rtCamp Turns 14

Yesterday, we completed another year of Good Work. 14 so far.

Coming out of the pandemic, and heading into the current recession, the last year acted as a pit stop for refueling. We did refuel very well, resuming international travel to attend three flagship WordCamp events across Europe, US, and Asia, along with our first Dreamforce and our all-time favorite Splice Beta 2022. We also traveled a lot within India to ramp up our campus hiring efforts to make sure we continue contributing to human capital development for the rapidly growing WordPress ecosystem.

As always, we celebrated our anniversary through an rtParty (our annual company retreat) which happened in person after a gap of three years. We also reopened our physical office in Pune, but only as a training center for our new campus recruits. Though, since the space is big enough, rtCampers who live nearby have also been using it as a coworking space.

A Short Retrospective

We approach company development like any other project, only with longer sprint durations of 2–3 years. This year wraps our current sprint, called “Vision 2x”. 

We started Vision 2x during the pandemic, with the goal to grow by 2x our headcount and profit over 2 years. With our KPIs centered on profitability, we managed to hit our 2x profit goal but fell short of the projected headcount growth. A good kind of “failure” to have nonetheless.

Significant time was spent in the last few months on the next “sprint” planning, dubbed “Vision 500”. Over the next 3 years, we intended to hit a headcount of 500. Considering we are in the middle of a recession, this will probably end up being a stretch goal, with a more realistic target the focus of currently ongoing evaluations.

Looking Forward To 15…

While the recession does not restrict travel like COVID did, we decided to cut down our travel budget and other discretionary spending significantly as precautionary measures. Practically, this might play out as a smaller rtCamp presence at the next few conferences & events.

Through the recession, one of our biggest priorities is to avoid layoffs in response to lower billable hours across our client-servicing teams. With potentially reduced cash flow, we run a lean enough organization to have good cash reserves that can power us through. 

Our plan instead is to reroute the thousands of hours that are freed up into building cool stuff (more on that later), testing ideas that we couldn’t try in the last few years, and laying the groundwork to widen our service portfolio.

We have already started inviting proposals internally. So far, exploration has started on a few hot topics such as CDP, DXP, machine learning, DevOps, and improving our SaaS capabilities. 

Within DevOps, we are currently experimenting with tooling that reduces developer onboarding time on a new project, automated deployment, and rollback coupled with automated functional and visual testing.

Within machine learning, our focus is to reduce friction to creating content on the open web. We caught up on a few ideas from Matt Mullenweg’s Keynote at WordCamp Asia. See if you can hunt the treasure we found! 🤠

Talking about specific technlogies, outside WordPress, we are exploring the usual PHP (Laravel) and JavaScript (React, Next & Nest). But we also testing the waters by diving into Python, mainly for machine learning projects and Frappe/ERPNext stack. Frappe is mainly for internal tooling. There are even a few native app experiments happening using Tauri (Rust) for cross-platform desktop apps and Flutter (Dart) for mobile apps.

Of course, everything we do is connected to the WordPress ecosystem in some way 🪐

Partnerships

As we interact with our clients, the open-source & tech communities at large, we encounter several, super-specific challenges that we find we can build solutions for. WordPress Plugin Compare & the Salesforce integration for WordPress VIP came about as direct responses to such observations.

However, we are also keen to join forces with individuals & agencies who have innovative ideas but lack the resources to bring them to life. We want to fuel their journey to solve some real-world problems – be it for their end users or for enterprises at scale.  

Despite our desire to explore this avenue, we were never able to due to the short availability of quality engineering talent and leadership. The reduced demand prompted by recession cuts creates an opportunity for us to partner with folks to build incredible things.

If you are a business owner who could capitalize on rtCamp’s outstanding engineering talent, we are open to working at discounted rates for partnerships. Your idea just needs to touch two elements — WordPress and SaaS. If so, please get in touch with us!

What else?

This year, we want to consciously invest efforts to publish all that we learn from our research around evolving enterprise requirements. We hope this can help businesses or agencies seeking similar answers. 

One of our recent publications, Personalization on the Web series, came from our larger research efforts to bring personalization of WordPress content powered by Salesforce data as a decision engine.

Overall, we’re thrilled that in our first year as a teen we welcomed new rtCampers, worked with some fantastic clients, continued our profit streak, and made a further push to our open-source learning and training program. Excited about the next one. 🚀

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