By Sam Tuke, Chief Executive

At the end of October I will leave the company which has been my privilege to lead for the past 4 years. This company feels like family; I will forever cherish memories of first meeting and learning from each of our team, and signing each of our large customer accounts.

All effective businesses are a partnership between employees and customers, and this is even more true for we few Open Source companies of this world, for whom community is the fertile earth which births and nourishes. Let’s indulge in some highlights from phpList’s company-community-customer partnership since 2015.

• 2016-2019 Growing the core team: having started out as a full time team of four, we grew the company’s remote-working base to include a permanent office in Tirana, and US sales and marketing team
• 2016 Catering for big senders: we introduced new, larger service plans at phpList.com in order to serve new markets, from 200,000 messages per month to 100 million messages per month
• 2017-2019 New hosting infrastructure: we inverted the phpList services infrastructure paradigm to provide limitless horizontal scaling, node redundancy, and datacenter-independence
• 2017 Product overhaul: we redesigned the phpList application interface, addressing the #1 pain point of the phpList community from the preceding years, and later added automated update delivery and installation
• 2018 GDPR compliance: we added new features, documentation and procedures to make phpList a leader in the field of data regulation compliance
• 2018 Monthly releases: we adopted Scrum development principles and established monthly releases for phpList applications, releasing improvements from the community and company alike more quickly (now on our 14th monthly release!)
• 2019 Next-gen product: we re-wrote our flagship product using the sophisticated Symfony framework, into an initial release of phpList 4, with a new Rest API, and included this with phpList releases
• 2015-2019 Promoted Open Source education: we spoke at tens of events around Europe, frequently as conference sponsors, on topics including Open Source communities, economics, workflows, and marketing. We also ran Hackathons, introducing students to web development and sponsored the local Tirana hackerspace

A fresh phpList

My leaving coincides with the fruition of two big projects at phpList: deploying updated company branding, and launching a new commercial website. We’ve been hard at work on these two and the many benefits they’ll bring. Stay tuned for more details shortly!

Thank you

Stepping in to lead a large and established Open Source community is a scary ordeal. Rituals, gurus, procedures, and norms can be challenging to learn and adapt to: lore generally isn’t documented. Thank you to the phpList community for tolerating and then embracing me. Thank you to phpList Ltd. staff for accepting and then embodying our methodologies. And thank you Michiel Dethmers for establishing the world’s first and most popular Open Source email marketing system and a community around it.