We hope you're doing well! This year was crazy for most of us. At the end of this year, we wanted to review what happened on Strapi and what comes next.
As you may know, we already announced that's good news was coming. And this is it, we can officially communicate on them! Firstly, we want to make a resume of this year and what progress we made.
Our move
In January, just after the release of the v1, we didn't expect to receive such awesome feedback! Most of you appreciated the panel of features provided by Strapi, but two of them had particular interests: the dashboard and the API Builder. The first one allows to manage your app and the data, the second one allows to build your API on the fly without writing a single line of code.
All these features with the exception of the dashboard were only available through what we call the Studio (SaaS). We made this choice to the updates easier, and to give us opportunities to monetize in the future.
However, to offer an open-source Node.js framework closely linked to a SaaS software (Studio) was a mistake. This slowed down the development, complicated the workflow and was not appropriate for the developers.
The community let us know that we were on the wrong path. That's why we decided to totally rethink and refocus our vision to find a new guideline. The main effect was that migrate the whole SaaS features to the current open-source part.
Strapi will be fully open-source, more flexible and more easy-to-use.
The company
We also noticed that many of our users were wondering on the long-term future of the project. In order to reassure the community and to reach our ambitions, we created a French company called "Strapi Solutions" to support the development of Strapi.
This company allows us to ensure the proper development of Strapi, and all the different legal aspects. We can also easily offer consulting or training services. Feel free to send us an email at hi@strapi.io.
The product
Strapi allows the user to build, deploy and manage its own API. We want to develop a flexible solution, tailored for projects' needs, no more, no less.
For this vision, we focus on three main lines:
- The community
- The flexibility
- The simplicity
We aim to make Strapi an open-source project based on a strong community, powered by a powerful plugins system and easy-to-use for being an entry point into the API's world.
The future
During the month of September, we decided to look for an incubator to help us to improve the project. One of our specificity is that Strapi is used all around the world (USA, Canada, Brazil, India, France, ...). We were very careful to find a long-term incubation oriented to the international because we know that we need time to build a product and our market is global.
After several months of preparation, we are really excited to announce that we are joining Upper, an incubator based in Paris dedicated to international businesses! Moreover, we also got financial support from the French Government and the city of Paris to accelerate the development of Strapi.
This is a big step for us. During an entire year, the whole team will be supported by professional people which help us to improve Strapi. 2017 will be a key year as we will officially release the new version and our hosting solution.
Thanks for being part of this journey, we also wish you happy holidays! Be happy, have fun, take care of you and your family.
The Strapi team
