ScaleMath 2024 Year in Review

Welcome to ScaleMath’s 2024 year in review. 

First of all – Happy New Year, and here’s to 2025! 🥂

I hope all of you have had an incredible winter break (or Christmas 🎄 break for those who celebrate) & wonderful New Year’s Eve with family and friends. 

Here’s a quick recap in case you’re here for the first time:

• ScaleMath is the operating partner of choice for industry-leading companies with a strong focus on customer acquisition and experience. In short, we run growth (product marketing, strategy, and beyond) for your favorite companies. 
• We’re a team of creative & driven operators (interested in joining us? Email us at [email protected] – try to make it impossible to ignore you. We get inundated with hundreds of applications every week). 
• From writing and technical documentation to email (and beyond) – we’re the team category leaders trust to deliver best-in-class content and the outcomes other agencies can’t. Let’s talk.
• The outcome: Build better software, products, and services. Reach more users. 

And let’s just say this year … we delivered.

💳 Over 1M conversions

📈 Growing traffic value by an average of 210%

🤝 Expanded our team (and kept everyone already with us … retention ♥️)

👨‍💻 Started dogfooding our upcoming software product internally

… and so much more.

2024 was far from an easy year, but I’m proud to say we’ve still never been stronger than we are today. We’ve retained every single company we signed on in 2024. We’ve dialed in our focus with an easier (less convoluted) application process that will continue to evolve. 

And of all the companies we work with, we only stopped working with a single company. 

Most conventional business advice would tell us to consider this a resounding success, but all companies matter to us. We had been advising a startup for ~ four years. Despite accounting for less than 2% of our annual revenue, we treated them as though they were irreplaceable – treating all aspects of our work for them as if we owned a majority share of the company, pulling out all the stops whenever needed. 

This is exactly how I always wanted and still want us to operate ScaleMath. 

When we stopped working with them, and on all the rare occasions we stop working with a company, I fear that this runs the risk of changing this mindset. Not just for me but for the team as a whole. To say this was an irrational fear would be an understatement. 

In the months since moving on from what I failed to realize was a startup with a very toxic culture, I haven’t felt this refreshed and happy to wake up the work we do in a while. 

So, while not all companies and leadership are equal, our commitment to operating under the premise that they are – until they really want to make it clear to us that they aren’t – isn’t changing. And we did it all by keeping the team a very reasonable size. It’s very easy to spend to grow and many glorify doing so. We want to do things differently. Every dollar we save is a dollar we can pass back to our customers. Lean & efficient remains at our core. 

Thank you to our customers for the incredible year. You are our lifeblood, and we literally love you. 🫶 ❤️

Here’s a bit of a look back at the year 2024:

We (finally) gave scalemath.com a proper facelift

It’s been a long time coming. For about as long as we’ve been around, the ScaleMath website hasn’t accurately represented us, what we stand for, and what we do. 

I’m super excited to have this new site heading into 2025.

This is version 3 (take a look at version 1 and 2 below 😅) – it’s 3.0. We intend to take this shell and use it to iterate throughout 2025. We have a ton of pages that haven’t been included in this initial launch, i.e. service pages for the individual capabilities our team has across video tutorials, product documentation, customer onboarding, etc. 

This is all on the way & should be making it to the site in early 2025. 

Note: We decided to stick with a traditional WordPress setup for this project as opposed to migrating it over to Next.js for the frontend, because I wanted a setup that would be easier for the team to iterate, and add to it over time without taking attention away from our frontend engineers building Workover. 😅

Here are the three versions of our site we’ve had to date, from oldest to newest:

This first version was built by Mike Oliver – powered by GeneratePress, which makes sense, seeing as he went on to join the GeneratePress team, which is still doing great work in the community.

Powered by OllieWP. I whipped this together myself using Ollie as a part of my own experimentation with full-site editing. This site served us well as a slight facelift of V1, and considering it was put together in a few hours, I’d say we extracted a good amount of value from it. The majority of our operating advisory and services pipeline currently comes through referrals and personal connections as opposed to through scalemath.com – the site itself and what we use it for are (also) going to be a bigger focus for us in 2025. 

Fast-forward to today, here are the main parts of this setup: 

• Bricks: a newer builder, extremely performant, and as close to a developer-oriented workflow as you can get without going fully custom (or building with a stack you can properly version control with Git, i.e., Next.js / Tailwind CSS). 
• Automatic CSS: excellent CSS framework with a developer experience that makes it easy to build sites that are maintainable. 
• Advanced Custom Fields: we make use of custom post types for lots of things from case studies, testimonials, and service pages. ACF remains our plugin of choice for this. 
• Presto Player: we don’t currently have a lot of videos present on the site, but this is something that we intend to experiment with in 2025 … particularly for some of the service pages where we will likely have walkthroughs and examples.
• Rank Math: the #1 WordPress SEO plugin. 
• Patchstack: the best security solution for WordPress (and soon beyond). 
• WS Form: an extremely extensible forms plugin for WordPress, easy to style – dare I say, the #1 WordPress form plugin. 
• Tally: in addition to WS Form, as we wanted forms that could trigger in extremely aesthetic popups for easy subscriptions/applications regardless of the page you’re on (instead of directing everyone to a contact us page). We thought about building it directly ourselves but it wasn’t worth the time investment to do so. 
• Hosted on our hosting infrastructure powered, which runs on UpCloud & RunCloud behind the scenes. 

This is my first time using Bricks. The community is strong, and I can see why. It’s a great workflow. Compared to Next.js projects, I miss having a proper Git-based workflow. 

But I love that it’s now easy for everyone who needs to be on the team to update the copy on the site, ship a new landing page (or at least the first version of a landing page) with components based on other existing pages, etc. Once we see how we get on with this setup on scalemath.com, I’ll likely get the team to expand our use of it (possibly even standardizing all of our marketing sites to it) … even the one for Workover so that we can separate the people working on marketing site pages from those working on product UI so it’s easier for work to happen in parallel.

Attending WordCamp Europe in Torino, Italy 🇮🇹

This year’s WordCamp Europe was in Torino, Italy. 

As every year, it’s always a great time to hang out with industry friends and clients as well as stay in tune with everything that’s going on in the WordPress industry – beyond what you see online.

Especially seeing as the conversations online are currently dominated by drama that is ultimately not in the interest of the future of WordPress.

Next stop … Basel, Switzerland 🇨🇭

We look forward to attending WordCamp Europe next year in Basel, Switzerland, and hope to see many of you there. If you’ve never attended a WordCamp and are thinking about coming along, do it! We’d love to see you there, and I’m confident you’ll love it!

Also, if it makes it any less daunting, connect with our team ahead of time, and we’ll look forward to hanging out when you make it to Basel.

In honor of being in Switzerland this time next year: Bis bald! 👋

Attending Dublin Tech Summit 🇮🇪

We also had the pleasure of attending this year’s Dublin Tech Summit along with some of RunCloud’s leadership team as sponsors and meeting the local developer/SaaS community. 

Dublin has a really great startup culture. In fact, I’d say it’s perhaps more approachable than London’s, which strangely doesn’t have that many events – let alone any flagship ones consistently every year. Not to say there aren’t any, lots of companies host events throughout the year with 20-30 people in attendance which are also great. 

Personal / Random Updates

Improving My Setup

The main improvements to the setup this year were in the audio/video department. 

• Canon 90D (I also use this as my webcam for meetings)
• Shure MV7
• Elgato Key Light (game-changer)
• BenQ Desk Lamp
• Elgato Prompter 
• Elgato Neo Stream Deck

We are planning to make a return to YouTube – some experimentation there late 2024 and the plan is to really dial things up a notch in 2025.

2 Weeks in New York 🗽

I spent just over 2 weeks in New York City in the summer. Given the startup/tech community here, I intend to spend at least 2 weeks a year here – using the time to meet a few founders in-person, work remotely, and feed off of the insane energy this city has. 

🗽NYC-based founder or operator? Please email me [email protected], and let’s try to meet up sometime in 2025.

Learning to refocus

Moving into the new year, we’ve made the decision to wind down our relationships with a few companies we started working with in 2022. This was a tough decision to make, but it was clear that it was time for us to re-evaluate and refocus in 2024. 

It was increasingly starting to feel as though they were becoming a distraction that took us away from doing work for what I can only describe as core clients. 

Upon doing so, it became clear that our ambition is far more centered around working for select, “great-fit” (not just good-fit) clients and really focusing on having a much bigger impact together. 

Our software product put on hold, to be revisited in 2025.

In the summer of 2022, we started investing in starting a new company. I’m really looking forward to being able to share more on this in the coming 1-2 years. 

In the meantime, here are some lessons we learned for those interested: 

If you’re bootstrapping, act like it. 

A mistake I made for a few months was thinking that, due to where we were at with ScaleMath, I shouldn’t necessarily consider the amount of money being invested in the short-term. We’re going after a big, incredibly competitive vertical, so understandably, it’s going to take time to compete, and that was something I prepared myself for. 

Perhaps a bit too much. To quantify that a bit, the product designer we worked with is now leading design for Laravel. But that meant we drifted from the bootstrapping mindset, which I’m incredibly relieved is no longer the case this year as we prepare to resume the development of Workover and (if ready) open up the doors to customers in 2025.

Don’t say no to funding from the right people. 

Note: This is something we are yet to do and do not really intend to do short term.

But my point here is that if the problem you’re going after is big enough, don’t shy away from taking on funding just because you want to retain 100% ownership.

That would be silly and short-sighted. Why risk failure over getting someone involved that is not only going to bring money to the table but likely also bring experience to the table?

This is especially true when solving hard problems in competitive verticals. Something that evidently isn’t going to be easy for a team of any size. 

I still have a natural aversion to taking on funding because I think there is inherent value in bootstrapping your way to an elegant solution. A lot of founders who take on funding don’t know how to work towards the solution and instead throw money at the problem. 

Hire fast, fire faster. 

Hiring at ScaleMath is quite different, and there haven’t been many situations where I’ve felt that the way we handled things wasn’t the best way we could have at the time. 

At the new company, this is not exactly true. Hiring for a number of roles that I hadn’t previously hired for (oftentimes with help from recruiters) led to us keeping onboard people for a prolonged period of time when really we should have realized sooner rather than later that they weren’t the right fit for us. They were not necessarily bad hires, just not at the right time. Great people who can and likely will do incredible things at another company but just didn’t really fit into the environment of every specific business at every time. 

Building great software is hard. 

Let me clarify that statement. 

Building great software that not only works incredibly well but feels delightful to use is challenging and not something you can shortcut.

Not a lot of software achieves this. 

So, in a time of AI uncertainty, remember that true craft cannot be outsourced to AI (the same way only the sloppiest of thinking currently can).

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And that’s a wrap on 2024. Here’s to 2025! 🥂

– Alex Panagis