The business of open source - Caleb Porzio (Livewire) and Taylor Otwell (Laravel)
The business of open source - Caleb Porzio (Livewire) and Taylor Otwell (Laravel)The business of open source - Caleb Porzio (Livewire) and Taylor Otwell (Laravel)
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The PanelTrailerBonusEpisode 2Season 1
The business of open source - Caleb Porzio (Livewire) and Taylor Otwell (Laravel)
Is web development still a good career choice in 2025? What's the future of open source? Justin and Brian dive deep with Taylor Otwell (Laravel) and Caleb Porzio (Livewire, Alpine.js, Flux) about the state of web dev, building a business on open source, and the anxiety of managing competition.
Should people still pursue web development as a career?
Are we still excited about the web? Why is Laravel growing?
How big are your customers?
How interested are developers on the business side of Saas?
How did you think about open source when you were getting started?
How do you think about being a creator when you have a large business?
The next generation pipeline
Rethinking open source
What's your anxiety level towards competition?
Is web development still a good career choice in 2025? What's the future of open source? Justin and Brian dive deep with Taylor Otwell (Laravel) and Caleb Porzio (Livewire, Alpine.js, Flux) about the state of web dev, building a business on open source, and the anxiety of managing competition.
Chapters:
(03:31) - Should people still pursue web development as a career?
(11:04) - Are we still excited about the web? Why is Laravel growing?
This episode definitely leaves me wondering what the Visual Basics of 2025 are. I know that “low code” exists, but I don’t hear about kids using those solutions like we did with VB and Delphi back in the day.
I'm talking about kids. When I was a kid I tried to make a PC video game which led me to Visual Basic and then C#. I would be surprised if kids are trying to program web apps
My kids sometimes ask about learning to code, but they don’t actually have much of an interest when I sit them down in front of either an IDE or something like Swift Playground.
Sometimes it feels like my generation is the only one that really “got into” computers.
But honestly, the fact that I’m here in my 40’s thinking about how to get my kids into programming is probably illustrative of the problem. When I was a kid, my parents knew nothing about computers. I was forging my own path… and now that path is well-tread.
What is The Panel?
When it comes to bootstrapping and building software, there's rarely one right answer. We want to dive into the nuance. In every episode, veteran founders Justin Jackson and Brian Casel bring together a panel of sharp minds from the indie tech world to tackle thorny topics – from pricing and product strategy to work-life balance. No gurus, no easy answers – just real conversations we'd normally have behind closed doors.
Justin Jackson:
Welcome to The Panel: where smart founders discuss the realities of building better products and a better life. I'm one of your cohosts, Justin Jackson, the cofounder of Transistor.fm
Brian Casel:
And I'm Brian Casel. I'm working on Instrumental Products. And, here we go. This is episode two.
Justin Jackson:
Episode two. You are about to hear the voices of
Caleb Porzio:
I'm Caleb Porzio. I've been a Laravel dev for a long time, and I build LiveWire and Alpine JS and Flux, like JavaScripty dev products.
Taylor Otwell:
Yeah. I'm Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel. I wrote Laravel back in 2011 and still am head of the company now.
Justin Jackson:
This was awesome. I feel like we really opened up a lot of interesting stuff that maybe hasn't gotten talked about that much on other podcasts.
Brian Casel:
For sure. I I what I love about what we're doing at at with the panel podcast is we're we're bringing on some friends who happen to be pretty well known, but we're hearing conversations, things talked about that you maybe haven't heard these these guys talk about or or gals talk about. You know?
Justin Jackson:
Yeah. For me, I really wanted to get into what's happened in web development. Like, what's the state of it? Are kids learning it? Should a kid graduating today try to get a career in web development?
Justin Jackson:
Do kids even want to build SaaS apps? Like, do they know what that is?
Taylor Otwell:
Mhmm. Yeah.
Justin Jackson:
It's just really interesting hearing all of us talk through that and kind of what inspired us to get into it.
Brian Casel:
And especially the career trajectory of people like Caleb and Taylor, where they started and how they started and where they are today. I mean, it's it's kind of a crazy path. I mean, the thing that that I found so interesting and inspiring in this episode, but also just following the work of of Caleb and Taylor is that tension that I know I feel it all the time. That tension between just being a creator, a builder in in our blood, and building a business. And that tension that happens between the two.
Brian Casel:
And what and what happens when they start to overlap, I I think is we we had a really good conversation about that.
Justin Jackson:
That topic, I think, is so important. I think so many people feel it, and I feel like we articulated it. Like, we really kind of brought that out and explored it. Like, what is what's going on there? How do people deal with that?
Justin Jackson:
How do they deal with that?
Brian Casel:
I was real psyched to hear Caleb and Taylor come on today's show. I mean, Caleb is one of those guys. He's just he's like a powerhouse of a creative force in the in the Laravel ecosystem with with Livewire and Flux. And, I, you know, I highly recommend his personal solo podcast is is a really great listen. So it was really great to hear, his perspective.
Brian Casel:
And and, of course, Taylor, everything he's built and the crazy evolution of of Laravel from just like a personal productivity tool to, VC backed, like like, an incredible ecosystem today. You know?
Justin Jackson:
Yeah. I was introduced to Taylor through Adam Wavin, and then he introduced me to this whole Laravel world. I I think I met Caleb at the first Lara con I went to. You folks are really gonna enjoy this chat we had. Caleb just texted me.
Justin Jackson:
He's like, woo, like, that was great. Some real spicy topics. And yeah, that's what we got here for you today.
Brian Casel:
Yep.
Caleb Porzio:
Let's do it. This is
Justin Jackson:
actually a perfect segue into what I want to talk about. My kids are older than your guys's kids. I've got two in high school, two in college, and they're trying to think about their career, what they should do. My question is, is web development still a good career these days? Should my kids be considering web development as a career?
Justin Jackson:
Do you advise people to pursue it? If so, what path should they take? Caleb, you had a episode of notes on work on this. So what's your what's kinda your thoughts about this right now?
Caleb Porzio:
This is founded in nothing, but I'm like in three years' time, I've totally switched, and I'm like, no. I don't get into web development.
Justin Jackson:
Okay.
Caleb Porzio:
Because I've, like, sold people on it in the past, and it's worked out great. But the recent batch of people that I've sold on web development, like, literally haven't been able to get jobs. And then so my brother, he switched from HVAC, and he got a job, but then he moved, and he lost the job. They wouldn't let him move from Denver and whatever. And he couldn't find another job.
Caleb Porzio:
It's like there nobody's hiring, anybody below, like, mid. And I don't know. It's just different. I'd be like, don't I'd stay away personally. To a newcomer, I love you know?
Justin Jackson:
To a newcomer. So a kid who's 19, you're like, don't, you know, go
Caleb Porzio:
It's too unknown, and there's not like it's not like it was. Like, money's not all over the floor. You're not just gonna easily get a job, and it could all change in a few years. Like, I don't know. I wouldn't recommend it personally.
Taylor Otwell:
Is it are the do you think it's because the the bar is higher now? Like, web development is just harder. Is that part of it? Like, is it people that didn't grow up programming like some of us may have? Like, you know, I I started writing my first websites when I was, like, 10 or 11.
Taylor Otwell:
But now, you know, like, building websites is it's complicated. Is that why? Like, do companies just have a higher bar for who they let in the door, and you'd have to have more advanced skills to even get a job?
Caleb Porzio:
I just feel like remember that the entire, like, ten years of I feel like it was ridiculous that everybody was getting paid, but they're getting paid and people, like, who knew nothing. I I don't know. I feel like it I don't think it's too hard. I think you look at, like, HVAC or something. Look at any other trade, and the people who make $60,000 are, like, excellent, the thing they're doing and did an apprenticeship for four years, where people just go into React Boot Camp for, like, two months were making $80.
Caleb Porzio:
So it was just, like, wrong. You know? Mhmm. I don't know. I I just feel like there was something weird going on.
Taylor Otwell:
A zerp a zerp era.
Brian Casel:
I do think that there's gonna be a a big trend if it's not starting already. Yeah. Like, the coding boot camps with with AI. I know we're gonna get into AI and stuff, but, like, I think more people are going to it it's gonna become more accessible and and and more expected that the workforce has technical skills. And picking up those technical skills is gonna get easier and easier and easier.
Brian Casel:
And and I I guess the question that I have for Justin is, like, what what do we mean by a career in web development? That that's pretty broad. Like, getting getting a job at a at a big tech company or or, you know, employed as a software engineer somewhere or because I I think that more professionals in all parts of the workforce are going to need technical building skills. Like, there's just gonna be more building involved in all parts of the economy. Whereas right now, it's really just, like, either you work in tech or you don't.
Brian Casel:
I think as as my my kids are eight and 10, when they get get into the work into the workforce, I feel like almost every professional industry is gonna be considered like a technical job in some form.
Justin Jackson:
Yeah. I I think I'm trying to square, like, what's happening in the broader economy because I do care about it, and there's all these layoffs. I think Stripe just announced a bunch more layoffs. And kind of the joke that I hear is that Laravel is the only one that's hiring. I don't know if that's Taylor, do you think that's true?
Justin Jackson:
Like, all the companies you know are is is Laravel one of the only ones that's hiring, or is that just a misnomer?
Taylor Otwell:
Well, we are hiring. That part is true. So if you
Caleb Porzio:
kiss these jobs.
Taylor Otwell:
I would say that Laravel, as I ran it, as a bootstrap company, was always very anemic on our staffing. Like, we were understaffed, I think, compared to the amount of customers we had and the amount of revenue we had. It just was kinda silly. And a lot of that was just for selfish reasons. Right?
Taylor Otwell:
Like, the more people I hire, the less I make. You know? So, like, you're not incentivized to hire to a healthy amount and really, like, invest in the business. But, yeah, we are hiring. Although I would say that even in our hiring, which feels like a lot for us, we're still trying to be pretty judicious in how many people we hire.
Taylor Otwell:
We're hiring a lot of people that we sorta know, to be honest, like, out of the full stack Laravel world, because we wanna maintain our culture of, like, moving fast, shipping fast. And that's just hard to do. Like, the more people you bring on, the harder that gets. And so we're still trying to be cautious about it, but, you know, I think probably a lot of companies did over hire a lot and are correcting.
Justin Jackson:
Yeah. And I it's hard to know if this is a short term correction, because we have seen these waves before. Like, there was the big Ruby on Rails wave and there was, like, tons of Rails boot camps. And then, you know, President Obama is telling everybody to learn to code and so everybody goes. And my theory is that there's just not that many good jobs, that many good employers in any economy, and there's actually not that much great talent in any economy.
Justin Jackson:
And so is there always gonna be a place for people who have a lot of passion and a lot of talent? I think yes. And will there always be good companies with solid fundamentals that are hiring? Yes. What's less clear to me is, like, what happens at big companies, but it does seem like they go through waves.
Justin Jackson:
Like and you'd think they'd be smarter. But during COVID, they all hired up like crazy, and then it's like, oh, we don't need all these people. They start firing them.
Brian Casel:
I've always been completely out of touch with what a big company, especially a big tech company, actually looks like. Because my whole my entire career
Caleb Porzio:
Same.
Brian Casel:
Yeah. When I was employed, you know, fifteen, twenty years ago, it it was a team of, like, 20 or less. And, like, to think about, like, Stripe or or one of these places with, like, thousands of engineers, like, literate I know how big of a product Stripe is, but still, like, what are you putting all those people on? What how how do you have that many people enough projects to fill their plates? Like, it just seems insane to have so many people.
Brian Casel:
It it does it does seem like we we went through, a decade or more of a of a pretty big bubble. And in the last couple of years, it's, like, correcting back to some semblance of of, like, a normal company, you know, in terms of size.
Taylor Otwell:
I suspect a lot of what happens at those larger companies, because I've I've seen it a little bit as I've talked to people is, you know, obviously, the founder is not doing the hiring. It's like you bring in some sort of middle management layer, and the middle management sales guy comes in and says, oh, I need a team of 10 more sales guys. And, you know, next thing you know, you do that a few times, and you've got, like, a hundred new people or a thousand new people, and then you're just kinda way out of control.
Justin Jackson:
Are you guys still bullish on the web and web development in general? Like, there's a weird even, Caleb, this is something else you were questioning, which is and I wanna get Taylor's take on this. Why is Laravel growing? And I think what you said was
Caleb Porzio:
It doesn't make sense.
Justin Jackson:
Yeah. Why doesn't it make sense? Why do you think it doesn't make sense?
Caleb Porzio:
Yeah. Because, like, the the pipeline this this pipeline problem of, like, when when I got into web development, it was, like, every PHP. Every it's what React is now. Mhmm. And at the time, it was, like, Code Ignite or whatever.
Caleb Porzio:
But pretty quickly, basically, it's like, what what do you see when you when you Google search or just getting in or you don't even know what you don't know, And you start looking stuff and you go like, what should I use? And what does everybody say on Google and Stack Overflow? And there was a moment in time I totally remember, like, evaluating it. Like, I was buying a camera or something where I just, like, looking at the brands and it was like coding. Oh, Laravel.
Caleb Porzio:
You gotta use Laravel. Like, Laravel's awesome. You should use Laravel. And then the web artisan page, whatever. So use Laravel.
Caleb Porzio:
And and now that's so far from being the way that it works that it's like, where are people coming from? So there must be this, like, massive hopper of WordPress and Symfony or whatever of people or some it it's just, like, mysterious to me in this way that's like, we're not in the pipeline. So how is it that we're still growing? Like, LiveWire is growing. Laravel is growing.
Caleb Porzio:
You know? It's, like, crazy. But, yeah, it's a mystery to me. I don't know. Taylor probably know a lot better than I am.
Caleb Porzio:
What do you think, Taylor?
Taylor Otwell:
Yeah. I think, I've had similar thoughts. So I know when we first started building cloud, and I was thinking about, you know, what we currently have with Forge where we have 20,000 customers or something like that. And I was like, there's no one else left in the market to sell cloud too. They're already using Forge.
Taylor Otwell:
But what I've been surprised by is there's actually a ton of PHP and Laravel out there in the world that is just not on social media. They're not talking about it at all. They weren't even using Forge because they're using some homegrown company Kubernetes setup or something. And I think there's just so much PHP in the world that people are modernizing on to Laravel. We see that quite a bit from, like, legacy PHP projects, and they wanna get up to date.
Taylor Otwell:
And Laravel's kinda the most sensible option for them. But, honestly, I just think that so much of web development is outside of social media. Like, the vast majority, well, over 90% of it, obviously, is, like, outside of anything you could possibly perceive on social media. Even at larger companies, like, some of our larger companies interested in cloud, I've never heard of them using Laravel before they, like, reached out to us about cloud. It was never on Twitter.
Taylor Otwell:
It's never anything like that.
Caleb Porzio:
Yeah. That's a that's a funny thing. I I definitely agree. And, like, the state of of the state of surveys and everything, those are all fed by, like, Twitter and social media. So you'll see, like, technologies like, one of my favorites, HTMX, longtime favorite.
Caleb Porzio:
Shout out to HTMX. Gets all this popularity, but it's not really indicative of, like, who's using what. It's just like Yeah. Influencers were, like, hyping it for a period, and now all the social media circles got it, and then they all answer those surveys. So it's like, what is even this data?
Caleb Porzio:
You know?
Taylor Otwell:
This entire topic is funny because I actually had a call with Microsoft's Azure team. And they asked this exact same question, so it's confusing even to them to some extent. They were like, what do you think about, like, JavaScript and PHP? And, like, their take was, we see JavaScript is super popular with, like, these boot camps in React, but, like, no one seems to be building anything substantial with it on our side, at least.
Caleb Porzio:
No one ever has. Okay. So it's like well, it's crazy.
Taylor Otwell:
But even they found it confusing, you know, so I think it's, you know
Caleb Porzio:
That is so weird. Right. It's like I mean, we still ask the as Laravel lights on, but it's like that question of, like, how wait. So these are the popular technologies, but how do you actually build something with them? Like, what?
Brian Casel:
That's exactly what what I'm thinking about here is, like, I'm I'm always thinking about it from the perspective of a builder and and our little corner of the Internet of, like, bootstrapped entrepreneurs, like like SaaS, like startup folks. Right? Which I know is a tiny drop in the bucket of the worldwide, like, tech scene or or coverage for different technologies. Right? But from that perspective, like, that's what always has that's what what what I've been attracted to in in particular stacks.
Brian Casel:
Like, I've been attracted to Laravel and Ruby on Rails. And these are ecosystems that make it that seem it's it's almost surprising to me that these are not more popular than the than than the React and and the JavaScript based stuff. It's like, everything is here that you need to build a a legit, you know, application or product for the world. The the ecosystems are so well connected here that it's easy and fast to ship and and market products. It's just surprising to me that, like, when I when I look at these cutting edge tools now, especially at, like, I'm looking at, like, tools that people are using to build with AI.
Brian Casel:
I'm trying to understand, like, where are the nontechnical people going to learn how to become a builder. That's something I'm very interested in right now. And I'm looking at all these tools, like, I don't know, like, like like Bolt and and like Lovable, these like AI builder editor tools. None of them support, like, PHP or Laravel or or Ruby on Rails as as their, like, set of options that you can build with in their interface. It's like, how how is that possible, you know?
Justin Jackson:
Yeah. I've I've actually got a quick question that I think applies to all three of you because, Brian, you're building these Rails components. Right?
Brian Casel:
Yep.
Justin Jackson:
And, Caleb, you have, Livewire and Flux and Alpine. And then obviously, Taylor, you've got Laravel and that whole ecosystem. What percentage of your customers are big companies? And what percentage are just individual small companies? Like, is is what's driving those businesses like, I imagine with Tailwind.
Justin Jackson:
Like, Tailwind is used by giant companies. And so I wonder if, like, a lot of that momentum is actually driven by these big companies adopting and using the technology. Or is it is it a mix? Is it just small teams? It's like who's yeah.
Justin Jackson:
Like, Caleb, who's your customer? Who's the who's the ideal customer for Flux?
Caleb Porzio:
So I think it's, two things. I think it's small, medium size, but small businesses for and I think that's at least my experience with Laravel in general, it's like, to me, everybody who uses Laravel and Rails was like a chiropractor, And then they were, like, getting into coding a little bit, and they made their own thing for their own chiropractic thing. And then they sold it to other ones, and now they have a business. That's everyone. Everyone who was a chiropractor.
Justin Jackson:
That's much more true in Laravel than Rails. I but I think it's also true in Rails, but that if you go to Lara Connor, that's
Brian Casel:
insurance agents in rails. Chiropractors.
Caleb Porzio:
Yeah. But I also so I think it's chiropractors that size, but it's also, like, I think individual developers make these decisions.
Justin Jackson:
Right? Mhmm.
Caleb Porzio:
Like, even at even at big companies. I feel like and that's why this social media stuff I feel like it does matter. It matters what shows up when you Google because whatever people think is the thing or the hot thing, you're gonna tell your PM or something, and they're gonna look to you to hear. And you're they're gonna hear everybody starting to murmur and say that, hey. Dotnet is getting crusty or, like, Blazer's getting old and, like, we should be on React.
Caleb Porzio:
Then then it bubbles up and they go, alright. We gotta rewrite this whole segment to React. And, like, I feel like it it comes like it bubbles up. You know?
Brian Casel:
Mhmm. But Yeah. I'm only at the very beginning of of, like, the customer research into the types of customers who are entering the list for for instrumental components for for rails. So, you know, I'm sure, Caleb, you have, like, a lot more, like, of a, like, a dataset to understand who these people are.
Caleb Porzio:
But I don't look at it, though, like, as well as you might think. So, like, you probably don't worry about it.
Brian Casel:
Well, I I guess the split that I'm seeing, it's I don't know. Maybe call it fifty fifty is, like, half of them are just, like, solo builders, entrepreneur. There's probably a lot of side hustles in there. Just like, I wanna I I've got I got my job. I wanna, like, build something on the side.
Brian Casel:
I wanna use a cool new tool that I heard about on on Twitter or something. But I the other half, I think, are employed developers at some small to medium sized business, and nobody else on their team might know or care about what tech stack they are choosing to build stuff in. But
Justin Jackson:
they
Brian Casel:
are they are the the developer who who gets to sort of decide, like, which tooling they they bring into the projects for for some company. And I I think that's and and, you know, a lot of them are, like, in in the components world, I'm sure this is true for for users of Flux. There's a lot of back end developers. And with Tailwind taking over everything, which is amazing. I love it.
Brian Casel:
You know, people without design chops and UI chops and and people who get frustrated on the front end, they are looking for shortcuts to build stuff without, you know, having to wire it up.
Justin Jackson:
Taylor, what about on your side? Are like, do you have a sense of the the types of customers you have for Forge and what you're aiming for with cloud?
Taylor Otwell:
Yeah. Yeah. We've run some stats on that before, and it's definitely a mix. Obviously, there's a big long tail of, like, just kinda hobbyists, solopreneurs, or sort of freelancers. Then you kinda have quite a few agencies, you know, like, Titan or vehicle or two popular agencies in the Laravel world.
Taylor Otwell:
And they're the ones that actually end up sometimes infiltrating Laravel into these larger organizations through their agency work. And then we actually do have, like, mid market or even, like, approaching enterprise type customers. And we've seen this, like, on our early access to Laravel cloud where, we've got, like, a pizza chain on there. Even, like, companies like Elastic or Paddle, we've got a company right now that's working with the NHS building a big system. And so there's that's just a lot of, like, that under the radar stuff that just doesn't pop up really on social media.
Taylor Otwell:
So we know it's out there. Now how much it's out there, I think we don't have a full grasp on until we really get our, like, hosted cloud platform out the door and kinda, you know, just start making calls and people start coming to us, and then we'll have a better idea of it. But it's definitely out there, and I think, you know, again, there's so much legacy PHP out there, that, you know, we'll see how that goes as well. I think that's kind of a pipeline for additional Laravel apps. I do think that, like you know, this circle's way back to your first question about would you get into web development.
Taylor Otwell:
I think that I would probably say no unless you're super into it. And I think that post that rails wave of work, I feel like these days, you just don't see as many, like, bootstrap startups in general as compared to that Rails wave. You know? And I see that in Laravel as well. And I guess part of it is just, like, the consolidation of the Internet to some extent where, like I remember back when I first created Laravel, people were, like, building their own social networks and, like, you know, building forums and stuff like that.
Taylor Otwell:
And it's just, like, a category of sites that people don't build anymore.
Caleb Porzio:
Except Nuno. Nuno's the only one left who's like, I'm just gonna build a social network.
Justin Jackson:
Sorry. Who's that?
Caleb Porzio:
Nuno Maduro. He he works for Laravel, but he just
Justin Jackson:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Caleb Porzio:
Made a social network thing.
Taylor Otwell:
So, anyway, we'll see we'll see, you know, how many of these bigger customers are out there. I would say, historically, our customer base has been, you know, smaller to mid market and less so, like, enterprise.
Justin Jackson:
My perspective is so limited. To me, I still see tons of opportunity for new SaaS companies, new bootstrap SaaS companies. And I understand like, there was a wave where everybody tried to build a Rails based SaaS and realized it was difficult. And a lot of those people maybe were became jaded. And, you know, I'm not saying any of it's easy, but there's still every like, my kids are in college, like I said, they're going to graduate and they're going to get to a job and their boss is going to say, hey, why don't you go find us a calendar booking utility, you know?
Justin Jackson:
And they're gonna be like, okay. They've never heard of any of them. They're just gonna research. And it's very likely they'll find SavvyCal, which is the new one, and they'll use that one. Even some of these old categories that have incumbents, I'm surprised people aren't trying to build competitors in those niches because some of them are old and crusty.
Justin Jackson:
And it's like, man, like, just give us a fresh take on this.
Taylor Otwell:
This is kinda spicy, but I think, like, the Gen z generation of developers actually doesn't typically have the skills to do it. Oh. And it's just because
Caleb Porzio:
of how
Taylor Otwell:
I think it's because of, you know, there's been such a front end focus the last five to ten years in web development where a lot of people are coming in, and they're great on, like, the front end. You know? Like, they're way better than me at that kind of stuff, but they don't understand, like, the databases or the queues or caches or all the stuff on the back end that you would maybe need to piece together to build a SaaS like that. And, you know, I had been having these thoughts for a while, and I went to, Rails World in Toronto, actually. And I met, I met a a guy that has a a really big Rails based startup, actually.
Taylor Otwell:
And he's younger than me. He's, like, in his twenties. And I was like, dude, like, I've this is something I've been thinking about, and I'm just curious, like, if you have any insight here. But do you feel like people your age know, like, how to build complete apps? And he was like, oh, no.
Taylor Otwell:
No. They're totally lost. Like, and they need he was like, they're all stuck in this front end world, and they need something like Rails or Laravel, and they just haven't gotten there. And he he said it's created, like, a gap, you know, and, like, what people can actually ship on their own.
Caleb Porzio:
Mhmm.
Brian Casel:
That and that that really does speak to, like, the the the lack of, as as popular as these as as the reacts are, like like, the lack of an ecosystem like like Laravel and and Rails where where you can put all all the batteries together and all the tools together. What what I'm you know, to pick up on that question, Justin, what I'm really interested in from Caleb and Taylor here is maybe going back to to the beginning of your career and maybe as it relates today, like, you it seems to me that you, like like other folks, like, I would put, like, Adam Wathan in this category, like, people who who really built a a great piece of technology, like, created something new in the open source world. It seems like you you've come out of like this inspiration to build something great, to create something unique and and your vision for for solving a certain problem. And that snowballed into a a fantastic business. And then there's a lot of people in our in our bootstrapped SaaS world or startup world who come who come at it from a business first standpoint.
Brian Casel:
Like like, Justin, you're talking about, like, why don't more people just go out and look for these opportunities to build the next calendar app or or or look for these opportunities? It seems like folks like Caleb, and then please correct me if I'm wrong, but, like, it seems like it was, like, the the creative inspiration first, and then that snowballed into more of a business. I mean, I heard Adam talking about it the other day. It's like like he he's he's like a builder at heart, and the business side is is uninteresting to him, but he has a fantastic business now as a result of it. I'm I'm curious how you guys think about this and maybe, like, where you've landed today from from where you've come from.
Caleb Porzio:
I mean, my Taylor's got the the big story. I got the small one, but it it's, it's that. I mean, I'm not a I am, yeah, builder, so I was just hacking on stuff and reading stuff and publishing stuff. And then my thing got popular, and then another one got popular. But yeah.
Caleb Porzio:
And then the money was always just, like I just got lucky because because Nathan Barry taught Adam how to charge for courses, and Adam taught me how to charge for courses. And so it's like, oh, now I can make money. And then I found Justin Jackson because of Adam and, you know, whatever, and then that whole kind of world and whatever. But Justin, you know, like, Justin's insights, like, you know, something that I sort of carry around with me when I'm talking to other people. Because of you, your influence is, like, just thinking about, an opportunity in terms of, like, the size of the market Mhmm.
Caleb Porzio:
Like, largely determining your your opportunity for success rather than, like, is it a great idea? Or you might think, like, oh, like, nobody's building this. That's actually, like, not a good it's like you the market's gonna determine everything. That was all completely new to me. That's not how I thought, and that's not how people like me, I think, think.
Caleb Porzio:
You're just building stuff, and then the rest kinda comes later.
Brian Casel:
So
Justin Jackson:
Wait a second. So in some ways, Caleb, your experience is similar to Taylor's because you were just a young kid that got excited about something and you started sharing it. And, I mean, there's always a series of lucky breaks that happens there, but I don't see them that dissimilar. Yeah.
Caleb Porzio:
They're probably pretty similar. Just that it's mini baby, but whatever. On. Hit us, Taylor.
Taylor Otwell:
No. I mean, when I was first building Laravel, I had no idea if anyone else would use it at all. And, honestly, that wasn't really, like, the focus. I was just building something for myself to build startup ideas faster. People liked it over time and then, you know, kinda put businesses around it as it made sense.
Taylor Otwell:
But even those businesses were still about kinda like scratching my own itch and just solving problems I had. I didn't know if anyone would really use them or how popular they would be. That being said, I do think, like and I've heard Justin say this quite a bit. Like, just picking, like, a meat and potatoes web app, like, a hiring app or an invoicing app or whatever it may be and just, like, making a sexy version of that that's new is, like, a pretty tried and true way to, like, have a successful business, I would say.
Brian Casel:
I I think it is. But something I'm thinking a lot about this year is I I feel like I'm I've overcorrected in the other way in the last several years of, like, just looking for the opportunities and maybe losing touch of, like, well, what is it that I'm actually fired up about to create? Like, scratching your own itch, there there is such a premium to that, I think, when you're when you're choosing the right business or career path to to go after. You know? I I think I think this gets under talked about in, like, startup business circles.
Brian Casel:
Right?
Taylor Otwell:
Yeah. Adam Adam and I used to talk about this a lot. Just being being on the hunt for a business, we would say, is, like, the darkest place you could possibly be. Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Casel:
You know? And and just being opinionated about the thing that you're you you created Laravel to as a as a way to speed up your own process because it works for you, and and then other people like it. You know? That that, I mean, that that could be sort of a risky path because you don't know if there's gonna be a market there, but I I think being your own true customer number one for your thing, solving your scratching your own itch is is is sort of a superpower that that you should really, like, leverage if if you have it. And then that's the thing that kinda drives, like, okay.
Brian Casel:
I have this itch I wanna scratch. How do I build it? And then I go learn how to build using whatever path is is in front of me.
Justin Jackson:
Yeah. If it's these are all, like, necessary but not sufficient on their own. That's the you need to have a great market. And, you know, maybe Taylor just accidentally fell into the PHP market. Like, who knew how big that oil well was when he started picking at it?
Justin Jackson:
And it just turns out that PHP had this incredible footprint in the world. And there was just all this kind of latent demand of people that were hungry for somebody to come and, like, spice things up. And then he did. So I I think you need both. It's like, I think we can teach people to recognize when there's alignment between, like, oh, man.
Justin Jackson:
I'm really fired up about this, and there's also a good market here at the same time. And if both of those things are there, that's kind of, a lot of the a lot of what you need to make it work.
Brian Casel:
I think there's, like, a yes and here though because, like, yes, there was a a massive market of PHP users in the world, but you could also make the argument that, like, PHP grew as a result of Laravel growing and and the ecosystem around that. Same thing with Ruby. Do you do you think, like, there'd be so many Ruby developers today if if Rails was never a a thing? You know? It that made it easier for people to actually build products and applications.
Brian Casel:
And, like, you could also look at things like like WordPress, you know, that I I was in the WordPress ecosystem ten, fifteen years ago where it was like, well, that's the ecosystem that has that that puts all the tools together to make it easy to build stuff.
Caleb Porzio:
In, like, WAMP. You remember WAMP?
Justin Jackson:
Oh, yeah.
Caleb Porzio:
Like, for Windows and my whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Apache MySQL. Like, I could I tried to learn Rails when I was getting started in web, and I had, like, failed.
Caleb Porzio:
But, like, WAMP is so easy and, cPanel or whatever that PHP my admin Mhmm. Like, those tools were tools that my p brain could, like, use and understand. And I feel like that's a huge so maybe at the time, like, Laravel wasn't even out. Why was PHP's? Obviously, WordPress and platforms like but just the platform of just, like, this thing is so easy to use and get something running.
Caleb Porzio:
You don't have to know a single command line command. You know? Mhmm. Which I think mattered a lot at the time and is a big reason why.
Justin Jackson:
And it's easier now. Here's the thing, I think, for all three of you that I think about a lot. I think a lot about the pipeline problem because it does seem like young kids today aren't as excited about the web as I was in '93, '90 '4, '90 '5, '90 '6, all through that time. And there's all sorts of reasons for it. But even thinking about how we all got into things, like, you know, Nathan Barry had a big effect, I think, on all of us when he started doing shit and then publishing it.
Justin Jackson:
And it was inspirational to think, like, oh, man. I could build something. Joel Spolsky was like this for a lot of people. There's always, like, a character that comes out and says, man, you guys gotta be doing this, you know? And even like as a kid, like I was literally I turned 13 the year the web was born.
Justin Jackson:
Like I've been there from the beginning, but wasn't really thinking about building businesses on the web until later, until I think I heard about Thirty Seven Signals probably. Like, that's that's when it happened. You kind of need an inspirational figure.
Brian Casel:
I I I think about that same exact thing a lot. I I'm really curious for for Caleb and and Taylor about, like, who who or what company or product was your early inspiration? I mean, like, for me, I I literally remember this must have been, like, 02/2008, '2 thousand '9. I'm a professional web designer developer working at an agency, or, maybe I was starting to go freelance at that point, and I just stumbled into what Eighty was building with WooThemes for, WordPress. Selling $59 template, you know, theme templates for WordPress.
Brian Casel:
And I and I just like discovered that and I'm like, I have the same exact skills that Eighty has. I'm a designer, developer, I could build themes for WordPress, but I'm just doing them for clients or for some company. This guy's selling thousands of copies of $59 digital. And I remember like spending, like, a whole night just reading every blog post this guy wrote. Just, like, going down the rabbit hole.
Brian Casel:
Like, this is a whole entrepreneur entrepreneurial path with the builder creator skills that I happen to have. What am I doing? Just, you know, like Yeah. So I'm curious to know because you guys took the the the open source path. Right?
Brian Casel:
Because that's a path that I never really embraced in terms of, like, I wanna release, I wanna I wanna spend hours upon hours building something and release it into the world for free, into the community, and maybe good things will happen. Like, I I could never square that math for myself. I'm curious, like, early on, like, how did you think about open source as, like, an inspiration or, like, a path to, like, invest your time into?
Taylor Otwell:
I didn't really even think about it that way, honestly. I was only focused on building a framework that I could ship stuff faster on. In open sourcing, it was just like it was just like putting it on SoundCloud more or less. Like, I don't care if anyone else listens to it. I don't care if anyone else uses it, but, like, I might as well, like, put it out into the world.
Taylor Otwell:
And, honestly, in some ways, I feel like I didn't even really start a business until this year. Like, when, you know what I mean? Like, everything I built basically up to this point was just stuff I personally needed or wanted to build, and I put it on the Internet and charged for it. But it was still, like, at the end of the day, just building stuff that I was personally interested in that I I cared if other people used it to a point, especially later. But when I first released, like, Laravel Forge in 2014, which is my first commercial product, I honestly didn't care that much.
Taylor Otwell:
I wasn't trying to start, like, a big business. I was just trying to automate my, like, server management for myself, and it happened to be it happened to go well. But I remember telling my wife, like, I'm it'd be cool if this, like, paid our phone bill. I was so I was definitely not trying to start a big business. I mean, things that were inspirational just philosophically for me getting into programming was, like, 37 signals and they're getting real book for sure.
Taylor Otwell:
It was one of the Yeah. Books I read as I was building Laravel. It was super inspirational.
Caleb Porzio:
I didn't know it was that old.
Taylor Otwell:
Yeah. It is pretty old.
Caleb Porzio:
That's crazy.
Justin Jackson:
How did you even, like, discover it?
Taylor Otwell:
That's a good question. I don't really remember. I read it in PDF format just, like, off their website.
Justin Jackson:
Like, you're you're, in Little Rock. You're working for a trucking company or something. Like, how did you even get how did you even know that that was out there?
Brian Casel:
Yeah. I don't know.
Taylor Otwell:
It was a big company that I worked at. There were hundreds of other developers. I don't I probably had seen, like, Basecamp or Campfire or something like that for, like, project management and then started reading their stuff. I honestly wish I could remember how I first saw it, but it was just super inspirational to me in terms of, like, the way I shaped Laravel and how I built it and focusing on the features that I did. Yeah.
Justin Jackson:
Because you were, like, trying to build a invoicing app or something originally.
Taylor Otwell:
Yeah. Basically. Yeah. All sorts of, like, random apps like that.
Justin Jackson:
You gotta you gotta make that a Laravel starter kit, I think, just for the just for the history of it. Finally get that thing out there.
Taylor Otwell:
Yeah. That'd be great. Well, actually, one of the first apps was an invoicing app called, Coinfly. And, actually, this was live. This was a a real app.
Taylor Otwell:
I built it with a guy named Michael Hasselbring, who who is one of the first other Laravel developers I know who, for some reason, also happened to live in Arkansas, and he was, like, Laravel user number four or something like that.
Justin Jackson:
Oh, wow.
Taylor Otwell:
Just happened to also live in Arkansas, which is, like, crazy odds. But, yeah, we we built an app called Coinfly and launched it, and I think that's the only other app I've ever launched outside of, like, the Laravel world that had nothing to do really with Laravel infrastructure.
Justin Jackson:
Where
Caleb Porzio:
is he now? No. I wanna know,
Justin Jackson:
like Yeah. Where's that dude now?
Taylor Otwell:
I'm still friends with Michael on Facebook. Yeah. He's still a developer. He may have some screenshots of coin fly on his machine somewhere. I have to dig them out.
Justin Jackson:
Oh, yeah. And, Caleb, you did you kinda follow the the Otwell WAV and, playbook? Was that your goal with with Livewire, or were you just playing around with it? And then you said, oh, maybe this could be the the, you know, the way to go.
Caleb Porzio:
I mean, I just started building open source stuff in Laravel ecosystem because and Vue, but because I I don't know. It it's like the way. That's what you just do. It's like you do something cool at work, and then you go, oh, I can make this a package. And then you get excited about, like, oh, I can name it.
Caleb Porzio:
Like, what could the name be? What would the logo be? Like, oh, this is, like, a thing that I could build and put out into the world. And so I just kept doing that and never thought about money, obviously. I quit my job and just kind of just thought I was gonna be, like, poor for a while.
Caleb Porzio:
But then Adam. Yeah. It's all Adam and the the $60,000 ebook. You know? And that post and I was actually, like, applying the Titan at the time or something.
Caleb Porzio:
Or I was the reason that he's the reason I got hired because he left a vacancy, and then me and Daniel, like, filled his spot. But anyway, yeah, I had followed Adam for, like, a while as I followed, like, Taylor and Jeffrey and whatever listening to Laravel podcast. But, yeah, Adam was the, like, I guess, like, Taylor and Jeffrey and inspirational, but now I never thought, like, I would build, like, anything like they've built. But then when Adam dropped that and, like, wrote an ebook and made that money and quit his job, I was like, alright. Like, that's I'll do that.
Caleb Porzio:
Like, that's that's a very I remember, like, seeing that and going, I I'm going to do this. Yeah. I don't know when, and it probably won't be on the same level, but I'm going to do it. Like, there is a formula right here, and it's so, like, practical. I'm gonna try it.
Caleb Porzio:
So anyway When
Brian Casel:
when you went out on your own, when you left full time employment, were you already thinking in terms of, like, I can make a living from from products like that? Or were you thinking, like, I'll just contract or what was the what was the drive?
Caleb Porzio:
Yeah. I thought I would just I just wanted to have fun on GitHub for as long as I could before having to get a real job, and then I would just, like, consult, I told myself. So, yeah, I remember having to, like, tell my family that, and they didn't really get it. And people are, like, pretty worried about me and,
Taylor Otwell:
yeah.
Caleb Porzio:
And our like, I kept the the stub for that year. It was mostly my wife's income in, like, one month of Titan, but it was, like, $25,000 in revenue for, like, 2019 or something in just money in our house.
Brian Casel:
I remember so I I went out on my I left my full time job in 02/2008 right, like, ten months before the economic crisis back then, which
Caleb Porzio:
is
Brian Casel:
I I think about that a lot. But so I made it through that, and and and I remember my dad saying to me, like and this was, like, six or seven, maybe eight years into me being self employed. He's like, so this, like, self employment thing, it's kinda working, really, it turns out. I'm like, yeah. I I it was rough in, like, first year or two, but, like, I I figured it out.
Brian Casel:
It's like it it took a while for the for my parents to really, like, come around. Like, oh, he's can he can actually do this.
Caleb Porzio:
Yeah. I got, like, aunts who are, like, who are, like, really worried and and with my parents, whatever, but still it's like and not anyway, there's still this part of me that wants to, like, go go on a tour and be like, look
Justin Jackson:
at these pay stubs. Like, you were wrong.
Caleb Porzio:
But I
Brian Casel:
So I I'm curious about today for so I'm so inspired by both of you because you you both have this, like, creator energy in the blood. It definitely early on, and it and it and it you rode that energy into great success in this career. How does that translate to today when you have a much larger audience? You you have thousands upon thousands of people using the products that you create. So how does that influence what you decide to build?
Brian Casel:
How do how you decide on features or road map or what's worth investing in? Has it has it changed you? Like, now that you actually have businesses on your hands, how how are you thinking differently about the stuff you do?
Caleb Porzio:
I'm still in the I'm I'm where Taylor was. Well, like, I don't have a business. I just have, like, I I have, like, one kind of a full time employee and, and yeah.
Justin Jackson:
Oh, Caleb, this is the time to go into your thing.
Caleb Porzio:
You're I'm an artist.
Justin Jackson:
You're Yes.
Caleb Porzio:
Listen. I don't give a shit about anything.
Justin Jackson:
Let me do my Caleb impression. You know? It's like, listen. I don't care if I make money. I don't care about any of this.
Justin Jackson:
I'm doing things slow. I'm doing things my way. I'm an artist. I want to release good stuff that is high quality that only I can do. That's Yep.
Justin Jackson:
That's I
Caleb Porzio:
mean, it's truly it's like, even if I there's times where I don't want to be that way because I wanna be more strategic and whatever, but I always kinda just default to, like like, I'm building a date picker right now, and I'm spending, like, over a month on it. And just because I got obsessed with the problem, and it's like, I have to see it through. And I'm probably not, like, shipping other things I should be right now, but I'm building the date picker, and that's my whole life. So I don't know. That's kinda how that the creator energy just comes out because I'm just get obsessed with a thing and then just do the thing.
Justin Jackson:
I think the thing about this is, I've told this to Caleb too, but I I remember meeting you at Laracon and then following you on Twitter and then seeing you record those initial Livewire videos.
Caleb Porzio:
Yeah.
Justin Jackson:
And I I DM'd I I just looked in Telegram. I DM'd Taylor and Adam, and I'm like, what's up with this Caleb guy? Like, he's just got this energy.
Caleb Porzio:
And He was very excited. He was so excited.
Justin Jackson:
But there's something about that that I think is part of this whole thing, is if you can get fired up about something, if you have if you care about the product, if you care about how people are gonna use it, if you care about the logo and the design and all of these things, that all feeds into all of this. Like, that's how some of that's how this stuff gets built.
Brian Casel:
Exact there's there's a value to that, to that creative energy.
Caleb Porzio:
Yeah.
Brian Casel:
And this is something that I'm I'm dealing with, like, the, the aftermath of, like, all the other side of this. Like, I so I'm I'm I've been in the rabbit hole building, like, a block editor for for with with Rails and and Tailwinds that which is which is insane. Like, to and, like, I'm I'm in I'm in the weeds on it. I've been and it's coming along and everything, but but I'm
Caleb Porzio:
Building, like, a radio checkbox is insane.
Brian Casel:
Yeah. You know? So
Caleb Porzio:
Building, like, a toggle switch is, like, the hardest thing you could do.
Brian Casel:
Exactly. And and so I'm I've been in this for for the past month. I'm excited about it. I'm spending a crazy number of hours on it. I think it's gonna be good, I think.
Brian Casel:
But I'm also but in the back of my mind or in the front of my mind, I'm constantly thinking of, like, is this a business? Are all these hours worth it? Am I gonna get an ROI from this? Am I marketing it am I gonna market this? Like, there's that that that business brain and the creator brain.
Justin Jackson:
Mhmm.
Brian Casel:
But I'm trying to get back in touch with that creative energy because I I think that can actually drive something great in in the world. Whereas, you know, if it's just if if I'm just thinking too opportunistically, it's
Justin Jackson:
Yeah. How do you think about that, Taylor? Because now you got you got this you know, your venture capital, and you've all previously, it seemed like you were really high on the creator energy. Like, I want this. I think this is good.
Justin Jackson:
Do you still got that going on?
Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I'll just kinda tell it from my personal perspective. I think, you know, when I was in the the the the midst of Laravel bootstrapped era, you know, something I always thought about a lot was how is it all gonna end? You know, like, what is gonna be this big open source framework? And I've got all these businesses and, like, I was just curious.
Taylor Otwell:
Like, how's all this gonna end? Is it slowly gonna fade? Is it gonna, like is some other new technology gonna come along and, like, supplant us or whatever? In a lot of ways, I consider, like, the first chapter of Laravel's history did end, you know, like, this year, this past year with, like, the culmination of, like, we built Laravel to this point. I launched all these bootstrap products, and they were successful, and we raised this big venture capital funding round.
Taylor Otwell:
And that's the end of, like, the bootstrap Laravel era. And I think it is a good thing because I think that I was reaching a point to where as an artist and as that sort of creative person, I was just sort of coasting a little bit. And Yeah. I think now it's like I needed a fresh challenge of, like, can I deliver that at scale? You know, like, can I maintain, like, world class products?
Taylor Otwell:
Can I make sure that everyone's shipping really great stuff we can be proud of, that everyone's happy, to build these great things together at, like, a 50 person company, a hundred person company, a 200 person company? And it sounds like I never would have imagined myself being in this place, but I think I just got to a point where, like, I had sort of done everything I wanted to do on a on a bootstrapped world. And it was like, okay. This is great. And it was just like, I needed a fresh challenge.
Taylor Otwell:
You know? And building I can still scale the company in a lot of ways the way I wanna scale it. You know? Because I'm still CEO of the company. I set the culture in a lot of ways.
Taylor Otwell:
I set how we work in a lot of ways. I determine the product vision. And so, like, right now, my my new challenge is, can we be Laravel at scale and just make it bigger and better and still maintain the same vibe and culture and all of that? And that's what I'm, like, super interested to see play out now, as, like, chapter two, you know, of the Laravel story of can we take it there? I see myself as, like, a servant of PHP at this point.
Taylor Otwell:
You know? Like, I'm me and PHP are intertwined forever. And if I I will retire, you know, a PHP developer at this point. And I want to build, you know, like, the best products that we can possibly build for PHP at scale for everyone and make them easier than ever to use. So that's, like, my new challenge and where I'm, like, deriving fresh energy from.
Caleb Porzio:
I think
Brian Casel:
the thing I'm taking away from this whole conversation is, like, how personal what we build and whether what we're creating or our businesses, how personal it is. I mean, maybe to flip it over to Justin, I'm I'm I'm curious to to hear how you think about this. Because I remember when you first announced that you're joining John to get into Transistor.
Justin Jackson:
Yeah.
Brian Casel:
And I just remember thinking, like, that makes perfect sense for Justin Jackson. Like, I because I before that, I knew you, like, first as a podcaster. Like, you were always a podcaster for years before Transistor came along, and and it made perfect sense that that how do you think about that today? Like, where you ended up? Yeah.
Justin Jackson:
I mean, that's the this is the whole challenge is, like, I like telling people to start businesses and how to start businesses, but the actual mix of what works is very difficult to divine, especially for another person. How do you do this? Well, you got to get really interested in things, you got to build some things, you got to get passionate about some things. And you got to also keep your eyes open for things that could possibly have an economic engine that can make it work. That's the whole thing about all of this is that you can be excited.
Justin Jackson:
But, the reason that some ideas work as businesses and some don't is that they have better economic engines underneath them.
Caleb Porzio:
That's the luck. That's luck. Like, the only reason that I make any amount of money is, like, I could've there's an alternate universe where, even in rails, like, from talking to rails people at rails world or whatever, like and and talking to people about numbers even and business owners in rails, people the Caleb's in rails and how much are they making? What are they doing? And it's like, the pie is so much smaller.
Caleb Porzio:
Like, how much money is out there for an independent developer to make a LiveWire or a Flux and then sell that to other developers is just smaller. Like, I just got lucky that the PHP Laravel world is has more money, is bigger. I don't know. Like, things like that. It's just but even programming in general, I could have been into playing the lute.
Caleb Porzio:
I don't know. You know? It's like, that's the luck part.
Justin Jackson:
Yeah. Some of this is luck, but I do think you can see, the difference between me and you guys is that you guys are all just more talented than me. No.
Brian Casel:
That's not true.
Justin Jackson:
In a in a way, it is. Because there is a way, I think, of observing momentum in a market. And I felt it as Adam introduced me to Taylor. Taylor and I hung out a few times, and then I went to my first Laracon, and I was just like, what is going on here? This like, why isn't everybody in tech talking about this?
Justin Jackson:
This is
Caleb Porzio:
You MC ed your first Laracon. Right?
Justin Jackson:
Yeah. I I think I spoke the first one, and then I MC'd the second one. Yeah. And Caleb was in the crowd going, who the fuck is this guy? This motherfucking fucking and I was like, I I don't know.
Justin Jackson:
I'm here. I think I recognized right away, like, holy crap, there is something going on here that is really special. And there's a momentum here. So there's always going to be a series of fortunate events. But it's kind of like, increasing your luck surface area.
Justin Jackson:
If you just keep buying a lottery ticket, which has the same likelihood of winning every time you buy it, then sure. Your life's not going to be, you're gonna have less potential for things to happen. Yeah. But if you seek out those communities where stuff happens and I think the reason Taylor initially invited me is he read a blog post and he asked if I could speak about it at Laracon. So that was my ticket into that community.
Justin Jackson:
And so, yeah, you gotta do things. You gotta you gotta put yourself out there. There's a there's a way of orchestrating this that will help. My worry is that's not happening anymore for kids who are 19 and 20. And the PHP world needs that.
Justin Jackson:
Like if the if the if the median age of a PHP developer is 45, and the median age of a Rails developer, I'm guessing, is about the same age, it kinda sucks. And it there's that that there's problems there. There is a pipeline problem there.
Caleb Porzio:
Yeah. That's wild.
Justin Jackson:
I I I talk about this with Adam too. I think, like, even for Tailwind, it's like you need young people to be getting excited about building stuff on the web in order for you to have a pipeline. This is a problem in podcasting right now because my kids think a podcast is something that happens on YouTube. And if you if you think about the average Apple Podcasts listener, like people who use Apple Podcasts for podcast
Caleb Porzio:
Yeah.
Justin Jackson:
It's they're probably in their forties. That's a demographic gap problem. And you have to be thinking about it, especially when you have you have time and energy and resources to influence it in some way.
Brian Casel:
Interesting though because it's like the that, demographic I think this is probably true for both podcasting and developers in the Laravel ecosystem. And I guess maybe Rails is that like, if you're selling to the 35 40 five age group, like, that's
Caleb Porzio:
valuable demographic. It's like, you know, it's like the best demographic.
Brian Casel:
They're they're listening to podcasts. They're they're gonna buy, like, a luxury vehicle, or they're they're they're building stuff with with Laravel. They're they're they're working for, like, businesses.
Justin Jackson:
Mhmm.
Brian Casel:
Because the the kids are they're they're, you know
Justin Jackson:
Working with this college grad over the summer was was very interesting to me. So this college grad Ferdinand needed a job. I said, well, I've got some extra money. Why don't I hire you to build a Laravel app? Something I just wanted to use for Transistor.
Justin Jackson:
And so using my own money, I hired him over the summer. And, there's a few things that were interesting. One was just like how much energy I got from working with somebody who was junior. And I think a lot of development teams are missing that now, like people don't hire juniors. And it was just so fun to take someone who had never didn't even really understand what SAS was and show and had never even seen really Stripe or had never used Laravel, had never used Livewire.
Justin Jackson:
And each time he's like, oh, wow. Oh, oh, you can do this. And he's just figuring all this stuff out. And then, the job market is still bad. He got a few offers here and there.
Justin Jackson:
But now him and his buddy are building a SaaS for like auto dealerships or something like that. And there's some that whole experience of seeing this kid, like kind of learn and being able to mentor him and him building a SaaS app from start to finish in a summer using Laravel, which the speed of which he was able to do it was incredible. And then he's like, oh, I'm gonna go build my own thing now, and who knows if it'll work. It might take him five, six, seven tries. But It
Brian Casel:
is true. Like, I I'm so out of touch with with the the 20 year olds. And, like, what they're gonna do in the like because for me, like, I I learned a ton from the guy sitting next to me physically in in the office in the small agency that I worked for as my first job. Like, that's how I learned CSS.
Taylor Otwell:
It was like
Brian Casel:
asking this guy a thousand questions. Yeah. You know, for for two years.
Caleb Porzio:
It's gonna be you're gonna learn if you're excited about web or if you do something like that in your 20, you're gonna learn React and ShadCN because Claude is gonna Mhmm. Just you're gonna say, I need this, and Claude's gonna go, Shadzian, react. Here you go. Lucide icons. And that's that's an interesting thing to me now is, like, the pipeline's kinda dictated by what the people making these models, like, want to make the default tech to build this stuff for you with.
Caleb Porzio:
It's, like, kinda feels kinda unprecedented in terms of, like, how it's gonna really change things, you know, or set, like, one tool is incredibly dominant. You know?
Brian Casel:
Yeah. That is what where, you know, where I I think the the discussion around AI is, like, it's not so much about because, you know, so many of us, like, more more experienced developers, like, oh, it's not good enough to build what we can build. Of of course, that's true. Mhmm. But I think I think the thing that a lot of us are maybe a little bit blind to is that it it makes it so much easier or it or it will be the go to pathway to learn how to how to build stuff
Caleb Porzio:
Yeah.
Brian Casel:
If it if it isn't already.
Caleb Porzio:
And it is for me now, like, in a lot you know, if you had to go build something in Rust, like, I don't know if you're a Rust developer, but you're gonna use ChatGPT or Cloud or something. Right? Like, yeah, I think you'd be pretty foolish to not. Yeah.
Justin Jackson:
Yeah. I think there's things that you guys can do, and probably me too. But I think Laracon should have, free tickets for younger people, for college kids. I think, if you're doing another, Livewire day, I think you gotta reach out to every college, just have a mailing list, and build relationships with those people, and try to build some of that pipeline with younger people. Because I think they will get fired up about it.
Justin Jackson:
Because the story is like, friggin awesome. Like, you know, you know, like, people, kids are wondering, like, how do you have a career? And how do you make money? And how can you do something that's fulfilling? And the world is pretty dire right now.
Justin Jackson:
It feels like there's a this positive message out there that could you could be connecting. And we've got all these great examples of people who have done it, but there's not a lot of people, like, purposefully doing that stuff.
Taylor Otwell:
Yeah. I see it like you know, I think for the past year and moving into this year, I've been trying to move a lot of pieces on, like, this chessboard in my head of, like, how to correct that pipeline problem. Part of it is our Laravel cloud platform just to make it easy to ship your Yeah. Your stuff when you're done, which is a bit huge. With, like, stuff like Vercel has become so easy to use in the JavaScript world that we just had catch up to do there.
Taylor Otwell:
Stuff like our new starter kits we're working on, our boot camp, Laracon. I think your ideas about Laracon are great, but, yeah, I'm hopeful that this year we can get enough of these chess pieces in place where it feels like, okay. There's actually a compelling thing. We can show a new developer, hey. The fastest path to launching apps and making money on the Internet is building Laravel apps.
Justin Jackson:
Mhmm.
Taylor Otwell:
Everyone wants to make money. You know?
Caleb Porzio:
Yeah. Yeah.
Taylor Otwell:
So yeah. The pipeline problem is just something I think about a lot here at the company and just internally with myself.
Justin Jackson:
Yeah. And I think that's where you starter kits are a good idea. Yeah. Thinking outside the box. Like, thinking if you go back to any interview anybody, and they're like, oh, yeah.
Justin Jackson:
I started with HyperCard or I started with Macromedia Director or, like, there's all of these things that used to allow us to build stuff. I got started in Microsoft Access where you could build stuff in that GUI editor and then figure stuff out on the back end. Like, there's there's a lot of room, I think, for that kind of stuff that would help
Taylor Otwell:
More visual building, you mean?
Justin Jackson:
Visual building, but also just, examples. Examples that might resonate with, you know, like, there's a Spotify API is and that Spotify has one and you could, like, build something with it? You know? Like Yeah.
Caleb Porzio:
Off the cuff thing, starter kits so, like, I think we're entering a web where it's like something like how do I put this on? Not incriminate myself or anybody else. So well, like, UI component libraries are the new starting point
Justin Jackson:
Yeah.
Caleb Porzio:
For building interfaces where, like, it's not h it's not divs anymore. Mhmm. It's not divs, and it's not just CSS. It's literally component libraries, the baseline, and then it's starter kits. Mhmm.
Caleb Porzio:
So it's like most just like so, like, as far as Laravel getting in, it's like it has to net what you're doing. It has to nail the starter kit story because that's that's it. And then the the level below that is UI component library, and then the geekiest of geeks will pry open that and actually write, like, a tag. You know? But it's I don't know.
Caleb Porzio:
It's, like, definitely is the era. We are in the era of the starter kits and the component library, and we have to just, like, double down on that as hard as possible and make Laravel a place where, like, we have all the all the back stuff. We just gotta have all the front stuff. So it's like, oh, this is the best. Yeah.
Taylor Otwell:
And the the new Laravel.com is gonna be so great. I wish I could show it to all y'all, but it it launches next month, and it really kinda takes this on headfirst. Like, this whole right now.
Justin Jackson:
Give us a little exclusive.
Taylor Otwell:
Dude, I'll send you I'll send you some screenshots after this.
Brian Casel:
I I can't wait to see that.
Caleb Porzio:
I have a a tangential topic. So, Brian, like, you're presenting this thing that you're saying, like, you know, me and Taylor, like, builders at heart, just scratching our own itch, and then the business is kinda, like, come off of that. But you're kind of approaching it like, well, yeah. I mean, I could build that, but is there a market for like, you you know, this more, like, business mentality, which and you're like, is that good? Whatever.
Caleb Porzio:
And I think it's smart. So I I just wanna share one thing that I'm thinking about and hear your opinions because it's very it's like a spooky opinion for me to have. It's like I'm not used and Justin probably knows it from my podcast, but I'm wondering if I'm becoming disenchanted with open source.
Brian Casel:
I listen to that. Yeah.
Caleb Porzio:
Yeah. And I it's this, like, interesting thing that's happening to me where all I knew was open source, and that's the only way that you released software. And then I went on this crusade with Flux. It's like, I want Flux to be free, but I don't want everybody to steal it and create their Flux wrappers, and then I'm just feeding all the beasts. You know?
Caleb Porzio:
I've basically, the enlightenment moment was somebody somebody literally told me. I don't know. Somebody. It's like, you actually have to charge money for it. Not for the purpose of making money, but for the perp that's this is the only sanctioned way to protect your value here.
Brian Casel:
Mhmm.
Caleb Porzio:
And I was like, boom. This is crazy. Like, literally, I have to charge money for this if I want to sleep soundly at night and not be constantly, like, fighting off hoards of people forking or copying and pasting or Mhmm. Doing their own, you know, iteration of it. So that was the first kind of fundamental shift.
Caleb Porzio:
And now so Flux's JavaScript core is completely detached. I maintain it. It had a separate name for a while. It's a completely detached library in my brain, but nobody knows that because I was gonna make it this open source, you know, like, library that anybody in Rails could use, totally headless, could build even the most complicated combo box, the date picker, like, everything. But I never put it out there because all I see is, like, I put it out there, and now I have all the open source PS to deal with, but whatever.
Caleb Porzio:
It's like people are just going to wrap on top of that value, and I don't get to capture it. And then I maintain it for everybody. And it's it just seems like all roads lead to not smart to do. So why don't you, like, take all this energy and innovation and put it in something that people can't just steal from you, which is, like, totally new to me. But it's becoming sort of the way that I'm thinking is, like, I it was so weird to not open source something.
Caleb Porzio:
Mhmm. It feels selfish. I'm, like, not sharing this with people, which is the weird thing. But, anyway so I'm sharing that because I'm like, what's this you know?
Brian Casel:
To me, charging for flux is the the most completely obvious move you can make. Yeah. Like, and and I for all the reasons you said, but also because it's a great business. And and you've built an incredible product and it's, you know, worth charging for. But the way that I think about it is, like, this is why I have a hard time wrapping my head around the open source path in terms of a strategic business path.
Brian Casel:
Because maybe it's not exactly the same, but to me it's a freemium model. Right? Yeah. Open source, like, highly generous product available for free. But, but to to make this sustainable, whether sustaining as a as a small company or or something large at scale, like, you need to have some way to monetize it.
Brian Casel:
And the only and, like, I I always come from a small bootstrapper, perspective. Like, I've I've tried freemium plays on things and it's just incredibly difficult to make that work sustainably unless you have a a huge distribution advantage. Right. And you, both of you have have this incredible distribution with your open source achievements in in this in this ecosystem. Right?
Brian Casel:
So so you you're at such a massive advantage there right out of the gate. Like, it's about time you have a product like Flux, you know, to to to make it.
Caleb Porzio:
Yeah. I do. Right. And it's like, well, could I have done any of this if I didn't have all the open source, like, stuff? You know?
Caleb Porzio:
But yeah. Right.
Justin Jackson:
That's Taylor, did anyone get salty with you when you released Forge as a paid product?
Taylor Otwell:
I don't remember people being very salty about Forge. I I think I remember the most sort of, like, salty reactions about Laravel Spark, which was like a SaaS starter kit for doing recurring billing in Laravel apps. And people were kinda salty that that wasn't open source for whatever reason.
Brian Casel:
I I guess it's the difference between a downloadable and a hosted thing. Like, if it's hosted, it's, like, typically a subscription.
Caleb Porzio:
Infrastructure. It's like
Taylor Otwell:
Yeah. People want code to be free, I think. Like, in general, they, like, they just have the sensibility to where if it's a code package, like, it should be free. If it's, like, a hosted website, then I'm okay paying for it, for whatever reason. You know?
Brian Casel:
But the but then there then, like, the reality is, like, there are so many people working in businesses that will happily pay a 300, 4 hundred, you know, more license fee to download code to to use in their business.
Taylor Otwell:
You know? Yeah. Totally.
Justin Jackson:
Like, I know that talking to Adam Wavin, he has this, like, there's this, like, dark side of open source that maybe I don't see, which is just like Yeah.
Brian Casel:
That that's the thing that you guys would know much more about.
Justin Jackson:
Like But it doesn't seem like you really experienced that, Taylor. Like, it's it's been fine for you.
Taylor Otwell:
I think I've experienced I've experienced it. I just think, I'm a callous husk of a open source, developer at this point. You know, I think in the in the first few years, say the first five years, it definitely bothered me. You know? Like, the complaining, the sort of, like, entitlement, mentality that some people have around open source where, you know, open source is not, like, just, like, servitude, you know, to the to the community.
Taylor Otwell:
You're just kinda building things and trying to have fun and build cool stuff. I think these days, I just, like, don't really think about it or worry about it. You know? But, you know, I I know it bothers a lot of people.
Caleb Porzio:
I feel like I'm past the point of caring about the entitlement and things like that. But I have a question for you, Taylor. When you, like Laravel seems so well insulated from the outside. Laravel's business, Laravel's open source seems so insulated. Like, when I built Alpine, it was, like, two months.
Caleb Porzio:
And then there was an alternative to Alpine that was basically Alpine. And then, Evan, you made petite view, which was basically Alpine just to whatever. And it so it's like, I just don't see almost ever Laravel is this big community. You know? I almost never see anybody create an alternative to Laravel.
Caleb Porzio:
Mhmm. Like, is it the tech moat? Is it what is it? But it feels like you're not staving off new PHP frameworks every day.
Taylor Otwell:
Yeah. I think part of it is a tech moat. I think a lot of it is just a time moat. Like, the amount of time it would take to recreate sort of, like, the framework. But then not only the framework, it's, like, the docs, cashier, socialite, horizon.
Taylor Otwell:
It's like Nova, all of these packages, and then putting things around it, which I've been extremely lucky. And maybe the luckiest part of the whole Laravel journey is, you know, people like you, Caleb, and also people like Jeffrey Way, who come along and they create something like a Laracasts. And, you know, it's just like, if you create a new PHP framework, you just don't have a Laracasts on day one, you know, like Yeah. Sort of evangelizing your framework. So I think that's part of, you know, what creates such a large moat around Laravel and probably Ruby on Rails to similar extent where there's just so much time has passed and so much stuff has been built and educational material and videos and courses.
Taylor Otwell:
It's just like it's so hard to, like, reach parity with that.
Caleb Porzio:
So picture this dystopian future, Taylor. I go, you know, Laravel, oh, it's so great. It's so powerful. But, like, let's say, like, you're, like, Symphony or something. But it's so bloated.
Caleb Porzio:
There's, like, 50 folders or whatever. I'm gonna create Shmeravel. Shmeravel is this, like, beautiful, breezy, like, there's, like, one file and, like, it's functional, and it's just, like, file based routing, and you only use what you need. And under the hood, all you see illuminate everything, you know, like, symphony down in the deep. But the thing you're interacting with is called Schmeravel, and you go to our docs.
Caleb Porzio:
Then when you want eloquent, we we go over to Laravel's docs for eloquent, but you can use its whole ecosystem. But you use your and then this starts, and then there's a community, and then people create these starter kits for it. It's like, I'm a Schmeravel guy. Yeah. It's like, is this your plan, Kaelitz?
Caleb Porzio:
Are you guys like that?
Brian Casel:
Yeah. This sounds like a product being born here. I don't know.
Caleb Porzio:
I wanna yeah. Like, how does this make you feel? What do you think about this?
Taylor Otwell:
Well, from a business perspective, it would not bother me because I think that our success as a company doesn't have to be dependent on Laravel. And I think this is the fundamental thing That's awesome. With maybe Tailwind or LiveWire, where if there's a Smartavel, great. Let's let's host every Smarrival app on Laravel Forge and, even, like, pivot those products, you know, to to focusing on those things if we need to. And those products are actually really hard to build.
Taylor Otwell:
So, you know, I've always and I'm trying this even more so with cloud to disconnect the success of Laravel with the success with the success of Laravel, the open source framework, with the success of Laravel as a cloud hosting company.
Caleb Porzio:
Mhmm. You
Taylor Otwell:
know, those are kind of two different things where we can go beyond Laravel into all of PHP or even into other languages, you know, if we wanted to. So I think I think that's why it doesn't bother me anymore. It definitely really bothered me back when I didn't feel like I had, like, I didn't have a forge or something like that. And it's like someone could fork Laravel at any time if they got, like, mad and then just create a slightly slimmed down version, you know, because developers love, like, sort of light fresh tools
Caleb Porzio:
and Lightweight alternative too.
Taylor Otwell:
Exactly. Yeah. But, yeah, it doesn't bother me anymore. Although, that being said, I still watch the PHP space like a hawk for any, you know, new frameworks, new ideas That's what
Caleb Porzio:
I look at. Competition.
Brian Casel:
That's what
Caleb Porzio:
I look like. We still got the fire.
Justin Jackson:
This would be interesting. What's your each of your your anxiety level when it comes to competition as a percentage? How what's Taylor, what's your if you had to give it a percentage, what would you give it?
Taylor Otwell:
You know, I'm mainly anxious not so much these days about our competition in sort of the Laravel hosting space. I'm more anxious in just being able to deliver great products that don't disappoint everyone. Like, that's what I'm actually most anxious about at this point, like, in my career because I feel like Laravel we've built something pretty good at Laravel, but now we're trying to build something, like, really great. And, like, it would so bum me out, like, if we launched big products and it's just like, these kinda suck. You know?
Taylor Otwell:
Like, the community just isn't feeling them.
Brian Casel:
On that question, I was I was kinda curious about who who you even think about as competitors. Is it like is it like the non PHP developer path? Like, the pipeline problem. Right?
Taylor Otwell:
Yeah. A little bit the pipeline problem. But, you know, like, there's ways for us to I'm totally open to running non Laravel apps, running just plain PHP apps, or even running Ruby on Rails apps on our platforms at some point if we wanna, like, expand our customer base. You know what I mean? If we feel like we've kinda, like, okay, we've done what we can in the Laravel world.
Taylor Otwell:
Let's bring this experience to Rails, to Django, to Express, to whatever else.
Justin Jackson:
Dude, you gotta go full circle, dude. Dotnet.
Taylor Otwell:
Oh, man. I really do have to. That'd be so good. So
Justin Jackson:
so what's your anxiety level with when you're with regards to launching Laravel Cloud? How anxious are you about, like, thinking about that and going, like, I hope you just always seem so calm, but are you
Taylor Otwell:
No. I I'm anxious about it. You know? Like, I think, anyone that's launching a big product is gonna be anxious about it. And, you know, but, again, hoping it's just the experience people hope for, hoping it doesn't go down, hoping it doesn't crash.
Taylor Otwell:
You know, we spent so much time, like, on this product, and, you know, I I think we've really dotted our i's and crossed our t's on this, and we've built a really great team around it. But you're always gonna have, like, those those butterflies in your stomach anytime you launch, like, a big product. So I'm just hopeful it really delivers what the community deserves and what they want.
Justin Jackson:
Mhmm. What about you, Caleb? What's your anxiety level these days?
Caleb Porzio:
On a scale of one to on health?
Justin Jackson:
Well, we went to one to 100. You know?
Caleb Porzio:
Yeah. Like like no. I I sometimes I'm breezy easy breezy
Justin Jackson:
Yeah.
Caleb Porzio:
And have a really good, like, perspective. And and, like, realizations help help me. Like, at one point, I I I used to get anxiety about, like, other people making educational content about LiveWire because I was trying to sell, like, screencast, and I realized, like, that's so dumb. And it's a it's an all boats thing and it whatever. It's so releasing that is, like, really helpful for my brain.
Caleb Porzio:
But I I will say that, like, it can be unhealthy at times for sure. Mhmm. You watch, you watch The Last Dance. Did you watch that, like, Michael Jordan series? Right?
Caleb Porzio:
So, you know, I'm not comparing myself to MJ, but his,
Justin Jackson:
those type of Jordan of, Right.
Caleb Porzio:
A lot of people say I'm not saying it. A lot of people say it.
Brian Casel:
I don't know. That's what I'm hearing.
Caleb Porzio:
I mean, I've heard it. But when he's talking, I go like, oh, I get what that's like. Like which is crazy. So watching that is kinda trippy for me, and he does that thing that they, like, made fun of on SNL where he's like and then, like, you know, that guy, like, stepped in my and I took that personally. You know?
Caleb Porzio:
He's like, I took that personally. And when he says that, like, over and you're like, woah. This dude's got, like, some demons. Yeah. But that's what drives him.
Caleb Porzio:
It's like, I have some of that, and, and I feel like, oh, I get that. And the more that I have made friends with people in the same boat of, like, building things and having these babies that people try
Justin Jackson:
to Mhmm.
Caleb Porzio:
You know? Yeah. Anyway, I chose the wrong metaphor. The more I interact through it, other people feel that way too. You assume everyone else, like and I don't even know, like, the depths of Taylor's emotions about a lot of this stuff, but I would assume that he's easy breezy about a lot of this stuff.
Caleb Porzio:
But because I've seen other people and myself, I now just assume that he's Michael Jordan too. And if you're if you he's gonna take it personally too because that's what you do when you create something that you love and you care about. So that's so, yeah, unhealthy, but good for good for business. I do think
Taylor Otwell:
when you run a business, there it is helpful if there's a part of you that's like, I will crush every enemy that stands in my way. You have that. Like, mom mamba mentality, Kobe, Michael Jordan mentality is
Caleb Porzio:
Yeah. To be helpful.
Justin Jackson:
What's funny is Jason Fried always says he doesn't have that. He's like, don't we don't care about crushing the competition or whatever. But Yeah.
Caleb Porzio:
Wonder what, David says, though.
Justin Jackson:
Yeah. Yeah. Maybe David's different.
Caleb Porzio:
How does David feel about that? I don't know. What about you, Brian?
Brian Casel:
Yeah. I I think I mean, I I just think that a lot of a lot of people use this fire internally. I I I would guess that a lot of us do. I mean, I know I know I'm constantly, like, hard on myself about, like, it's not good enough. I can ship better stuff than this.
Brian Casel:
Or, you know, I think it's good in the moment, then I look at it tomorrow and, like, this is shit. That's the thing that I'm constantly battling with in terms of competition, both in business and, like, the things that I create. You know?
Caleb Porzio:
So I'm making Flux into a Rails UI kit, and I'm working on a block editor. And I'm very excited about it. And I am going into Rails world, and I'm gonna promote it. I'm gonna get on stage, and I'm gonna tell everybody about it. How does that make you feel, Brian?
Brian Casel:
We're gonna we're gonna edit Kayla out of this podcast.
Caleb Porzio:
How does that make you feel? Like, oh, yeah.
Justin Jackson:
Get the intensity meter going here.
Brian Casel:
I mean, look. Like, it's it's definitely true that competitors see, what what really starts to actually bother me is when my competitors are, either direct, like, friends of mine or people, like, well connected, in in my circles. And I I hate it when because what what ends up happening is I have to distance myself from them. I Yeah. I, like, I I literally, like, unfollow people that I'm friends with because they're in the same product ecosystem that I'm in.
Brian Casel:
I'm I'm just like, I cannot look at what they're doing. It's gonna drive me nuts.
Caleb Porzio:
And it's not I've been in this situation, and I've, like, needed to do that. But they will see in some ways, they'll see you disconnect. Like, you might unfollow or something. And it's like, oh, this I'm trapped between I don't want you to perceive this as aggression. Yeah.
Caleb Porzio:
But, like, literally, I need to do this for my own mental health. Like, I just can't look at this shit.
Justin Jackson:
You know? Wow. This is good. I like how we ended this one. Yep.
Justin Jackson:
Yep. We could keep chatting for all for all time. But the nice thing about the panel is we can have you guys come back anytime, and, we'll continue on. And if folks out there have other questions, that's the whole thing. Like, if you had stuff that you were wanting us to talk about and we didn't get ahold of us, all the links will be in the show notes.
Brian Casel:
Yeah. We'll we'll definitely circle back with you guys on a future episode.
Justin Jackson:
Yeah. We'll see how the intensity meter. I I wanna see Laravel Cloud. I need to get I need to get in there, Taylor.
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