Beaver Builder, the drag-and-drop page builder plugin, celebrated two years in business this week. Fastline Media, the parent company, started as a web design agency, but due to the success of their product the team closed down its client services department at the beginning of 2016 to focus 100% on Beaver Builder. After just two years in business, the plugin has passed $1 million in revenue.
Beaver Builder hired its first employee in April, 2015, a year after launching. It now employees four people full-time and a few part-time contractors in addition to its three founders. The plugin recently passed 100,000 active installations between the WordPress.org and commercial versions.
As part of their two year milestone post, the team also announced that it acquired the beaverbuilder.com domain name, which set them back $2,300, according to co-founder Robby McCullough.
“There was a really good salesman for the holding company that we bought it through,” McCullough said. “He convinced me it was a steal. Considering it probably cost ~$10 originally, though, it was a bit of a sting.”
McCullough said that he and his co-founders see Beaver Builder, and other WordPress website builders, as being a bridge between WordPress and its mainstream market competitors like Wix and Weebly.
“This idea came up during Jeff King’s presentation at Pressnomics, as more and more traditional ‘jobs’ become automated and obsolete (think driverless cars/trucks on the horizon),” McCullough said. “More and more people will be forced to start small businesses and create their own opportunities. Along with democratizing publishing, we think WordPress (and the web in general) — hopefully with the help of Beaver Builder — has the opportunity to ‘democratize the workforce.’”
With the $1 million milestone under their belts, McCullough said the Beaver Builder co-founders plan to keep putting food on the table and taking care of customers.
“We’ve made it this far by providing great support and embracing customer feedback,” McCullough said. “We might be in the driver seat, but our customers are the ones laying the track.”
Congratulations, that’s huge!