The Year in Review - 2020 at Make

It’s impossible to look back on 2020 without feeling a mix of emotions as we go over the events that defined it. 

On one hand, there is the story everyone knows about, ruthlessly scripted by that fast-spreading, submicroscopic agent called “Coronavirus”.

Granted, we are not the most fitting voice to narrate the sorrow COVID has brought upon the planet, but our confidence in a rapid global recovery (in both sanitary and economic terms) is absolute.  

In parallel, there is the Make story, which belongs to all the actors that make our company and product a reality: stakeholders, leaders, employees, partners, and of course, users and customers. 

Mercifully, it’s a happier tale, marked by hard work, innovation and unprecedented amounts of personal and professional growth. 

Looking forward to 2021, this is an account that we wish to share with you, so grab a chair and be welcome to Make’s year in review.

Make in 2020: Facts, stats, and milestones 

Make’s 2020 was remarkable because of the sustained (and sustainable) growth rates experienced at every measurable level. 

By the end of December 2020, Make had:

• 244,000+ new registered users

• Nearly 1,000,000 scenarios (automations) created by users

• 629 featured apps (from 359 a year ago)

• 354 certified partners (from 120 a year ago)

A growing user base relying on an expanding pool of apps to automate their work, backed up by a far-reaching network of experts: that’s the kind of growth we live and breathe for, and it doesn’t end there. 

Now, let’s go deeper into the numbers that explain Make’s growth in 2020. 

Countries, industries, markets: Who is using Make?

Since its foundation in 2016, Make has enjoyed high levels of popularity in five countries:

• United States

• United Kingdom

• Germany

• India

• France

During 2020, we saw rapid adoption across new territories. On top of the countries mentioned above, Make has experienced brisk growth in the following countries: 

• Israel

• Australia

• Brazil

• Canada

In addition, there is an emerging community of Spanish-speaking users distributed across Latin America and Spain that makes us optimistic about our future in these regions.   

If we look at users by industry, the sectors that adopted Make the most in 2020 are: 

• Ecommerce - 17.3%

• Local businesses - 16.81%

• Digital agencies - 13.28%

• Education - 12.38%

• SaaS - 11.10%

But who uses Make within these and other sectors? 

In a rather exciting way, the promise of automating without code lives up to the hype, as the people who used Make the most during 2020 are:

• Executive, managers, and business owners: 24.55%

• IT professionals: 13.85%

• Students and interns: 10.66%

• Freelancers: 10.24%

• Product and project managers: 6.08%

Make users range from individual consultants and solopreneurs to household names like Facebook, Spotify,  Zalando, About You, United States Army, Global Payments, Remax, and the United Nations.

This sends an important message about our product and company: regardless of what you do, who you are, or where you live, Make will allow you to integrate apps and automate your work for better and immediate results.

Perhaps, this is what the democratization of automation looks like. 

Most popular apps on Make

Businesses and individuals are taking automation very seriously, and this shows in the figures related to app growth and app popularity. 

In 2020, the most popular apps on Make were:

• Email

• Google Sheets

• RSS

• HTTP

• Gmail

• Telegram

• Google Drive

• Airtable

• Slack

• Facebook Lead Ads

• Discord

• JSON

There are two riveting insights that can be drawn from looking at this list. 

The first one is a note about “validation by use”: each one of these apps is currently being used by at least 10,000 companies/users to automate related processes. This tells a lot about the problems and situations companies are struggling with on a recurring basis.     

The second insight touches upon the scope and power of Make: as you can observe, this shortlist features apps for digital marketing, instant messaging, business communications, API integrations, coded functions, spreadsheets, databases, and file storage. 

The level of variety shows that Make can and will cover a huge range of needs when it comes to automating tasks and processes. 

App growth and new additions

Our dev and app partnerships teams deserve a special mention here, as they are the reason behind one of the most impressive milestones of the year: releasing a new app every day. 

Thanks to efficient, quality-driven processes and the sheer talent of our teams, we started to release a new app every day by Q3 2020. In total, we launched 270 new apps during the course of the year, a record that we intend to break in 2021. 

To understand how massive this is, you can take a look at Microsoft, which released a little over 100 apps during the course of 2020 for Power Automate, their flag automation product. And this is a trillion-dollar company we are talking about!  

As for app growth, we saw some head-turning figures as well. This year’s list of top-growing Make apps includes:

• Loyverse: +9100%

• Amazon Lambda: +5400%

• Google BigQuery: +3800%

• eSignatures.io: +2200%

• Close CRM: +2150%

• Facebook Insights: +1469%

• Docparser: +1080%

• Remove.bg: +543%

• Mixpanel: +429%

• Agile CRM: +342%

• Google Workspace: +214%

• Wave: +189%

Beyond the apps: More 2020 Highlights

On top of growing our presence across the globe, releasing hundreds of new apps, and catering to a diverse customer base, we checked other important boxes in the year that passed. 

Notably, we:

• Attended our first CES Conference in Las Vegas

• Launched 10+ webinars and no-code challenges

• Built stronger relationships with our app partners through exclusive training sessions for companies like Typeform, HubSpot, Zendesk

• Became a badged Facebook Marketing Partner 

• Grew our app partner network to 175+ partnerships

• Spoke at 10+ conferences

• Opened new offices in the beautiful city of Olomouc

• Solved 33,000+ tickets for our users

• Grew the team to 72 people, covering 22 nationalities and 7 time zones

In addition, we published 92 posts in our blog (including our first viral hit), revamped the Make Academy, and got our first mentions in influential publications like TechCrunch, Search Engine Land, Fast Company, and Silicon Republic. 

It’s been a thrilling ride, and we are not stopping!

Leaps and bounds

The biggest lesson that emanates from the information presented above is perhaps the amount of manual work that Make users have been able to automate. 

If you take the speed of our server operations as the main parameter, Make users have automated the equivalent of 197 years of work in 2020.

This positions Make as a huge source of value for businesses and individuals, showing that greater efficiency and productivity is not a vague promise, but a palpable reality anyone can access immediately.  

As expected, we weren’t the only ones noticing this. 

The little Czech startup that could

As many of you already know, Make was officially acquired by Celonis, the global leader in Execution Management Systems (EMS) on October 14, 2020. 

The acquisition by Celonis will see us expanding our horizons and accelerating the pace towards the indisputable leadership in the workflow automation and app integrations spaces. 

Why Celonis, though? On top of complementing Make, Celonis was able to capture, share, and support our founders’ vision perfectly. 

Their commitment to building a company that keeps providing the kind of innovation and value we do was simply unmatched, and instrumental in moving the deal forward. 

Reflections on the immediate past and future

Like many companies operating in the digital world, Make flourished during 2020. 

Thanks to a combination of environmental and internal factors, the pandemic found us in good standing for what was coming.

At internal level, we were able to switch to a fully-remote work setting without friction. Owing to the decision to operate with remote teams since the early days of the company, the infrastructure and internal cultural traits demanded by remote work were already there. This allowed for a swift expansion of remote collaboration schemes when the situation called for it. 

The external front, marked by a context of accelerated digital transformation fueled the demand for our product. Sudden shifts in virtually every level of human activity exposed the need for automated processes and increased productivity, which is exactly what Make allows for. 

For all the positives that we experienced, we are still substantially more optimistic about 2021. Product and company-wise, this will be a year of cutting-edge innovation, with many surprises scheduled for the upcoming months. But that’s for another story.

Now, let’s make 2021 better.