So, we aren't quite ready to show screencaps (or other marketing material) to the whole world just yet. But I'll for sure make an HN post when that changes.

If you're cool with a text description though:

Basically, the core emotional impetus of this project for me begins with unfulfilled product enhancements for Perkville. Like, imagine a random 1-location Yoga studio wants to award bonus points on a member's 1 year anniversary. Sounds easy, right?

Well, saying "yes" to that customer means significant coding time, to store and update the membership start date, to handle edge case logic, to update all existing integrations to store the start date (and membership systems all store that in different ways, sometimes really obtuse and complicated ways), and then we need to build out interfaces for setting up the bonus. And what if a business wanted to award on the 6th month anniversary and not annually? Or for only certain membership types? And we need to QA, and add unit tests, and do code reviews, and on and on.

And we have hundreds of requests like that in the queue, with more coming in all the time. It's... too much.

Me and my engineers felt buried, for one. And our customers get unhappy too, that we just can't deliver fast enough for them. I really, really hate disappointing a customer. It hurts me, that this rewards platform we've been working on for years isn't doing what they want it to do. That we can't keep up with their imagination.

So, that was my emotional state 3 years ago when I sat my own boss down, and the product manager at the time, and was like, look, you need to let me solve this problem in a different way. We can't productize every single request that comes down. We need to figure out a way to build features for customers in a much more flexible way.

We looked at a bunch of tools in this space, like Zapier for example. But none of the tools were good enough. Zapier doesn't have the integrations we need (how long has their MindBody integration been in "in construction"?) and besides, it doesn't have the two-tier tenancy that we need. (We need to keep our customer's data all separate from each-other, with the ability to handle GDPR stuff on it as well.) And Zapier's (and all the others) tools for support really suck. You can't look up a user and see all the logic that's been executed for them. (People write into support all the time asking about their points.) Oh and on top of all that, the developer portal in Zapier really is not great. You have to download their SDK, become intimately familiar with it, and it is real complicated. (To their credit I think they've worked on this.) OH -- and Zapier is crazy expensive at the scale we need. We push a lot of events, and my estimate for putting everyone on Zapier came up to some insane number, like 50% of our revenue.

So, we decided. Let's just build our own and solve all of those problems. And so... we did. We got a v1 out pretty quick. We're able to hammer out integrations and updates to those integrations very quickly. Support can make features that we used to need engineering help on. There's still a ton of work to be done, but it's doing well enough that we've snagged some significant customers in the Fitness space. And it's really worked out for Perkville.

Anyways, that was quite the essay. That's the product. We're excited about it.