Taro's 2024 Year In Review

Taro helps software engineers in their careers. I find it hard to believe that we went through Y Combinator almost 2.5 years ago! We're almost 3 years old, but our goal is to be important enough in the world that we can celebrate Taro's 10th or 15th birthday.

For career decisions, you don't want safe or politically correct answers; you need spiky points of view from people who have achieved something at top companies.

That's how Taro is different from other forums like Reddit or Blind, or AI tools like ChatGPT or Gemini. Whether you're trying to find a new job, get promoted, or improve your skills as a software engineer, Taro is the place to get credible advice from true tech leaders.

The Taro engineering community grew more than 80% in the last year:

• Millions of views across Taro's courses and discussions
• 117,000 users
• Thousands of Taro Premium members, with the 3 most represented companies being Meta, Amazon, and Google. We also have engineers from 100s of startups.

A few highlights from the year:

• January: We made all Taro discussions entirely free to read and upvote. Taro Premium members can ask/answer questions.
• February: Launched Taro Courses to host expert-led courses with practical career outcomes. We now have 35 of the best on-demand video lessons on the Internet.
• August: Launched Taro's job board to make it easier to find and apply to high-quality software engineering jobs.
• October: A $100B company threatened to sue us 💸. Their lawyers sent us a very scary letter, but they backed down after we escalated to the CEO.

Some areas we want to improve going forward:

• Continue improving our focus. We removed TaroGPT, put Taro Networking on maintenance mode, and stopped running live cohort-based courses. But it still feels like our product surface area is too large. We'd rather do fewer things and do them extremely well.
• Generate traffic to Taro without relying on social media. Alex continues to be one of the best LinkedIn posters I've ever met (2M post impressions per week was not uncommon), but we want to build a truly habitual product.

We'd love to hear your feedback! Send us an email at team@jointaro.com, or let us know how we can help!