My partner Ariel and I set out to build Elementor in order to tackle the daily technical challenges and hardships we faced with each and every project while trying to run our own freelance website development and design agency.

From using custom code to spending hours on browser modifications, it seemed that being a profitable web development business was impossible. Necessity being the mother of all invention, we decided to create a better and more efficient working environment for web professionals, including ourselves!

Building Elementor on WordPress was the obvious choice for us. We had been active members (and fans) of the WordPress community, participated in forums, attended WordCamps, contributed code and developed several successful non-profit plugin projects. We believed our open-source project could find no better home than WordPress.

We ultimately released the first version of Elementor in June 2016, and within just 10 months we reached 100K active installs. Fast forward 4 years and Elementor is now powering over 4 million sites, has hundreds of thousands of active customers and more than 130K YouTube subscribers. Elementor is now the leading website builder on the WordPress repository, with a team that has grown to 130+ spread out around the globe. Dozens of new communities have formed around the world. We held 140 meetups across 6 continents last year, and 500 more meetups are planned for this year.

The overwhelming response made us realize that Elementor definitely wasn’t just a tool, it was a movement. We were improving the everyday professional lives of our users. Developers started releasing addons, designers created templates, young freelancers established their business using the platform. We had reached our goal and so much more.

Now that we have backing, we are even more committed to our path. This backing is not just from the wonderful people at Lightspeed, but the support of countless plugin developers, community leaders, YouTubers, startups and most importantly Elementor users from around the world.

Using our resources, we will continue to actively develop our open-source community, which is our strongest driver of growth. While our team might be limited in the number of features we can deliver, 3rd party developers have helped produce hundreds of addons, and cheerfully answered any user request. In addition, 70% of all the features we develop come directly from our users’ feature requests. This produces a steady stream of innovative ideas and suggestions that drive the creativity of our platform.

Besides the emotional advantages of being part of a community and forming relationships, there is also a great advantage in gaining feedback and insights from others. Therefore, we are expanding our efforts to form local communities that come together in meetups. We are also proud sponsors of WordCamps and plan to continue to back events around the world.

It’s one thing to develop a platform, and another to get people to use it. This is why instructional content has always been a priority for us. Throughout Elementor’s short lifespan, our YouTube videos have been viewed over 20 million times. We see great importance in expanding our training efforts, giving aspiring web creators the right guides to get them started, while building advanced skills for more experienced professionals.