That’s a reason to switch

I’m writing this update from Oakland airport on my last day in the US before heading to Denmark for the summer. It’s been a crazy 6 weeks, beginning with MicroConf in Vegas and then traveling through 8 states with my fiancé. It’s been a challenge to work from the road, but looking back a lot of things have been put in motion in the past few weeks.

I had a great call a few days ago with an agency owner. The reason of the call was a comment he slipped at MicroConf, which I’m going to try to paraphrase here:

We pay pretty much nothing for Buddy. I mean, it’s like a hundred bucks a month or something.

For context, Buddy is a CI/CD tool and basically a competitor to Branch. This comment was so fascinating to me. WordPress developers are known to be pretty price sensitive, but this guy thought that $100/month was cheap. I needed to know more!

I straight up told him “Hey, I’m not going to try to convince you to buy Branch, because it sounds like Buddy is working pretty well for you - I just really want to know more.” We had a great chat about how they used CI/CD and he mentioned several times that it would be hard for him to justify a move. They had just switched from DeployBot to Buddy, so switching tools again was definitely not on the agenda… Until we started talking about testing. I’ve mentioned a few times here that my vision for testing in Branch is resonating with people a lot. So when I told him about my plans he interrupted me and said:

See that’s a reason to switch!

Pretty awesome thing to hear… I think I know what to work on next!

What did the Manager do? #

I have a secret thing I’ve been working on in the background that I will share soon. Before it goes out I want to have a landing page ready for Branch. Currently I only have the manifesto, which shows my vision for Branch, but not where I’m at and what I have to offer.

I’ve hired 2 contractors to help me work on the landing page: A developer and an illustrator. The developer is coding my design in Tailwind CSS and setting it up with a static JS framework. He’s been really good so far, so I’m very optimistic.

What did the Maker do? #

The main maker thing I’ve worked on since the last update is the landing page. You will see the v1 soon, so stay tuned.

Cheers! 👋