Flipper Cloud

Even when you have a fully functioning product, there are a few hurdles to launching it.

3 years ago I wrote about why I was working on Flipper Cloud (https://www.johnnunemaker.com/featureflipper-com-why/). Since then, everything changed.

We bought Speaker Deck back from GitHub. My wife and I had another child. Microsoft acquired GitHub. I left GitHub. I joined Box Out Sports. Steve and I launched Speaker Deck Pro. It has been a busy two years!

And I'd be remiss not to mention the biggest change of all – the pandemic.

All of these things led to Flipper Cloud getting pushed to the side...

I wrote up a doozy of a post with a few business and technical hurdles we had to jump to launch the product.

You can read on here:
https://www.johnnunemaker.com/flipper-cloud-enabled/

Enjoy!

What a rush. I started flipper as an open source project in 2013 for fun. I had used rollout (in ruby/redis) but there were a few things I didn’t like about it.

The primary issue was it being tied to redis. Thus, flipper was born, but instead of being tied to redis, it was built on adapters for storage. It comes bundled with active record, sequel, redis, mongo and many other data stores.

At some point in 2017, I thought perhaps hosted version would be something valuable. Very soon after Launch Darkly and Split both announced large funding rounds.

I had no plans to go down the funding path, but that proved to me that people would likely pay for this.

As I already covered, from idea to launch was a long time (~ 2 years) because we were lazy about selecting a pricing model and adding a billing system.

We finally did and today we had our first paid signup (3 seats at $20/seat/month!). It feels great.

After like 2 years of just using Flipper Cloud for ourselves on Box Out Sports (https://boxoutsports.com) and Speaker Deck (https://speakerdeck.com), we finally released it.

When I started flipper cloud, I was still working at GitHub. Then, GitHub was acquired my Microsoft which changed everything.

I took some time off and then joined my former business partner (Steve) at Box Out Sports.

We used flipper cloud there and on Speaker Deck, which we acquired from GitHub right before (~2 days) the Microsoft deal was announced.

In December of 2020, we launched paid plans for Speaker Deck (which was entirely free before). Seeing people pay for Speaker Deck was highly motivating. We knew it was time to do the same for flipper cloud.

We selected a pricing model ($20 per seat per month) and integrated Stripe’s billing portal to get up and running quickly.

We had a few people who we let use it for free. We granted them a generous amount of free trial time (~ a month) to either upgrade to paid or switch back to open source flipper.

We are very excited about Flipper Cloud. Time will tell if we can convince everyone that the hosted version is much better than the open source version and worth paying for.