Big news for the Hashnode community!

I am thrilled to announce that we have closed a seed funding of $2.1M led by Sequoia Capital's Surge with participation from great angels like:

• Christopher Golda (Founder of BackType, launched Twitter Ads)
• Ed Roman (led innovation at Pluralsight),
• Girish Mathrubootham (CEO of Freshworks),
• Guillermo Rauch (CEO of Vercel),
• Harshil Mathur (CEO of Razorpay),
• Nakul Aggarwal (co-founder of BrowserStack),
• Naval Ravikant (CEO of AngelList),
• Ritesh Arora (co-founder of BrowserStack),
• Salil Deshpande (General Partner at Uncorrelated Ventures), and

• Shashank Kumar (co-founder of Razorpay)

  

Before this, we had raised a pre-seed round of $1M from Accel Partners.

Our investors are aligned with our vision of empowering developers to share their knowledge easily and effectively. With support from Hashnode community members and our investors, we are hopeful that we'll be able to create a lot of value and change the way developers share their knowledge today. 🙌

History

Currently, there are two types of blogging solutions. Publishing networks (like Medium) help a blogger with social media credibility and reach at the cost of SEO, traffic, and customization. On the other hand, there are self-hosted solutions like WordPress/Ghost but they lack an active community. Also, you need to maintain your blog actively.

Hashnode is best of both worlds. It helps writers focus on writing and gives them the freedom to blog without the risk of losing their content or SEO benefits. You can start a blog on your own domain using Hashnode and be up and running within a minute. You also get initial readership easily since there is a built-in dev community that is interested in reading your content.

We launched in min-June 2020 and the growth skyrocketed immediately through organic word of mouth in the dev community.

In June, we received 100 articles in a month and now we are getting 180+ articles per day. We power nearly 25K personal blogs as of now and we are proud to share that 25% of those live on a custom domain.

Over the last 4 months, we have shipped a ton of features and added a lot of value to the platform:

• Detailed Analytics: Out of the box analytics for all Hashnode powered blogs. See stats by week, month, and year.

• Rich Embeds Support: From a CodeSandbox to CodePen, embed anything into your blog posts.

• Web Monetization Support: Enable Web Monetization with the click of a button and start monetizing your articles.

• Bulk Importer: Import your articles from other platforms like Medium, Devto and so on. Also, import multiple markdown files by dropping a zip file.

• Ambassador Program: Enjoy exclusive perks and privileges by inviting your developer friends to Hashnode.

• Share a draft: Ability to share a draft with your friends and get feedback before you publishing your article

• Cool new challenges and badges: Get some extra motivation by unlocking cool new badges from Hashnode.

• Custom CSS: Customize the look and feel of your blog by injecting custom CSS (currently in beta and available only to Ambassadors).

• Source articles from GitHub : Write on GitHub. Every time you commit, your article gets published on your blog.

• Powerful Integrations: Integrate Google Analytics, Hotjar, Fathom Analytics, Plausible, etc and gain more insights into your blog.

• Powerful Search: Instant search functionality for every blog, powered by ElasticSearch.

• Improved Tagging and Moderators: Give the control to the community to moderate and manage sub-communities inside Hashnode

We also conducted two successful Technical Writing Bootcamps to help upcoming tech writers learn from the best and grow their writing skills.

We are grateful for all the love and support we have received from you! Thank you so much for being a part of Hashnode. 🙏

What's next?

With the fresh round of funding and so many smart investors on board, we want to take Hashnode to the next level and build the largest community for developers. Our long term goal is to help businesses and dev focused companies run their engineering blogs. We see a strong monetization opportunity here. That's why Hashnode will always be free for individual developers, Open Source projects, and non-profits. We are confident that we'll be able to achieve this goal by growing consistently and delivering value to our users.

Our roadmap is public and we are active on Discord. Feel free to join to say hi!

We are hiring

As you all know, we are building the next-gen platform for dev-blogging. If you are passionate about helping developers share their knowledge easily and own their content, we would like to hear from you. We're hiring for various engineering roles: frontend, backend, and full-stack. Check out hashnode.com/about for more details.

Cheers 🍺

Fazle,
co-founder of Hashnode