Taro's 2023 Year In Review

We got started in 2022, but 2023 was Taro's first full year of existence. Our mission remains unchanged: accelerate career growth for software engineers. [1]

Our data reveals insights about what software engineers were looking for:

1. Learning the traits of high performing software engineers. [video]
2. Developing the right mindset for interviews. [video]
3. Switching domains in tech. [discussion]

Looking back, 2023 was a year of infrastructure. We added a lot of "obvious" functionality that you'd expect in any kind of community: better Q&A support, native events, and more community options. We also achieved some degree of financial stability! This allows us to be focused on the long-term: build the best platform for career growth over the next 10 years.

The Taro engineering community more than doubled in the last year:

• Millions of views across Taro's video and Q&A content
• 64,000 registered active users
• 1250 Taro Premium members from 20+ countries, with hundreds of engineers at companies like Meta, Google, Amazon, and top startups.

A few highlights from the year:

• February: Launched Taro Events to host quality talks and discussions with engineering leads.
• 𝐀𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐥: Launched promotions.fyi to demystify how tech companies evaluate their employees. We subsequently folded this into Taro, so we're no longer actively maintaining promotions.
• September: Launched TaroGPT: an AI career coach trained on thousands of hours of videos and discussions hosted on Taro
• November: Launched Taro Networking: an easy way to connect with other folks in the Taro community based on shared goals, location, or level.

Some areas we want to improve going forward:

• Say no and kill things that aren't working. We joke internally that we're effectively building 4 products within Taro: YouTube, Eventbrite, Reddit, and LinkedIn. But we're only 3 people! So we need to be diligent in focusing on what brings users value.
• Continue getting broader engagement. Alex did particularly well with engagement on LinkedIn (1M post impressions per week was not uncommon), but we'd like to build reliable sources of traffic like Google SEO, or building a truly habitual product.

If you’re a software engineer and want to join Taro Premium before the end of the year (use your learning budget), join here: jointaro.com/membership

[1] A variant on our mission statement, inspired by Stripe: "Increase the collective impact of software engineers." Let me know which you prefer!