Prerelease

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This newsletter is an experiment of sorts: Doc and I email each other weekly, with you lovely people bcc’d. Please hit reply if you’d like to talk to me about anything I cover below. Also 🎉 this email is going out to 300 people. Thanks for sticking with us, those of you who have!

It’s been a while. Over the years, we’ve ended up saying that a lot. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Einstein had opinions on that, right?

In our case, the same thing over and over is making something that we hope people will like, then showing it to a few people and them liking it and then … waiting and hoping I suppose.

So if we want to do things differently, we just need to show our work to more people!

I’ve said it to you a few times lately: we’ve never before been in the position where we had a product that we’re more or less happy with that we are happy to share. Now we have two.

“Happy” is relative of course. Sometimes all I can think of is the long list of things that I want to fix or add to both Tito and Vito.

1. It’s hosted on Vito, but anyone can click a view it, using our new visibility settings

2. It shows a recently created hub for [Unblockconf], a new live extravaganza from our friends at [Buildkite]. Buildkite is the product we use to deploy Vito.

3. It’s a whistle-stop tour of some of the things that we shipped two weeks ago. It would have had to be twice as long to show everything.

What did we ship? Well… the list is long. I’ve been describing it that Vito was a beta, and now it’s a release candidate. There are still a few rough edges and a few bugs, but I really feel this is going to be a solid V1.

The main reason I say this is that it checks so many boxes. Our original vision was to have a product that solved a few different problems. The first, the main use-case was for an event, but thinking of an event as a continuum: from the first teaser communication to the random message you send to a fellow attendee 7 years later, Vito should be able to capture that journey.

The next reason is that I think we’ve really stuck closely to our core values. We’re not sure how best to implement analytics and tracking in Vito, so rather than cross an ethical boundary without reasonable consideration, we implemented no analytics. I’m looking forward to doing analytics in a non-privacy-invading way.

In terms of excellence, the product is really starting to come together in terms of matching our vision. That’s what excellence means to us: building intentionally. It’s also starting to feel great to use.

Finally, delight. I do think we need to add some purely joyful characteristics to Vito, but delight to us is more than just icing. It’s about adding value in unexpected ways, and I think Vito already does that with little UI quirks that ensure that the things you need are right there when you need them.

Finally, and maybe this should have been first, but I’ve been playing with the language of how to describe Vito without seeing it: Vito: a platform for building simple, live, social mini-sites. The pitch will be why you’d want one of those rather than an “event platform”, and, well, I have many reasons, but those are for another day.

It’s a good story, Doc. I’m looking forward to getting better at telling it. See you on the other side.

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