Celebrating 1 year after 10 years in the making

When you’re building a company, it’s important to celebrate your wins. Even the smallest.

Sure, there’s still plenty of work to do but one of the biggest benefits of doing this is it allows you to stop and reflect.

Reflection is powerful.

It gives the brain an opportunity to pause inside the chaos of whatever you’re doing. You can untangle and sort through experiences, recognize ups and downs, and create meaning. This meaning becomes learning, which can then inform future mindsets and actions.

Seriously, reflection is powerful stuff.

For us at Lemon Squeezy, as we pass the 1-year mark since launching to the public there is plenty to look back on and be proud of what we’ve built.

There will always be things we could have done better but it’s important to highlight the things we did right too.

No overnight success

The truth is, the success we’re having is no mistake. This is 10+ years of mistakes, battle scars, and raw experience all wrapped into an easy-peasy UI.

For the past decade, our individual specialties have been in building our own digital lemonade stands.

What Lemon Squeezy is today, is something we’d use ourselves.

We’re taking all of those learnings and squeeeeeeeezing them into one amazing platform. And we believe that all the blood, sweat, tears, cuts, bruises, and concussions we’ve suffered from doing this for so long, qualifies us to do so.

A year of consistency

The biggest takeaway from what we did right was — consistency.

We showed up every day and we executed a lof of the boring things right. Pushing pixels, slinging code, product direction, tweets, emails, blog posts, etc. The list goes on.

Here’s a look back and everything we shipped:

• Lemon Drop #01, #02, #03, #04, #05, #06, #07
• Support for almost every currency and payout method all around the globe
• API
• WordPress plugin
• Custom domains
• Lead magnets
• Free trials
• Abandoned cart emails
• Public roadmap
• Email marketing
• Loads of UI updates
• Test mode
• 1,000’s support tickets
• And we were the product of the year finalist 😻

Like most things, we can always be better but for a small team, we did what we had to do.

Fast forward to today. The team is growing and we’re excited to finally be hiring. Not to mention we’re making strides in our roadmap, and we couldn’t be more excited about the companies we’ve onboarded to trust us in powering their payments.

Looking ahead

As we spring into the next wave of work, the consistency will only get better. As the team size is more than doubled and we have a very clear and defined roadmap. Some of the most exciting things we’re eager to bring to life:

• Massive additions to APIs and documentation
• Expanded features for Saas companies
• Developer-focused tools & packages
• Checkout customization
• New affiliate feature
• Website builder
• Email templates
• Email drips
• Last but not least, a shiny-new Lemon Squeezy website 🤫

A raw reflection

In a recent episode of the Make Lemonade podcast, I sat down and reflected on the past year and what we’re thinking about as we look to expand the team.

As your company grows, the problems don’t go away, you just experience new ones. For us, building a team that is “all-in” is one of the top priorities. Hopefully, as we continue to share our journey we can look back and smile on all the milestones.

At the end of the day, I think the team will be pretty happy to reflect on what we’ve built.

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