year-in-review

2014 in Review: The Beaver Builder Story

I’ll probably never jump off a bridge, but when all the cool kids are doing something it’s usually worth at least considering. That said, after thoroughly enjoying many of the Year in Review posts that are circulating around the WordPress ecosphere, we decided to whip one up ourselves. This year has been a wild ride for Beaver Builder. We launched in April of 2014, so we’re still a very young product…

The Preface

Beaver Builder is a classic case of “scratching our own itch.” Like many web agencies, over the last several years WordPress has become our goto for just about everything. One of our services was a budget-website/template service. We would select a handful of themes to present to our clients and let them choose their favorite one. Custom designs take a lot of time. Utilizing an existing theme enabled us to focus on the build and the marketing, and churn out quality websites with a lower price tag.

This approach worked pretty well, but it wasn’t perfect. First, we were always on the learning curve of a new theme. Just like people, many gorgeous WordPress templates are a real mess on the inside! Spaghetti code, bad practices, confusing structure, overwhelming theme options, etc., etc. The speed at which we could finish a site was largely dependent on the usability of the theme our client chose. This inconsistency was frustrating. We always wished we had a single template/framework, that we knew inside and out, that was flexible enough to recreate the en vogue designs our clients wanted.

The Idea

We had two clients that really helped us realize the niche that Beaver Builder fills. One was a project for a larger company that wanted a completely custom website. They also wanted complete control over editing all of the text and images on every page. The second client was a gentleman who wanted a website, again, where he could edit everything himself. He didn’t mind investing up front, but he had no desire to continually pay someone for edits and changes. For client 1, we opted to use Advanced Custom Fields and custom page templates to build out the site. For client 2 (on his suggestion), we used SiteOrigin’s page builder plugin. Like many developers, we had always scoffed at page builders. We liked writing nice, clean markup. It’s fun and we’re good at it! But, using these two tools really opened our eyes to HUGE time-saving benefits of delivering an editable site.

Like many web agencies, a lot of mornings were spent emailing with past clients about small edits and updates. A date or heading needed to be changed, or an image needed to be swapped. Generally for these types of edits, more time is spent communicating than billable time doing the actual work. Neither of the two clients mentioned earlier came back with update requests and it was downright brilliant! The only downside was that neither ACF or the page builder plugin were particularly user friendly. Client’s 1 & 2 came back with questions on how to use their respective editing tools.

So, we started researching other page builders, looking for one that was efficient, worked on the front end, and was easy to use. Guess what, we couldn’t find one. In classic developer fashion, Justin (our lead dev), started pounding away at his own page builder in the evening time. It started as a framework theme with an integrated builder. But the more we worked on it, the more we realized it made sense to separate the two.

Skip ahead a few months and the FastLine Page Builder was born! We spent a lot of time building this tool, and we figured it could benefit other people as well, so we decided to try to sell it. We built a marketing page, agreed that most premium plugins/themes cost around $50-60 dollars (so ours should too), and there it was. We entered the premium plugin world.

We were familiar with the term GPL, but that was about it. We genuinely worried that if we didn’t copyright our code, a competitor could take it and put us out of business before we even got started. Particularly, the story of WPMU Dev and Joost de Valk’s WordPress SEO plugin made us nervous. What could we even do if one of the big boys decided to rip off our code? At the time, not adopting a GPL license seemed like the best choice.

After months of working on this project during off-hours, we anxiously awaited the money to start flowing in. Guess what, it didn’t. We had a small trickle of sales and, frankly, it was pretty discouraging.

The Name

Luckily for us though, one of our first customers was a “marketing guy.” He not-so-subtly told us that we had an amazing product, but our marketing sucked. He gave us some great free advice. We took it and it worked! So, we decided to bring him on as a contractor/consultant. On his suggestion, we doubled our prices, split our offering into different packages, and completely rebranded our product. He suggested that our name at the time, FastLine Page Builder, didn’t mean anything and that it was kinda “lame.”

Here’s another familiar story: we needed a name. Gosh, it’s hard to name a product. We spent weeks coming up with ideas. Everything depends on the name, and EVERY good name is seemingly taken (especially when you’re talking about getting the .com without paying a mint). We struggled with this for several weeks.

After much frustration, and in an attempt to get the guys to crack a smile, I started thinking about animals that build stuff. Bees build hives. Spiders build webs. Yeah, okay that’s a start. Beavers build dams… beaver build… it alliterates well.. I perked up and jokingly said, “how about Beaver Builder?” We laughed, “hahaha.” It’s funny, but no one will take us seriously with a name like that. But, like school girls, we couldn’t stop giggling about it. It was so fun and memorable. Luckily, compared to a suit-and-tie corporate culture, the WordPress culture is pretty casual and playful. After a bit of debate, we decided to try and pull it off!

GPL or Bust

I grew up in Silicon Valley and, ever since my first job at a hoity-toity Palo Alto coffee shop (i.e., startup central) when I was 14, I have always had a fascination with the startup ecosphere. One company that I followed very closely, almost from their creation, was Balsamiq. They blew up so quickly, and they were extremely transparent with the way they ran and marketed their business. This post in particular was my goto for what we needed to do to market Beaver Builder.

As suggested by Balsamiq, I wrote up a boilerplate email. I spent a half day making a list of 30-40 WordPress blogs and bloggers, then spent another day or two personalizing and sending out the emails. I spent a lot of extra time researching the people I was writing to, and ensuring that my emails were unique, complimentary, and didn’t sound spammy. I figured the personal touch would in turn result in everyone responding back with their excitement about writing an article about the FastLine Page Builder. I was very wrong. No one cared.

After scratching our heads for a bit, wondering why no one wanted to write about our awesome product, this article (and particularly this comment) by Jeff Chandler started making waves. Jeff came under fire for using the popularity of WP Tavern to “force” a product called VersionPress to adopt a GPL license. This hit very close to home, and Jeff’s statement forced us to completely rethink our perspective:

“The bottom line is, if you are entering the WordPress product market and don’t use the GPL or a compatible license, then good luck to you because you’ll need it.”

We had some heated debate amongst ourselves on whether to go GPL or not. In all honesty, the team member that was originally pushing for GPL had no idea what it really meant. It just seemed like the right thing to do. But, business is business, and sometimes what seems like the right thing isn’t. What we needed to do was educate ourselves on the GPL, and that’s what we did. What we found is that, while sites like GPL Club and other (arguably shady) GPL marketplaces exist, the WordPress community genuinely supports each other. Take Chris Lema’s recent post on the camaraderie of the WordPress community, “all our boats may rise and fall together..”

At this point, while we had been following the WordPress community for awhile, this is where we really started to understand what it is all about. We’re all in this thing together. Many of us could likely be making more money working for a big “suit-and-tie” company. But, for whatever reason, the idea of making a living while contributing to an open-source project (that’s mission is to Democratize Publishing) makes us feel good. Everyone gets that we wouldn’t be here without each other. This is a huge, symbiotic community, and it’s a really really cool thing to be a part of!

I am waxing on here, but this was a really pivotal moment for us. After our research, we we’re ready to trust the community and unlock our doors. We decided to remove our copyright and adopt a GPL license. Looking back, it was a great decision. Did you hear that, Jeff!? You can go ahead and write about us now ;)!!

Later, we decided to release a free version of Beaver Builder to the WordPress repo. As Boone Gorges suggested in his Be a Volunteer, not a Martyr WordCamp SF talk, this giving back not only made us feel good; it brought us exposure and business that we otherwise never would have received. Same story with our WordPress Customizer Import/Export plugin which did get featured on the Tavern! After rebranding, tweaking our marketing strategy, and adopting a GPL license.. things really started taking off!

In Closing

There’s a ton of details missing from this story, but as I sip my coffee here I realize I wrote way more than I was planning. Like everyone else, we’ve been struggling with how much support we can offer, whether our pricing structure provides value to our customers and whether it’s sustainable, trade marking our name and logo, moving from a general partnership to an LLC, and all sorts of other technical hurdles that could justify a blog series of their own. Just today, we’re trying to decide whether to “jump off the bridge” with some of the other cool kids and publish our financials. As of now, we’re going to keep a few secrets ;), but that may change in the future.

As always, we cherish every opportunity to eMeet and chat with everyone, so please don’t hesitate to let us know your thoughts or questions in the comments! Oh and of course, have a wonderful New Year!

Image Credit: zeitfaenger.at

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Robby McCullough's Bio

35 Comments

  1. Dave Bell on January 4, 2015 at 10:13 am

    Great post, great story, great product! Happy New Year! I wish you great success in 2015.

    I love using your software.

    I am hoping to get some clients and “roll it out” to them.

    WordPress is already fun. Beaver Builder makes it EASY and fun 🙂

    Dave



    • Robby McCullough on January 4, 2015 at 10:32 am

      Thanks Dave! Likewise, wishing you a great new year!



  2. Scott Bolinger on January 4, 2015 at 11:57 am

    Best of luck guys 🙂



    • Robby McCullough on January 4, 2015 at 12:23 pm

      Thanks Scott! Likewise to you and the AppPresser team. We heard a lot of buzz about you guys at WordCamp SF, and we think what you guys are working on is really cool stuff!



    • Seth on March 7, 2015 at 9:54 am

      I have attempted to apply BeaverBuilder to Apppresser with no luck — am I right that they do not work together?



      • Robby McCullough on March 7, 2015 at 12:15 pm

        Hey Seth! We haven’t tested Beaver Builder with Apppresser yet, so that’s definitely a possibility. If you don’t mind opening a support ticket, we’ll be happy to look into it for you. 🙂



  3. Leo Merkel on January 4, 2015 at 6:10 pm

    We use Beaver Builder with the Genesis Framework and Dynamik Website Builder. It’s what I call a dream team. We can develop and deliver in half the time now and have at the same time all the clean code for additional programming needs. Keep up the great work!



    • Robby McCullough on January 5, 2015 at 10:23 am

      Thanks a ton, Leo. Will do!!



  4. David Waumsley on January 5, 2015 at 2:54 pm

    What just happened? Big chunk of text, no instructions and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

    Nothing inspires more confidence than this kind of straightforward honestly. Please keep it up and (for entirely selfish reasons) I hope you have a wonderful and posterous year.



    • Robby McCullough on January 5, 2015 at 4:09 pm

      Glad you enjoyed it! I definitely got a bit carried away while writing, haha. We’ll definitely do our best to keep it up!



  5. Dev on January 5, 2015 at 7:56 pm

    Awesome stuff, Robby. Best wishes for 2015!



  6. Ken Westgaard on January 6, 2015 at 12:06 am

    Thanks for sharing your story! I’ve been following you guys for a couple of months now and your product looks very promising. It’ll be ideal for creating landing pages! So just waiting for that first client to test it out on.



    • Robby McCullough on January 6, 2015 at 11:14 am

      Excellent! Can’t wait to get you on the team 😉

      We actually have some really cool features planned for landing/squeeze pages! Stay tuned..



  7. Ed Stutzman on January 7, 2015 at 10:09 am

    Incredible story!

    It’s refreshing and incredibly inspiring to hear from folks, like yourself, who are true to themselves and their purpose without being afraid of transparency. It takes tremendous courage to do what you’ve done and I appreciate it.

    We bought the BeaverBuilder plugin last year and thoroughly enjoy the freedom and speed it gives us in building websites with WordPress.

    You and your entire team have a lot to be proud of.

    Thank you!



    • Robby McCullough on January 7, 2015 at 11:44 am

      Ed, if nothing else, I thought it would be nice to get this all written down as a historical record (for our own sake). I am so happy that you found it interesting. Thanks for the kind words and for your comment!



  8. Martin on January 8, 2015 at 12:58 am

    Awesome work 🙂 I´m so glad I found beaver builder. Just what i needed. I like the roadmap/news about the upcoming changes aswell! (browsing the forums/blog almost every day for new stuff) I wouldn’t mind if you posted more of that stuff too 😀

    Best wishes for 2015 and again thank you for an awesome plugin!

    Btw feel free to send me the swedish po.files when you release bigger updates 🙂



    • Robby McCullough on January 8, 2015 at 9:33 am

      Thanks Martin. Writing more and being a bit more active in the WP community is my new years resolution ;). Hopefully I’ll be able to keep it up.

      You may have to remind me on the .po file, but again, we can’t tell you how much we appreciate your help with that!



  9. Alessandro Curci on January 12, 2015 at 5:11 am

    My best wishes for your 2015 is…. get noticed and be acquired by Automattic!
    WP front end editing is officially “on hold”, I think mostly because is not an easy task to provide a rock solid back compatible new editing experience.

    IMHO the “next web” will be more oriented to widgets, and CMS to compositing interfaces, and probably there’s nothing more lean and friendly than beaver builder when it comes to UI and ease of use, it feels “native”.

    So, for Automattic, why reinventing the wheel and not just start from the best cutting edge front end editing plugin? For you and Automattic, please evolve shortcodes with the thing https://github.com/staylor/example-thing !



    • Robby McCullough on January 12, 2015 at 10:17 am

      Thanks Alessandro! We would certainly entertain that idea if Automattic reached out, haha. We’ll see 😉



  10. Mel Richards on March 1, 2015 at 11:48 pm

    Hey, nice to get the back story. Been playing around with BB today and man I’m impressed! I found out about you through Chris Lema’s post on drag n drop plugins. I’ve been looking for something like this for a long time! Finally, someone has built something that is lean, works well and is powerful! Nice work boys! Now to test it out with some Genesis child themes and membership plugins (iThemes Exchange)! But may have to ditch those for customized versions of your base theme… it’s pretty killer!

    I have a feeling BB is going to blow up this year! 🙂



    • Robby McCullough on March 2, 2015 at 7:51 am

      Hi Mel! Thanks so much for reaching out and sharing your thoughts! 🙂 You just made my morning.

      Please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any questions or concerns.



  11. I found my tribe at GoDaddy! | WebCami Cafe on November 13, 2018 at 9:02 am

    […] got to meet Robby McCullough of Beaver Builder fame.  I’m a two year BB user and it has transformed my design process.  This made my […]



  12. Tuan Phan on March 12, 2019 at 9:05 am

    Just saw this post from David Waumsley’s share.
    Used Beaver Builder for almost 1 year (April is 1 year). Have tried Elementor, Divi, Visual Composer.
    Not intended to change to any other Page Builder.
    Love Beaver, and also love Beaver Builder :bb:



  13. samulea on June 5, 2020 at 4:09 pm

    Thank you robby. You tell us in a good way…



  14. YouTech on June 13, 2020 at 6:13 am

    Awesome work 🙂 I´m so glad I found beaver builder.



  15. Yaina on July 24, 2020 at 11:31 pm

    Using this amazing page builder for all my wp sites.
    Thanks you so much!



  16. 9to5wordpress on August 26, 2020 at 11:23 am

    I am a beaver builder fan 🙂



  17. Adtya on September 14, 2020 at 5:26 am

    Using this amazing page builder for all my wp sites.
    Thank you so much! N I am a beaver builder fan



  18. Rogtechs on October 4, 2020 at 1:26 am

    I recently started using Beaver Builder, it is just superb. I have tested other page builders on my WordPress site but found this one easy compare to all of them. Thanks for creating this.



  19. Technicaljohn on November 3, 2020 at 2:24 am

    Will it work with genesis framework?



    • Anthony Tran on November 5, 2020 at 2:10 pm

      Yes we are compatible with Genesis framework =)



  20. Abhishek on June 20, 2021 at 7:24 pm

    With web speed becoming more important due to core web vitals, I am more inclined towards Beaver builder than elementor. I was recommended by askanydifference in favor of beaver builder.



  21. ExactlyHowLong on July 2, 2021 at 2:21 am

    Yeah, I totally agree with you that Beaver Builder is becoming way better than other page builders. I get it that Elementor provides better flexibility, but after building a few websites with Elementor, I noticed one thing that websites made with Elementor are much slower and heavy page size. I don’t know why. And that’s why I have to use a premium plugin to optimize the loading speed of that particular website.



  22. SUMUIT SINGH on July 23, 2021 at 8:02 am

    I am the greatest fan of this page biulder



  23. TechVizd on August 5, 2021 at 12:58 pm

    Thank You for sharing this useful and great information



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