Cacher — The first month
We launched Cacher on Sep 5th, 2017. What I had assumed would be a fairly low-key launch turned into a month-long scramble to address bugs, scaling issues and customer feedback while at the same time building toward our longer-term feature goals.
Suffice it to say it’s been one hell of a ride. Now that we’re at a more stable point, I’d like to take a few minutes to go over what was accomplished in the first 4 weeks and what I’d personally learned from the experience of launching a new app.
The wins
Let’s talk about the good parts first.
- Our assumptions about what features former GistBox users wanted (mostly) held up. In spite of some hiccups around migration and Gist sync (more on that later), there were few complaints around the core experience of creating and managing snippets. It was encouraging to see lots of users customizing their editor color themes and messing around with labels. These were the types of developer-centric enhancements we wanted users to discover.
- We pushed a number of significant productivity enhancements in response to direct customer feedback. Better and faster search, collapsible files and shareable team snippet links were all done to provide Cacher users with a better day-to-day experience.
- We squashed a bunch of scaling issues before they got out of hand. Behind the scenes, it was a challenge to keep the servers running smoothly while users moved enormous amounts of data during the migration from GistBox. Big shoutouts to Heroku, New Relic and Sentry for providing the analytics we needed to resolve all the timeouts, exceptions and performance issues in a timely manner.
What we learned
- As you would probably know from reading the comments to my launch announcement, GistBox users were not too happy about the lack of Gist sync support out of the box. This was a feature we had always intended to build but the overwhelmingly negative user response definitely moved it up our backlog in a hurry. To all the GistBox migrants who got caught up in the mess, sorry and thank you.
- All the advice people give young companies about waiting to address scaling issues did not apply to us. Unlike the majority of startups out there who spend the first month struggling to acquire their first dozen users, Cacher already had a ready audience of 75,000+ GistBox users. In addition, each of these users had a library of several hundred code snippets acquired from years of development. We hit infrastructure scaling bottlenecks very quickly and had to promptly change the way we wrote our most expensive database queries.
What’s coming up
We have a number of exciting developments coming up in October. Along with continuing to bridge the functional gaps between Cacher and GistBox, we’re building out two important features for sharing and collaboration:
- Embeddable snippets — Plenty of Cacher users use Gist to share their snippets on blogs and company wikis. We’d like to take this functionality one step further with themes and a frictionless way for users to copy them to their own library. Stay tuned.
- Notifications — A key advantage in being part of team in Cacher is staying on top of what the rest of the company is doing. Having the ability to (selectively) be notified of new content further advances that benefit.
What do you guys think? Do you agree with our learnings? Got other things you’d like to see us build? Drop a comment here or post a request on our community forum.
