2023 Review – A Year of Incredible Growth for Rocket.net

As we leap into 2024, it’s time to reflect on the incredible year we had here at Rocket.net.

Celebrating our anniversary back in June as a 3 year old hosting company, we spent the majority of the 2023 focusing on supporting our growth and planning ahead for the continued scale of Rocket.net.

From implementing massive API enhancements to restructuring our support team, we’ve prepared for what we feel is going to be the biggest year of our careers – 2024.

Before diving into our 2023 review, I want to thank our entire team for continuing to go the distance for our customers. In 2023, we maintained an impressive 97% customer satisfaction rate across over 45,000 interactions with a sub 1 minute average response time; beyond incredible.

I’d also like to take this time to thank each and every one of our customers for their support and trust. Every single staff member understands the importance of your business and we are beyond thankful for the opportunity to work together and promise to continue to deliver every day.

2023 Rocket.net Highlights

As we reflect on 2023, I wanted to highlight some of our achievements that we’re extremely proud of.

97% CSAT – In 2023, we maintained an industry leading 97% customer success rate in over 45,000 conversations.

151 Five Star Reviews on Trustpilot – We received our 151st five star review on Trustpilot in 2023. As always, this really hits home for us as we do not ask for these reviews, customers find the time to do these completely on their own and it speaks volumes to our team’s hard work.

7.2PB Bandwidth and 84B Requests – In 2023, we served over 7.2 Petabytes of data and a whopping 204 Billion requests! That’s over double the delivery we did in 2022.

Executive Expansion – In 2023, we announced the addition of our CTO, Dave Koston. Since joining, Dave has made an enormous impact contributing directly to our overall platform stability and scalability.

Profitability – As one of the very few bootstrapped businesses in our industry, we continued to stay disciplined and maintain a very cash-flow positive business.

$4.5mm ARR – We officially hit $1 million in annual revenue in August, 2022, and closed out 2022 at $1.8mm ARR. In 2023, we closed the year at an impressive $4.5mm ARR, making 2023’s growth rate 150%!

< 1 minute response time – As you start to scale your business, keeping up with quality customer service can be challenging. I’m happy to share that as we more than quadrupled in size, we maintained a sub 1 minute response time on support.

Feature Development – At Rocket.net, we’re never “done” with our product. Over the last year, we continued to release valuable features driven by customer demand.

2023 In-Depth

Now, let’s dive into some nitty gritty details behind some of these 2023 highlights.

Revenue Growth

In 2023, we almost doubled our business ending at an impressive $4.5mm ARR. This is an incredible testament to our hard work and dedication to our customers here at Rocket.net.

While it’s not all about the money for us, I like to share these numbers to not only build confidence for our customers and team, but to inspire others with our journey.

We are one of the very few bootstrapped companies left in our industry and we take great pride in customer success. In the end, our customers are largely responsible for our continued and impressive year over year growth and we will continue to do everything we can for their business.

Continued Customer Success

At Rocket.net, our customers are our top priority. While it may sound obvious, companies can tend to scale and forget about just how crucial the customer relationship is.

Everything we do at Rocket.net always has to bubble up to customer success. Whether it’s launching a new feature or implementing a new policy, we always ask ourselves “How does this impact our customers?”

In 2023, our team did an incredible job handling customer support. With over 45,000 conversations in Live Chat at a 97% customer satisfaction rate, our actions speak far louder than our words:

One thing I’m most proud of is how well our support is able to scale alongside our revenue growth, creating a $201,000+ Revenue Per Employee factor.

We never want to have our staff under pressure, so we’re never afraid to hire when needed (In fact, we’re hiring now!), but thanks to our staffing policies and structure, internal tooling and enterprise-grade API and control panel, we’re able to keep support at a minimum as we maximize our growth.

Make sure to read the post from our new Director of Operations, Danielle Hardy all about how we’ve had to scale our support organization internally.

Product Development

In 2023, it may seem like we were a bit quiet on new feature development, but it’s for great reason.

We spent the second half of 2023 preparing our platform for the growth we’re anticipating in 2024. From implementing 90% end to end test coverage on our API to completely rebuilding our deployment process, we spent much needed time stabilizing things and preparing a foundation for what’s to come in 2024.

Some of the things we accomplished in 2023:

API Improvements – We made massive improvements to our API when it comes to our testing and deployment processes making our API the enterprise-grade our customers deserve.

Platform Analytics – We integrated datadog at an incredible level allowing us to trace a click in the portal directly back to the API to ensure we’re always running in optimal state.

While we have some BIG things coming in 2024 that I can’t share just yet, here are some of the new features already in flight:

Site Templates/Site Cloning – The #1 requested feature on Rocket.net is the ability to clone a site. To take this a step further, we’re going to be launching what we call “Site Templates” so customers can deploy a WordPress site, install the necessary plugins and/or themes, then quickly create a template that can be used on future installs.

Improved Authentication – At Rocket.net, we take security very seriously. In the beginning, we wanted to get to market as quickly as possible to validate our platform. Since then, we’ve grown at an incredible rate and recognize it’s time to take it a step further. We will be implementing an all-new identity provider to support SSO with various providers, including SAML integrations for Enterprise. This will also enable 2FA on all Rocket.net accounts.

Enhanced Backup Retention – We will be pushing from 14 days to 30 days on all of our daily backups. This will come at no additional charge and be available very soon to all customers.

Improved Staging Functionality – If you asked me today, I would tell you that the thing we could improve the most is our staging functionality. While we have made massive improvements to the current system in the last few weeks, we are working hard to completely rewrite our staging system.

These are just some of the things we have in store for 2024, but they speak volumes to how we are continuing to service our customers to provide them with maximum value.

While we continue to iterate on the existing feature set, we do have some very big things we’ll be announcing in the next few weeks, so stay tuned!

Looking Ahead Into 2024

While 2023 was a great year and put us in a phenomenal position, our entire team is incredibly excited for 2024. In 2024, we will be sponsoring more WordCamps, contributing more to WordPress core, and providing the most incredible and unique experience in the market.

In 2024, we will remain committed to our customers to provide them with the best possible experience for their business. We will continue to go the extra mile and do whatever it takes to make our customers successful as well as our team here at Rocket.net.

With that said, if you’re heading to any WordCamp or events this year, we would love to meet! Listed below is a current list of places to catch us in 2024. We have an all-new events page coming very soon as we’re constantly adding more and more events!

WordCamp Nepal – January 12-13, 2024 in Nepal

WordCamp Phoenix – February 9-10, 2024 in Phoenix, AZ

Cloudfest – March 7-9, 2024 in Europa-Park, Germany

Wordcamp Asia – March 7-9, 2023 in Taipei, Taiwan

Tastemaker – March 13-16, 2024 in Chicago, IL

Cloudfest US – June 5-8, 2024 in Austin, TX

WordCamp US – September 17-20, 2024 in Portland, OR

As you can see, we definitely have a busy 2024 ahead of us, but we’re thrilled! More events, more features, and more success.

In closing, I would again like to thank our amazing customers and astronauts, as well as wish everyone a Happy, Healthy, and Prosperous New Year!