Yesterday, we rolled out free accounts to LayerVault along with the concept of forking. The release had been several months in the making. But unlike most big launches, the pieces of this release were exposed over time. If anything, it wasn’t so much the big launch but one of the last launches in this thread of thought. After building LayerVault for nearly two years, we have realized that the best way to build a product is to release things piecemeal and to avoid the Big Launch.
I wrote a bunch of words and did some research on the metrics of press success and launches on the company blog.
For the past two years, LayerVault has been a paid-only service. It’s allowed us to stay focused on building a business that will be around awhile. Today, LayerVault is taking a leap towards becoming more accessible in three different ways: free accounts, forking, and lower prices.
Finally.
Last year, we released LayerVault 2. This Tuesday, June 4, we’ll be making a big announcement. Mark your calendars.
We’re growing quickly at LayerVault and looking for a few good engineers to join us. We’re the most interested in Full-Stack engineers with a Rails focus or Cocoa developers.
Our mothership is in NYC, but you can be anywhere.
If you’re interested, please email kelly@layervault.com. Include your GitHub profile and a quick hello. We’ll take it from there.
Alternatively if you’re a technical recruiter looking to lend us your services, please email dumpster@layervault.com immediately.
We’re hiring once again at LayerVault. If you’re interested in a position, please get in touch.
Fast & Furious 6, by Chris Morgan. 2013.
Updating software is a pain. Troubleshooting bugs in applications still starts off with a check to see which version is causing the issue. Frameworks unnecessarily prompt users to install the latest update and restart. It frustrates users and opens them up to security vulnerabilities. It sucks. That’s why we’re releasing a small extension to the popular to Sparkle framework that allows you to silently and automatically update your application.
We’re open sourcing some neat software today that should have existed years ago. It lets you update your Mac application without any user input.
For a group of individuals who so loudly declare that design isn’t how it looks, designers really don’t know how to present their work. What we show off is the end of the process—the pretty picture posted to a portfolio website. Today we’re taking a step towards fixing that.
Introducing LayerVault Public Projects, a totally new way to share your design work with the universe.
Been a long time coming, but we’re rolling out Public Projects today.
At LayerVault, a significant percentage of our customers are outside of the United States. It’s interesting to see how international customers react to what I thought were standard practices.
For example, automatic billing at the end of the trial period must be rare among most European companies. With almost every US-based service and LayerVault, automatic billing is the norm. If I don’t cancel, I expect to be invoiced at the end of the month.
This sometimes leads to some teeth-gnashing and a “You dirty American!” or two. We always issue them a refund, close their account, gently remind them that the sentence “You will be billed on [today’s date]” was next to the checkout button, and apologize for the misunderstanding.
It’s hard to remember that although we’re all connected to the same internet, we all still have different cultural expectations
The Cocoanuts
(Source: railwayshoes)
It’s a big day for us.
You may notice that things look a little different. We’ve polished just about every part of LayerVault.
This update doesn’t just refine our interface design. We’ve changed the fundamentals of how you navigate LayerVault. The experience more intuitive, from breadcrumbs…
Painting the back of the fence.
