10 days ago I wrote about our plans to build Publicly.
Today I’m very pleased to write about our official launch.
Publicly
_Build in the open_publicly.io
I have scheduled our posting to Product Hunt, which should be appearing on the homepage very soon.
Daniel and I have been working very hard to put the finishing touches to the website. We hit our target of having 20 projects using the platform before our launch, and look forward to see many more over the coming days and weeks.
There is a definite shift from building in stealth to building in the open, and we hope encourage more people to do so. As more people choose to bootstrap rather than raise money from angels or VC’s the more they seem to want to share their journey.
Do we really need another network for following updates?
There isn’t a dedicate place to track the progress of that people are making building their products/companies. People post content on all sorts of places. Twitter, Dribbble, Medium, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Blog to name just a few.
Even when people use just one platform, their progress updates are often mixed in with other updates, conversations as they engage with their users and other users of the platform.
Publicly allows us to aggregate just those updates relevant to making, regardless of where the update was made. We’re making use of Iframely to smartly display a summary of the updates.
Embeds platform for today's Web
_Iframely gives you simple APIs to have all the Web's best media on your site and on all your users' devices._iframely.com
Users login with their Twitter account, this saves us some time to validate the users identity.
Once the user has logged in they can follow the projects of other users or create a project of their own.
Once they have a project, they can submit a update simply by adding the URL to that update, a comment on the update is optional, but can come in handy to provide additional context.
I worked with Daniel Kempe on Publicly. Daniel handle the identity and provided the design framework, and I handled the development.
We had a couple of brief discussions about the project, features and functionality. Then went our separate ways.
After a couple of days, we regrouped and started to merge what we had both done. From there it was very much an iterative process, continuing to make improvements, and use the product to identify and problems.
We shared access very early with potential users and let them use the platform, to help us drive the direction.
Publicly is built using the Laravel PHP framework. Hosted on Digital Ocean droplets, that is managed by Forge.
The frontend is built with the Bootstrap Framework. It uses the 2 web fonts from Typekit:
Very excited to be launching today. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments here or on Product Hunt.
