The community that just keeps getting bigger and better

Roughly one and a half years have passed since v1.0 of Mautic’s open source marketing automation was released to the public. Back then, the same old and expensive names dominated the market; and with multiple new marketing automation tools being launched every month, the Mautic dream appeared to be no more than a pebble on the road for the multimillion dollar steamrolling goliaths.

Skip to November 2016. Mautic founder, open source breather, and all-around nice guy David Hurley is beginning a tour of European community meetups. Far from his American base and fresh off the back of an Asian meetup tour, something is apparent now more than ever; the Mautic open source community has no borders and shows no signs of slowing down. For David, this was always the idea.

A solution that competes

With several hundred employees each, the big four shouldn’t have had an issue dispatching Mautic from the market – right? Wrong.

Let us perform a little perceptions test. If, by their own counts, Hubspot have around 18,000 customers and Marketo around 5000; how many Mautic accounts are in existence? At the time of writing: 100,000.

How about the 45 active, and more than 20 completed, translations of the software? Or the fact that the code is open to scrutiny and by nature, more secure? With a community that keeps getting bigger by the day, one can only anticipate more features, functionalities, and usability.

We’re not at the finish line yet

All of the above should ring alarm bells at offices of the big players. You could say this meetup was at ‘Mautic’s London HQ’, but everyone travelled from around (by my count) 40 U.K. offices; not to name the multiples of different cities toured by David thereafter. On ‘employee size’ Mautic can compete easily; and despite not even reaching its final form, for the moment there are some clear barriers to mass appeal and adoption.

Community wise, joining and being active is something that appeals initially to those with a technical background and naïve marketing managers; attracted by the ‘free’ and ignorant of the ‘coding knowledge’, ‘community support’ (shout out to Mautic Slack support legends ninjoan, arjon, john, rcheesly, autoize, and imrodmartin) , ‘hosting’, ‘bug fixes’, and ‘strategy needed’.  The former group tend to be the more active so it’s no surprise that the pace and depth of new feature developments are increasing. Also no surprise is the fiddliness and intimidation of setting self-hosted instances up and any new integrations with them. 

With support documentation and videos this is becoming increasingly understandable but still ignores the end user – marketing employees wanting to drag and drop some decisions, and haven’t the time nor will to bother about API keys, cron jobs, and pull requests. This is what the marketing automation market leaders offer, and is one of the needs companies such as Webmecanik and various freelancers fill.

For agencies who offer marketing automation to their customers, dealing with Mautic’s deployment, maintenance, stability, hosting, and integrations needs employees dedicated to the task. When their client calls them at 2pm saying a web form doesn’t work the answer cannot be “we’ve asked the community and are waiting for a response”.

There’s sun on the horizon

To most Mautic users the above is not new information. Attending the London meetup, I witnessed an air of newfound self-belief in the community which was as welcoming to new as it was old, with every person wanting to make their own mark. Bit by bit the project collectively grasps the metaphorical sword tighter and laughs in the face of well-established industry goliaths. 

For Webmecanik’s part, we welcome the growth of a community of which we feel very much a part of. We will continue to work in harmony to deliver customers real value, with access to a technical team, a dedicated account manager, European hosting, unlimited emailing, and all of that set up and working within a matter of a few clicks through our myWebmecanik portal. Mautic as A Service, professional as ever.

If you want to take a look at David Hurley’s slides from the night you can view them here.

Also in attendance was Ruth Cheesley (Slack: rcheesly), CEO of Virya Group, who presented her working experience with Mautic and provided some great examples of its implementation. You can find a copy of her presentation, "Integrated Marketing Strategies with Mautic" here.

A massive thanks goes out to Laurence and Marianela (Slack: mqueme) for organising this iteration of the London meetup; and of course, to everyone attending who helped create a wonderful atmosphere.  

You'd be a fool not to get to your next Mautic meetup, even if you've never used the software before. Find when something is happening in your area on the Meetup.com page; and if there's nothing nearby, why not host your own?