Announcing Hashnode's $2.1M seed round
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. π
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. π
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 πΊ
Fazle,
co-founder of Hashnode
Teacher at freeCodeCamp.org
Congratulations. This should give you the resources to continue expanding your awesome collaborative blogging community.
Exploring and Refactoring!
Big Congratulations!! Syed Fazle Rahman Sandeep Panda
Kudos to Hashnode Team!!
Being human in the age of Alogorithm
Congratulation Hashnode ποΈ
Thank you Syed Fazle Rahman Sandeep Panda, and Team for the platform. π¨βπ»οΈ
β UI/UX/ML | βοΈ Technology Blogger | π€ Speaker
Syed Fazle Rahman, Sandeep Panda, and Team,
Many Congratulations and all the best!!
Thank you, Tapas. We are glad to have you on Hashnode and super excited about the future.
Digital Content Strategist
Syed Fazle Rahman and @sandeep, My immense LOVE to your entire TEAM! I visualized this growth and progress at the same time when I first saw Hashnode platform and it's tremendous capacity and enormous beauty as a perfect CMS and a powerful community tool!! In fact, I had spent almost half a day browsing various parts of the platform and read all info about it.
I just wonder when you great people are going to offer services so that other people can build their own hubs for their choice of subjects. Right now the platform is all about posts from developer's community, so can I expect the monthly or yearly plans to build my own website/s using Hashnode?
I wish, you get a tremendous SUCCESS AHEAD with this platform which is IMPECCABLE in every way indeed!
Senior Support Engineer | Visual Novel Game Developer | Webcomic Artist
This is fantastic news! Really happy about Hashnode's success :)
Software Engineer and Father. Love to learn, love to teach, love to build. CTO at recorrido.cl -> Ruby, Elixir, Vue / Stimulus
Best wishes for the team and the future of the platform, keep it up!
Software Engineer and Founder of TrinityMoon Studios
Really nice jobs guys!! π
Since switching over from Medium, I love the domain options, as well as the ability to reach your community more. Love the ideas here, not surprised you got more funding. π₯°
Full Stack Developer | JavaScript | React | Nodejs. Subscribe to my weekly newsletter at https://yogeshchavan.dev/
It's really great news π
Front-End UI Engineer
Congratulations !
A nerd in books, tea, games and software.
This is incredible news! Thanks Hashnode team for sharing and for the hard work :)
Thanks - we are ready to scale and take it to the next level.
I love reading your articles. Keep them coming. :)
Thanks Sandeep Panda :) I'll keep writing articles as much as you'll keep bringing Hashnode to greater heights!
Software Engineer - Technical Writer
A little late to the celebration, but Congrats to you and the hardworking people of Hashnode! All the best!
Software Engineer
Congratulations. This is will give developers assurance that hashnode will be around for a long time. Thanks.
Technical Content Creator
Congratulation hashnode ...................
Thoughts, insights, and lessons from the IT Consulting world.
Great work! I've been a huge fan since I moved my blog over.
Frontend Web Developerπ
Congratulations Hashnode
Comments (26)