| Sure -- it's a neat story. Happy to share it.. Digs through some emails Looks like it was 2015. We did a fundraising campaign on our site (wrapup blog post here: https://blog.readthedocs.com/fundraising-wrapup/), which was our first big attempt at fundraising. To be 100% honest, we didn't reach our goal, and we padded the numbers with a Python Software Foundation grant, and the Twilio ad sponsorship to not fail in public. We were doing millions of pageviews a month at that point, but had a lot of failure around fundraising. More info on the burnout and sadness of that period here: https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2018/feb/7/the-post-i-neve... -- but moving on to the happy ending :) The Twilio folks reached out as part of that campaign. Specifically it was Rob Spectre, who I think was very forward thinking about their developer outreach at the time. They wanted to sponsor us, and in return we promote the upcoming events & blog posts they were doing. It was very lightweight to start. I think we filled out their "event sponsorship" form, they gave us the money, and we put some images & copy in the sidebar of the docs using our theme. I think they were willing to do this because they saw the massive opportunity of the channel we had. We've been able to build a business that supports a team with almost the exact concept they pitched to us, so the value seems obvious in retrospect. More info on our eventual transition to advertising is here: https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2016/aug/31/funding-oss-ma... |