by building on a personal frustration shared by many
A little over a year ago, my roommates convinced me to give Strava a try. I had always used Nike+ to track my runs, so I had a decent running history stuck within their systems. Still, they seemed to be having a lot of fun with this new app and its community, so I reluctantly decided to give it a go.
It felt truly empowering to buy into this new tight-knit community of like-minded runners. I was hooked.
The community behind the app quickly appealed to me. Strava appeared to have succeeded in building a true social network around sports. With Nike+ on the other hand, I had long lost hope of having friends on the platform — I assumed it’d just never really take off in Europe. …
The story behind our latest launch
Today, we’re launching Lumber: a command-line interface that generates an admin microservice for your application. We thought it’d be interesting to share what went into its making and why we’re doing it now.
🔥 Fire in the hole
Last June, we soft launched our main product: Forest. It did really well, racking up over 1.3k upvotes on Product Hunt and, most importantly, gave us plenty of feedback to reflect on. Among other things, we realized we were missing out on many potential customers because of a purely technical limitation.
Indeed, at the time we could only onboard projects in Rails or Express. That made up a big chunk of our initial target but, still, we were not suited for many of the more exotic stacks all the cool kids are using. Soon after the rush was over, we went back to work, keeping this learning in mind while thinking of new ways to improve the product. …
Unbundling the SaaS Black Box
Historically, software used to live on your desktop computer and was acquired via expensive licences that were quickly outdated. The early 2000s saw the start of something new: Software-as-a-Service. Software that could be consumed via your browser, rendering the notion of versions and updates obsolete.
At Forest, we think we’re seeing the start of a new kind of SaaS companies, that are able to close the gap between your application data and their cloud infrastructure. We’ve dubbed this new trend the Local SaaS, and are quite bullish it’ll catch on.
Regular SaaS came with two main limitations. First, they were up against on-premise solutions that had readily access to every piece of application data. That meant, when trying to onboard a bigger organization, a painful data migration plan and ensuing sync nightmare. …
For this first episode of the B2D Series, we are going to look at the foundation of any successful developer’s tool: a homepage that converts.
Because the first point of contact with your prospects will more likely be indirect (think email, ads, or social presence), your homepage should convey quickly and efficiently your value proposition. Additionally, as you grow and your understanding of what really resonates with your prospects changes, so should your homepage.
Playing catch up? Discover the B2D Series, a series of articles that focuses on best practices for marketing your product to developers. …
At Forest, we are first and foremost developers. We’ve had the ambitious dream, one year ago, to create a universal admin interface. Our dream was not only about building a product, but also about having it used by thousands. Thousands of our peers, other developers that grew frustrated over the years by the lack of a suitable solution to the admin interface mess.
Playing catch up? Read our previous article on Forest’s inception if you’d like to know more about the problem we’re trying to solve.
A needle in a haystack
We are neither marketers nor sales reps but we have a fair share of common sense, and that rather quickly led us to the realization that we would need to market our product for people to actually use it. …
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