Quarter Million Downloads Daily: How Taylor Otwell Built Laravel from Arkansas

From a spare bedroom in Arkansas to quarter million downloads per day—Taylor Otwell's journey defies every Silicon Valley playbook.

The creator of Laravel, the world's most popular PHP framework, built his empire far from tech hubs, worked alone for years, and turned down countless investors. Today, Laravel powers millions of applications worldwide, hosts conferences with 900+ attendees, and recently raised funding to scale even further—all while Otwell maintains his "average developer" philosophy.

In this candid interview, Otwell reveals the contrarian strategies that built a $57M company: why he stayed protective of his vision, how he handles the constant noise of open source feedback, and the crucial mindset shift from solo developer to VC-backed founder.

Taylor Otwell: Hi, I'm Taylor Otwell. I'm the creator of Laravel, an open source PHP framework for building web applications. So I started creating Laravel as a way for me to build web applications faster, and it was actually not my original intention to make it a big popular open source framework or community.

So the community's grown tremendously. We've gone from relatively a few downloads per day when I first released Laravel to now a quarter million downloads per day. Our first Laracon conference was in 2013, and we only had 90 attendees. At last year's Laracon in Dallas, Texas, we had over 900 attendees. Tons of developers around the world and almost every country in the world use Laravel to build incredible applications.

Taylor Otwell: I grew up in Hot Springs, Arkansas. It's a relatively small town in central Arkansas. I was always fairly interested in computers and the web as a kid. I think I built my first website when I was about 10 years old. I think I was one of the only kids I knew that knew how to build anything on the web, which was kind of fun because when you're the only kid in school that can build a website, everyone wants you to build a website for them.

Being around any other techie people or kids or startups, it's a very different world programming and being a developer in Arkansas than being, for example, in Silicon Valley. But overall I think that being in Arkansas has helped me maintain a level of focus and clarity on what I wanted to build that I probably wouldn't otherwise have had if I had been somewhere else.

College was a good experience in a sense because a lot of my professors were very old school programmers. Many of them had worked at NASA. Many of them did not even use a GUI on their computer—they were very old school nerdy programmer people teaching me core foundational programming concepts that apply across all languages.

Taylor Otwell: When I was working just like a day job as a software engineer, I always gravitated towards building tools for the other engineers at the company. I would always try to get side projects or get assigned to build things that would make us as developers more productive. I always found that more interesting than what the business was about.

I had some businesses that I wanted to build, some startup ideas, and PHP is a web programming language that is very easy to deploy out onto the web—it's easy to run and maintain and to ship. I needed sort of like a toolkit to build these web applications more quickly. There were other ways to do this in PHP, existing frameworks that were already out there. Many of them were kind of dated and maybe getting a little older, and I thought that I could build a more modern take on how to build web applications in PHP.

Once I was almost done with it, I thought, 'This is actually kind of cool and maybe other people would want to use Laravel to build things.' So that's when I decided to open source it, put documentation around it, and try to share it with the world.

Taylor Otwell: For the first 3 years of Laravel's life, I made no money on Laravel at all. It was totally open source. I had written my own scripts to automate this on my machine, but I decided to build a user interface around it and build a product out of shipping Laravel applications to the web, and I called that Laravel Forge, and I released that in 2014.

Honestly, I had no idea how it was going to perform, like how many customers it was going to have. I still honestly expected that I would need to work a day job even after I released Forge, but within probably a month or two of releasing Forge, Forge was making more money than I was making at my regular job. I was having to do customer support and I was having to fix bugs. I was in a situation where it was very obvious I could not do both things at the same time.

About 6 months after launching Forge, January 1st, 2015 was actually my first full-time day working on Laravel where I sat down in my home office, which was basically a spare bedroom at the time, and I was working on Laravel all day that day and have ever since.

Taylor Otwell: The first couple of years I was the only person at the company, so I wrote the front end, I wrote the back end, I did the customer support, I did the docs. I did everything. We made our first hire I think around 2016, 2017—I hired another engineer.

I think this is actually one mistake I made: I put off hiring too long. This may be common for other open source developers where when you create something open source or you create a product, you're extremely protective of it. It's your thing that you've created and you're scared that anyone's gonna come in and mess it up or mess up your vision for it. That made me very hesitant to hire, but then once I did I was like, 'Oh wow, I should have done this a long time ago.' Running a company by yourself can be stressful and a bit lonely.

Taylor Otwell: When you're building open source software, there's a lot of voices. They all have an opinion on where you should take the framework, and some of them are coming from a place of genuine constructive criticism and some of them are more like just haters of your project.

One really great piece of advice that another open source founder, Adam Wathan from Tailwind, gave me was that just like when you're in a band—say you're Metallica or you're Taylor Swift—if Metallica starts trying to cater to Taylor Swift fans, then they lose all of their core fans. In the same way, if Taylor Swift changes her core sound that her fans love and that they come to her concerts to hear, she upsets that core fan base. So play the hits for your fans. They love what you build, they're the core piece of your community.

I think it can be very tempting, especially when other smart people try to tell you, 'Oh, I think it should work this way' or 'I think you should do this.' It can be so tempting as an open source maintainer to go down these rabbit holes of 'OK well maybe if I add this feature then this group of people will finally use Laravel and start building with it.'

Taylor Otwell: In my experience, the people that sit on the sidelines and just shout criticisms at open source projects, if you were to follow their feedback and jump through that first hoop of what they want you to do, there's always another carrot on a stick they're dangling out there. They're like, 'Oh thanks for doing that, but I don't like this either and if you change this, oh that would be great.' You keep jumping through the hoops, but they never actually become a user of the product, which can be incredibly frustrating.

So listen to just your core audience that's already building with Laravel and they love what you're doing and they have businesses on Laravel. It's important to hear outside feedback too, but just use caution with how far you stray from your core beliefs and what you think your product needs to be.

Taylor Otwell: I had never really considered taking outside investment before Accel. I used to get emails about that pretty frequently and I would always just delete them, which Accel found hilarious. The reason for that honestly is just that we were happy at the company as just a small team working on whatever we wanted to work on, not wanting someone to mess up what I had built.

As developer expectations have risen quite a bit since 2011, the user experience and the tooling that developers expect—they expect it to be really, really good. The bar just keeps getting higher for how polished and how productive and how great your products have to be. I knew that if we wanted to take Laravel to the next level, it was gonna take a lot of work and it was gonna have to be some pretty ambitious projects that were far beyond anything we had built before. It was gonna take a much bigger team to build these things, and that's what led me down the path of raising money with Accel.

Taylor Otwell: It's been a gradual process changing from a solo developer to running a bootstrap company to now trying to lead a VC-backed company, and they all work really differently, honestly. When I was bootstrapping the company, it was extremely flat, but at the same time, when you go from 10 to 50, there are just new layers of organizational hierarchy and management that comes with that.

But I think what hasn't changed is our core mission to build awesome developer tools—that's still the mission we're on. Our underlying mission of building great products, nurturing a really great community with community events like Laracon and Laravel Live and meetups, all of that is the same. But I feel like I should have grown this kind of team much earlier, but I was scared to and I didn't know how to really. Bringing on people that can help us build these products and help us grow this community beyond what I'm capable of myself, and I'm super excited to see where we can go in the next few years.

Taylor Otwell: I've always said I see myself as a very average developer, which sounds bad, but I think it's actually been a really good thing because there's a lot of average developers in the world, and I feel like I build tools that help the average developer do their job quickly and that is just statistically a lot of people.

When you have an opportunity to build tools that people use pretty much 8 hours a day at their job, then you're making a huge impact on someone's personal enjoyment of their life. I think it's really interesting and amazing and this huge privilege, and it's something very few companies and software tools really get to do.

Everything I've built at Laravel was essentially solving a problem that I had encountered in reality. Many of them are things that I needed, and I think that if possible you should try to build a business that way where you are a customer yourself.

Taylor Otwell: The most common advice I give first is try to solve a problem that you yourself have. These are the problems that you're going to understand the most deeply.

The second piece of advice I would give would be do the hardest parts first. This is something that I think a lot of web developers that are trying to start new products get wrong. While they're the most motivated at the beginning of that idea, they build a lot of the easy parts like they might build the login form first, and you spend a month or two building all of these really easy parts and you're kind of procrastinating in this clever way of tackling the core hardest problems you need to solve to really make this product great.

Then once you've wasted all of your initial enthusiasm kind of dancing around, you sort of lost your momentum, especially as a solo founder. So for me when I have a new product idea, I absolutely try to build the most impossible part first, like the part I'm not sure that I even have the skills to build or understand. If you do that at the beginning, you're the most motivated and if you crack it and you nail it, the other parts are just all downhill from there. If you fail, I would much rather fail after 2 weeks than wasting 3 months. So do the hardest part first and try to solve problems you deeply understand, being customer number one yourself.