2021 Summary

2021 is over, and what a year! Let’s see: January 2021 we had no logo, no website, a team of 3, no social media, and Backlight.dev, one year in the making, was not a beta yet. 12 months later, time to recap, how much did we accomplish?

A Team is born

We started the year as a team of 4 and finished it with 15 members, split into 5 countries. Each member of the team is fully remote, thus allowing for wider reach in our recruiting process (things get easier once office location is removed from the equation). We now have a dream team ready to take on 2022!

We grew our product line

Backlight

On September 15th, Backlight.dev was released on Product Hunt. 700 votes and a thousand new Backlight users later, we can say it has been a successful launch although it’s only the beginning of the journey: we keep adding features, starter kits, and improving each aspect of the product.

WebComponents

Exactly 2 years after the launch of WebComponents.dev, we reached 100,000 users, and still counting!

In an effort to grow the web components community and allow small companies to benefit from our technology without the cost barrier we reduced the price of the two higher-tier plans into a single $5 plan.

Style-dictionary-play

We launched style-dictionary-play.dev last November, an online 100% free playground for Amazon’s design token library. Originally developed to be integrated into Backlight, we thought it could help a lot of people save a lot of time and made it one of our open source projects

More to come

We still have cards in our sleeve, keep an eye out a new product could be announced soon 🤫

We survived the Advent of Code

25 days - 25 features. What first sounded like a bright idea, soon became a daily jump-scare for the team. It usually went:

Marketing - Are we good for Today’s feature?

Dev team - Almost there, just need to release

CEO - don’t break anything I have a demo in 1 hour

Release - break things

Everyone - getting commando-style bug-hunting

Release 2 - works

Everybody - Day 3 done! 23 to go, see y’all tomorrow!

Joke aside, we had a lot of fun, came up with awesome features for our entire product range, no better time than Christmas to give back to the community! Read the recap

Pushing for Open Source

Open source is a principle that we value, a lot. For 2022, in an effort to give back to the community, we will have two different approaches.

First, we will fill up the open source page that we recently released, where our users and friends can see our contribution.

Second, we are actively sponsoring projects that we believe in, like we recently did becoming gold sponsor of Vite.

Keep an eye out for 2022, we have a lot in the pipe 🤘