Kaiju Automation

We launched TuringCI on Hacker News and got to the front page! Users connected their GitHub repos and kicked off builds! The hard work in properly designing the system paid off. I was quite bothered by the time it took but it was worth it in the end.

Link - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21828739

The landing page had copy and grammatical errors. Besides that this is the area we need to get better at - communicating the product and values around it.

HN community asked for iOS and wrote e-mails to the address in the contact section of the landing page.

We got about 10 users and 3 of them setup CI pipelines. And 1 buy offer (:

Strangely none of the users who responded to personal e-mails so that is a worrying issue.

Felt good to end the year on this note.

We started with $45 per month plan for solo developers. Upon much feedback, the questions we thought about -

1. How much worth is a developer's time to setup TuringCI vs copy pasting .yaml from another project and tweaking it?

2. What's the price where developers who don't have CI on day 0, will want to have one?

3. What's the price where a developer doesn't have to seek managerial approval for trying out TuringCI?

From this came the insight that we need to separate out CI and CD. And for CI we can simply charge $7 a month that, we as Android developers actually felt great about.

$7 pipeline - what a wonderful world!

It took three major design changes to get to the MVP. Learnings -

1. Security is a thing especially when requesting access to users' GitHub repositories. Handle OAuth tokens gingerly, SSL everywhere, CORS etc

2. Onboarding experience. The product was simple and fast and lacked cues for the user to guide them to next step. Also a reusable Vue table components didn't make it clear for the user if they were in a different section of the site.

3. Landing page. The value wasn't clear. No one could tell what it is that we make :/ We thought it should be super obvious but it wasn't

In time we addressed all these. We actually hired a designer to structure our landing page.

What if there was a way to not deal with all the .yaml, scripting, containers etc. to setup a CI/CD pipeline?

What if there was a way to execute ./gradlew assembleDebug on a remote machine for every commit?

What if there was CI/CD for day 0 instead of one year later and avoid all the last minute deployment drama?