Brandon Kelly

Midway through 2009, I decided to quit my dream job.

I’d wanted to work at Apple – specifically apple.com – since high school. At the time, Apple was growing cooler by the day, with the iPod, iTMS, OS X, and Steve. As a budding web designer/developer and Apple fanboy, to whatever small extent I saw myself working on the Web professionally after school, apple.com was it.

Beyond that very specific pipe dream, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. The Web was too new to be taken seriously as a college subject, and I enjoyed it too much to mentally associate it with a “career”. So I went to a community college with no specific major in mind.

While there, my friend got a design internship at a local “digital communications agency” called Design Reactor. He told me they had another open internship for an engineer, and encouraged me to apply. So I did.

During the interview, my soon-to-be boss told me I was overqualified for the internship. He offered me a real, full-time engineering job instead. So I took it.

Not getting the hint the universe was trying to give me, I kept going to school for another semester, and even took a career counseling class to get ideas for what I could do with my life. It wasn’t until I received my first promotion and a salary bump that it finally clicked: I’m good at this, I enjoy this, and this could also be a career.

Two years later, a couple close colleagues and I left Design Reactor for another agency, Level Studios, which just happened to be the agency of record for apple.com. During my interview I made it Very Clear that I’d like to be on the Apple team, and that’s exactly where I ended up. They even assigned me a desk in Apple’s marketing building, right alongside the rest of Apple’s web team!

I got to work on a little bit of everything: marketing pages for iPhones and iPods; a page promoting custom font faces in Safari; a JS-based QuickTime VR polyfill (used for those draggable 360° product viewers they used to have); you name it. And I got to work with some extremely smart, talented, and wonderful people. I loved every minute of it.

Shortly after taking the job at Level, I was contracted to make some improvements to “Playa”, an ExpressionEngine plugin I had written while at Design Reactor. I wasn’t really involved with EE anymore, but it was a “name your price” sort of offer, and I got to keep all the IP, so it was too good to pass up.

Playa 1.0 was just a clone of another plugin (Mark Huot’s “MH Multi-Rel”) with a nicer UI inspired by Django’s many-to-many relationship field. By the end of the contract, it was something else entirely, and it felt worthy of going commercial. I built a quick licensing mechanism and released Playa 2.0 for $69 (nice).

It was an instant success. So I got to work on a second commercial plugin: a CKEditor integration called “Wygwam”.

Before long, those two plugins were generating more revenue than I was making at my day job. But with more revenue came more support. It became increasingly difficult to balance working at Apple with working on the plugins. Eventually I had to choose one.

As much as I loved working at Apple, I’d always liked the idea of running my own business, and this was my chance to give it a shot. So I chose the plugins. I was incredibly torn over the decision though. I gave Level a six month notice, hoping I could maybe work something out before then. Six months passed and the situation hadn’t miraculously improved, so on December 31, 2009, I said my goodbyes.

The next seven weeks were total chaos. I designed and built a website for Pixel & Tonic – a name I’d come up with a few months prior, after a night of gin & tonics – including a new checkout flow and licensing system. I also prepared updates for each of my plugins, and decided to launch “FF Matrix” as a standalone commercial plugin. (It was part of a free field type bundle up until that point.)

And then, on February 23, 2010 – 15 years ago today – Pixel & Tonic officially launched.

The work paid off: plugin revenue literally doubled overnight, and P&T quickly became a household name in the ExpressionEngine community.

Within a couple months, I had enough consistent revenue to convince Brad(’s wife) to quit his cushy Nvidia job and join P&T. Brad and I met at Design Reactor, and we both left around the same time. We wanted to build an online booking application together – like Calendly (which didn’t exist yet) – and hiring him was going to accelerate that.

About a year into it, we realized that the biggest challenge we faced wasn’t technical; it was sales and marketing. The effort to win any one customer just wasn’t going to be worth it in the short term. We were going to need to raise some capital if we wanted to stay afloat, which wasn’t a path we especially wanted to take.

So we cut our losses, and decided to do something more in our wheelhouse: build a new CMS.

In a blog post announcing P&T’s launch, I wrote:

I want to expand. Not just in that I want to do this full time. I mean grow the business. Employ other people, and find new ways to better service the EE/web communities.

I knew vaguely what I wanted: for P&T to be a “real” business, so my little side gig could become a “real” job in turn. But my experience with real jobs was so slim at the time, I didn’t really comprehend what that meant. I’d never actually stuck with a job for more than two years. I sure as hell didn’t expect this one to last 15.

Yet here we are, 15 years later with no end in sight. Pixel & Tonic has grown to 16 people from four different continents, and Craft has become the most popular indie CMS on the Web, used by thousands of developers around the world. We’ve built out the ecosystem with our own ecommerce platform, plugin marketplace, and cloud hosting product, and we’ve hosted conferences in seven different countries. All without taking a cent of funding.

It’s been a wild ride. If you’re reading this, I probably have you to thank for it. So thank you for helping make the ultimate dream job a reality. (See what I did there?)

Here’s to the next 15!