnam and Cambodia just before WordCamp Asia in Thailand. I loved the mountains, the ocean, the coffee in Vietnam, and the old heritage in Cambodia. I am looking forward to visiting Vietnam again!

From March to May, it was a busy schedule with all the product teams and most importantly with WordCamp Sylhet. The first WordCamp we arranged in our city. More on this later in this article.

In June, attended WordCamp Europe in Athens. I always try to visit other countries while attending big WordCamps. This time, I visited Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Turkey. It was a 3-weeks trip and enjoyed the road trip and Eastern Europe’s food, culture, and road trips.

In September, attended the very first WordCamp Malaysia and I was one of the speakers. The Malaysian community is always super active and vibrant. Loved every bit of it. In transit, I did not miss traveling again to Vietnam to get a few cups of coffee there and spent 2 days in Phuket, Thailand.

The last 4 months of 2023 were always super busy with the sales season, and the new product release. Had to work day and night with the team to ship features, launch the FluentBooking Plugin, plan for 2024, build teams, etc. I was a bit exhausted at the end of November. So had a great ~1 week vacation in Uzbekistan & UAE. Uzbekistan was a new country for me and I loved its vibrant geography, people, and food.

I feel blessed that I could do all these travel (that I love most) in a single year while growing the business at a fast pace.

Business & Team Growth

For the last 3 years, WPManageNinja has been growing super fast. Almost all the products saw 2x growth along with the team.

Our most popular flagship product FluentForms is now powering 400K+ businesses. Beginning of 2023 it was 300K.

FluentCRM which is a Self Hosted Email Marketing Automation Plugin for WordPress saw a 2x growth as well. It’s now powering 40,000+ businesses worldwide and the team did a fantastic job by adding new features and improvements.

We celebrated the Second Anniversary of FluentSupport, the most feature-rich Custom Support Plugin for WordPress. We built FluentSupport to handle 100s of tickets every day in our business and later we released it for everyone. It’s now powering 7,000+ businesses worldwide and personally, I think it’s a really big number in this product category.

WPSocialNinja also saw significant growth. The team also shipped some fantastic features and improvements over the year. A big shoutout to all our beloved users who played a crucial role in this progress.

Our Donation, Payment & Subscription plugin, Paymattic is helping around 3,000+ non-profits and small businesses to accept donations and payments easily. This plugin also got many new features and updates in 2023.

Our very first plugin Ninja Tables also did great in 2023 both in terms of product and team. They grew big in number of team members and users while giving the best service and useful content.

Our fully open-source Plugin, FluentSMTP also now powering 200,000+ websites. If you don’t know, we pledged to keep FluentSMTP free and open. I think FluentSTP is the most featured rich and favorite SMTP plugin in the community.

Team Growth

For the last 3 years, our team has grown super fast. Sometimes, I could not keep up with it 🤣. In early 2021, our total team members were around 30, now it’s 100+

Our whole team is divided by each product like FluentCRM Team, FluentForms Team, etc. Each team runs autonomously from hiring new members, customer support, product planning, product updates/releases, annual tours, etc. Each team consists of cross-functional members which means, It has developers, marketing and support people.

In 2023, we tried to make each team stronger by improving their engineering skills, leadership, and productivity. We emphasized quality rather than quantity.

We had some changes in our team composition, with some members moving on for higher studies (Ph.D. & MS) abroad or other job opportunities, and a few being let go. I’m truly excited about the direction we’re heading. We’ve got a solid group now, more tight-knit than ever. Looking forward to the future with great optimism.

We could hire some super-talented members of the team and almost all of them cope with the existing team from the very first month. Most of the new hires were mid to senior level and I think it helped us a lot.

Expanding the office Space

In 2021-2022, we built our own office space and we thought, for the next 5 years we don’t have to think about it. But in early 2023, our existing three-storied building got small for the fast-growing team. A few months ago, we had to build half of the 3rd floor to accommodate the new members.

New Products

From 2015 to the present day, my goal remains unchanged: we step into the shoes of our users, identify their pain points, work tirelessly to solve them, and help small businesses bridge the gap between where they are and where they want to be.

All of our products are for small businesses that aim to solve specific problems, add value to millions, save countless hours, and most importantly add positive impact in the world.

As part of this bigger goal, we release 2 new products in 2023

FluentBooking

In mid-October, we released the very first plugin in 2023 – FluentBooking.

FluentBooking is a WordPress booking and schedule management plugin. It is specially designed to simplify meeting management for any kind of business.

Whether you’re a service provider, an online course creator, a consultant, or a small business owner, this plugin is tailored to streamline your operations and elevate your customer experience.

We launched an Early-Bird Lifetime Deal (ending this week). And I can say, it was the fastest-selling launch campaign ever in our company. The team is now super-charged, already added lots of features and tons of integration. I am super grateful to all the community who purchased and started using it to solve their appointment booking. 2024 will be very interesting for this product for sure!

FluentSnippets

One of the most powerful features of WordPress is that it can be easily extended with plugins or custom codes. You can add these custom code snippets in two ways: by editing the functions.php file or using a Code Snippets plugin.

All of the code snippets plugins follow similar architecture to store and execute the code snippets from the database and it’s not good and it’s dangerous in terms of performance and security.

FluentSnippets was my weekend project (Yes, I love coding and prefer new things). I wanted to re-invent the wheel and I did. FluentSnippets stores all the custom snippets into flat files and loads just like a regular plugin.

With this native design, FluentSnippets is native, secure by design, and the most performant code snippets in this category.

Within just two weeks of the launch, more than 2,000 sites started using it. Feel free to contribute in Github.

WordCamps

WordCamp Asia – Bangkok

I’m a huge fan of WordCamps and the WordPress community as a whole. My year kicked off with an exciting start at WordCamp Asia in Thailand. This event was special for me and my team because it marked the first major WordCamp in Asia. We were proud to be sponsors, and the turnout was fantastic, with over 25 team members attending.

Fun Fact: We brought more swag packs than the total number of attendees!

WordCamp Sylhet

WordCamp Sylhet 2023 was extremely important to me. It was the very first WordCamp in my city, and I had the honor of being the Lead Organizer for the organizing team. The entire WordPress community in my city worked tirelessly day and night for months to make it the biggest WordCamp in our country.

Fun Facts of WordCamp Sylhet 2023

• All the tickets got sold out in under 5 minutes
• 901 Registrations 
• 882 Attendees 
• 62 Volunteers
• 15 sessions 
• 37 sponsors 
• 25 speakers 
• 32 organizers
• thousands of happy souls 😍

WordCamp Europe – Athens

WordCamp Europe is the biggest and greatest show in the WordPress world! People from all over the world gather and make it incredibly amazing. I fell in love with this event in Porto, Portugal, so it was an early planned event for me. Five of our team members also attended the event.

The best part of WordCamp Europe is the opportunity to meet with many community members and our customers. I’ve had the chance to meet tons of customers and discuss our products and strategies with them, gaining first-hand insights into how our products are benefiting their businesses. I also volunteered at the event, which was a fun and rewarding experience!

I am looking forward to joining WC EU – 2024 in Italy in 2024! See you there!!

WordCamp Malaysia – Kulalampur

I believe the Malaysian WordPress Community is one of the most active and vibrant communities out there. I know many people from the organizing team, and it’s always a pleasure to meet these awesome individuals in person.

I was one of the speakers at the event, I shared my journey in the WordPress business and discussed how to build products in a socially conscious way.

It was one of my best experiences and I will not miss their next WordCamps.

2024 & Beyond Plans

My goal for the business remains the same as always: to empower small businesses. We will continue to evolve and innovate with our products and solutions. Here are a few hints for what’s coming in 2024:

• We will launch several new products designed to further aid small businesses.
• We plan to enhance the capabilities of our existing products.
• We aim to increase the skills and productivity of our product teams.
• Our focus will be on growing our teams more sustainably, empowering them, and adding more value to their lives and careers.

New Partnerships & Investment

I’ve always been passionate about new ideas, research, and development. Most of my investment has been in internal products. In the two years, I’ve made some seed-round investments in a few early-stage startups but nothing big.

In 2024, I plan to invest in several exciting startups. I’ve already finalized a partnership with a team that has a strong engineering background. I’ll share more details about this in the next 1-2 weeks.

I’m looking forward to partnering with a few companies to jointly grow in the WordPress space. I am super excited about all these opportunities.

One more thing!

Thank you for scrolling this far and reading this very long article!

I have been collaborating with my team for the past two years on a super exciting project. We’ve invested countless resources and hours into developing this product. It’s a WordPress Plugin, and I am excited to release it in the first half of 2024.

This project is a dream come true for me. I planned for it and purchased the domain back in 2018. I was waiting for the right moment when we could build, invest in, and launch the product – and now seems to be the perfect time for our company.

I am deeply grateful for a blessed 2023, which brought personal and business growth.