2024 Year in Review: Risks, Mistakes, and Rewards

It’s easy to focus on celebrating achievements and milestones, and we’ve had plenty to celebrate over the past 12 months.

But at WP Umbrella, we believe in building in public and staying transparent with our users. That’s why I’ve taken a moment to look back at 2024 with fresh eyes to assess what we’ve accomplished, honestly and openly.

Taking Risks And Making Mistakes

Behind these numbers lies the reality of running a growing SaaS business: taking risks, making mistakes, and learning from them.

My co-founder and I only started paying ourselves in June. For the past two years, we’ve relied on unemployment support from the French state, living a frugal lifestyle and earning just enough to get by. Every penny we’ve made has been reinvested into WP Umbrella to help it grow.

In February last year, we made a bold decision: to spend more than we were earning. We hired a front-end engineer and a chief marketing officer, confident that our steady monthly growth would allow us to break even before we ran out of cash.

By September, after paying our team, we had just €5,000 left in the company bank account. It was tight—but we broke even and today, WP Umbrella is an extremely healthy, profitable company.

Lessons in Risk and Reward

After three years of entrepreneurship, I’ve come to believe that taking risks is essential to achieving rewards. But not all risks pay off. Unfortunately, the two people we hired didn’t meet our expectations, and we ultimately parted ways. It was a costly decision—both financially and emotionally. We had poured a lot of energy into onboarding them, including a physical onboarding, a startup retreat, and an unforgettable experience at WordCamp Europe.

A Retreat Full of Lessons

I spend most of my time in the Alps, enjoying freeskiing, climbing, and mountaineering. Naturally, I chose Serre-Chevalier, where I live, as the location for our startup retreat. The plan was a mix of meaningful discussions about our roadmap, sharing meals full of cheese, hiking, and a rafting activity.

However, the retreat took an unexpected and deeply emotional turn during the rafting. Someone in the river needed urgent help, and we helped the rescue team pull them from the water. Tragically, despite the firefighters’ best efforts to revive them through chest compressions and resuscitation, they couldn’t save the person. Witnessing this so closely was a sobering reminder of life’s fragility.

Afterward, I gathered the team for an open conversation. I told them that life is too short and too precious to spend it doing work we don’t enjoy or find meaningful. I encouraged them to always come to me if they feel they’ve lost passion or purpose in their work, so we can find a solution together. Life is too short not to enjoy what we do.

We created WP Umbrella to do things differently and avoid unnecessary problems. We don’t like shady moves or overly complex solutions. We want to keep things simple and transparent so that tiny problems stay tiny problems. Why would anyone want problems anyway?

Organic Growth on Steroids

Our growth this year—152%—didn’t come from a massive marketing budget or flashy campaigns. Instead, it was fueled almost entirely by word of mouth from The Admin Bar facebook group and Reddit.

But this kind of growth requires more than luck—it’s about listening, improving, and delivering a product that truly solves real problems.

We’ve focused on delivering the best user experience we can in everything we do. Of course, it’s far from perfect, but we listen to what people need and do our best to deliver.

The first 11 months of the year felt like a race while holding our breath. Closing the feature gap with our competitors was no small task, and I’m incredibly proud of what the team accomplished:

• Safe Updates
• Domain Expiry Monitoring
• SSL Expiry Monitoring
• Alerting Center
• Multiple Custom Sending Domains
• Team Member Management

And completely redesigned UI/UX to fit these new features without overwhelming new users.

All of this while managing scalability and nurturing partnerships with plugin developers and hosting providers to ensure the best compatibility possible between for our service with third party tools.

By the end of 2024, we had almost closed the feature gap with our competitors. We spent December focused on stabilizing everything to ensure WP Umbrella is rock solid for 2025.

Constantly communicating and backing up 40,000 websites is a massive challenge—but if you’ve read this far, you already know that we thrive on challenges.

By the way, in 2024, we’ve also released a new backup technology and since February backups are stored in France, on server we own, and they are encrypted.

Scaling Through Collaboration In 2025

Every year, we choose a guiding keyword that serves as our compass. In 2023, it was FOCUS. In 2024, it was STABILITY. And now, as we look toward 2025, our focus shifts to SCALABILITY.

To achieve this, we’ll revisit and rebuild key parts of WP Umbrella, starting with the maintenance report feature. Each feature and interface will be reimagined to better address your needs and eliminate any friction you may experience.

Of course, we’ll continue to roll out new features, such as update automation, and put significant focus on improving our public API to empower developers and agencies to build their own thing out of WP Umbrella.

Enhancing Security Capabilities

Scaling isn’t something we can achieve alone. As much as we focus on improving WP Umbrella’s features and user experience, we know that collaboration is key to unlocking the next level of growth. That’s why a big part of our 2025 strategy is to deepen our integrations with other key players in the WordPress ecosystem.

WordPress security is a top concern for site managers, and we will work with a leading security provider to integrate advanced solutions into WP Umbrella. This collaboration will empower our users to address vulnerabilities proactively, protect their sites from potential threats, and provide an even higher level of service to their clients. By combining security with our maintenance tools, we aim to create a seamless, all-in-one experience for WordPress professionals.

Strengthening Hosting Provider Relationships

We’re also investing in stronger relationships with hosting providers. They are our main bottleneck, and we see tremendous value in working closely with providers to ensure WP Umbrella integrates effortlessly into their environments.

These integrations aren’t just about technical compatibility or new features. They’re about building a stronger WordPress ecosystem that really needs it right now.