Hey neglected Knitters! As planned, we’re back after Memorial Day! ;)
A few things have been in the works since our short break, but let’s focus on
Debut stuff
Knit is putting on its ball gown and heading to the Waldorf Astoria, ‘cause it’s time to go public!
Take a look at the blog post draft and video storyboard.
Feel free to send the link along to friends but please do not post publicly yet! The press embargo should lift next week; the plan is to distribute to Hacker News, Twitter, dbt Slack, and Locally Optimistic.
Ideally I would release open source code, cleaned up and well documented, but that’s actually quite a lot of work. So the code will go private for now and the open sourcing timeline will depend on the response.
This has been a long time coming, but why now? Let’s get into
Distribution stuff
When it comes to its audience, Knit has been a bit of a picky eater. People who work with data, but are also thinking about operations. Having complicated data workflows, but without needing something production grade. Is hands on with data plumbing, but is also down to think about grand philosophy. Things are sliced too thin, and Knit hasn’t found its people.
There are two changes intended with building in public. One is just the reach of social media and landing on more eyeballs. The other is shifting development focus toward areas that are more likely to be interesting to mass audiences. That means broadening the product scope from a low-level CLI tool to something more user-targeted and comprehensive, including a web app. The scope increase is drastic but I’m pretty convinced it’s necessary to explore much further.
I haven’t made a public release announcement like this before, so it’s all a big experiment. That means preparing for both success and failure! The main metric I’m measuring is e-mail signups. Here’s the rough decision tree:
0 signups. Buy a pint of Haagen-Dazs and cry into it. Then remind myself Rome wasn’t built in a day and continue to build out content. Even if it doesn’t become effective for distribution, having a content repository about Knit would be great.
10 signups. Follow up with everyone and see what they’re interested in. Cater new content toward them and try to convert them into beta users or collaborators.
100 signups. Qualify leads and target outreach to most promising development partners. May need to prioritize documentation, etc to make Knit approachable as an open source project.
1000 signups. Convert the interest into headcount. The most obvious would be to get financing, but there are other options.
How can you help? Check out the blog post. Think of what works and, even better, what doesn’t. Then let me know!