Beekeeper Studio

We're officially 2.0!.

After 18 months of hard work, new features, bug fixes, and community management we feel confident enough to declare '2.0'. At this point we think we're a serious contender in the SQL app market.

To celebrate, we've also posted a small retrospective on the path to 2.0, including a look at our 1000% growth over the last 12 months.

We posted the app to Hacker News, but didn't think much of it.

Two hours later a friend send me an SMS to congratulate me for being on the front page. I was stunned.

I spent the next 3 hours answering questions and the next week fixing bugs that the community found.

Tips for getting front page

• Make something unique - I think this helped us get upvoted by some high-profile folks initially
• Be honest - we were just two guys making a new open source app, no marketing speak or sales mumbo jumbo
• Be lucky - Luck had a lot to do with it. Maybe it was a slow news day? I have no idea how to be lucky.

We soft-launched the product via twitter by tweeting at Scott Handelman.

At this point we had been working on the product for about a year on nights and weekends, and we had a solid MVP to share with the world.

This small tweet created a steady stream of traffic to the site, and began our growth.