Ezfire
Productivity tools for Firebase developers
After sharing Ezfire with some members of the Firebase community and asking for feedback, it was clear that users wanted to be able to try the product first before connecting their own databases. This hesitency is very understandable, and so we sought to reduce the friction users have when using our product by introducing a sample database they can query to see how the product works.
We found some CSVs of country data online and spun up our own Cloud Firestore database with this data. Better yet, we did the whole thing using infrastructure as code practices, so managing and expanding this dataset in the future will be a piece of cake. This dataset is available for everyone to try now and can be selected as part of the onboarding process.
We spent a couple weeks quickly building our a marketing landing page at https://ezfire.io so that we could easily share what Ezfire was about. Building this landing page was an interesting process:
We have initially tried to use something like Next.js of Gatsby to build a static landing page. Given that we didn't have experience with these frameworks, we decided to go with the JAMStack option available for Angular. The experience has been really great so far, and the static page loads very quickly.
It took about 8 weeks to pull together a full MVP of the app that we were able to demo to others and start to collect feedback. We started demoing the app to some collegues of mine with experience and worked to try and moved to start integrating that feedback.
We had been building Replay Value for a while and noticed some gaps in the ecosystem around ad hoc access to our data in Cloud Firestore. We envisioned a tool that would let the user write, run and share ad hoc queries in a natural way, without the need to click through menus.
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