Xkit

I launched Xkit on Hacker News. We had a great reception in terms of time spent on the front page, and it led to a decent amount of leads, although it was not nearly as effective as Product Hunt.

Of course, we also had a bunch of classic salty HN comments. My favorite was one of the first 5 comments, was the top comment for awhile, and ended up as the #2 comment: "So I have to trust your company with valid access tokens for all of my users. No thanks."

You just have to know what you're getting into when it comes to Hacker News. To be honest, that's pretty mild compared to other stuff I've seen, but there aren't many forums where you just get outright negative feedback. C'est la vie.

With not much of a plan for how to maximize upvotes (which I've learned is a bit of an art), I launched Xkit on Product Hunt (now with over 25 connectors!)

We got up into the top 5 for the day, and this was a huge source of highly qualified prospects for us. It led to a bunch of demos, signups, and ultimately customers.

I finished the MVP product with a whopping 15 connectors. I launched to handful of fellow YC Founders with this video.

This led to our first handful of users trying out the product and requesting demos!

I committed the first line of code for IKit (short for "Integration Kit", now Xkit). I picked Elixir as the language (and Phoenix as the framework) despite not knowing either. I spent last week on self-guided crash course in Elixir to see if it was feasible to build the product in.

I decided on Elixir (and a new language generally) for the following reasons:

• this is at its core an infrastructure project, and as a result will need high performance, low latency, and high reliability
• recruiting engineers is a funny thing, and while the community for Elixir is small (but vibrant), I think recruiting to work on Elixir will be easier than the same product in Node, Java, etc (See: The Python Paradox by Paul Graham)
• I'm attracted to the functional programming paradigm, and have spent quite a bit of time in Typescript using FP principles
• I wanted to learn Elixir

I may come to regret this decision as a bit short-sighted, but when starting a new project, sometimes its nice to have a new thing to learn.