The First 90 Days

Otherboard continues to grow into the best content management solution for WordPress blogs. We’re 90 days post-launch (okay, it might be closer to 93 when this publishes), and I’d love to share all the updates that have happened so far, as well as a glimpse into what’s coming down the road.

90 Days

When we launched Otherboard on November 20, 2022 – we had no idea what the response would be like. Unbelievably, we were inundated with interest, trial users, and paying customers on day one 😍. There’s nothing like real customers paying real money to validate that what you’ve built really has legs.

In all the excitement – we truly had no idea what to expect or anticipate in terms of scaling and resourcing needs. We found within the first four weeks (when we expected to be running maybe somewhere in the realm of 1-10 million queued jobs for our users) that we actually ran over 1.5 BILLION queued jobs for them 🫠. “Queued jobs” are just a nerdy way of saying tasks that run in the background – like when we pull in your blog posts, analytics, ad revenue, and everything else Otherboard does.

Needless to say, we hit scaling woes far sooner than we expected. Two weeks in, all of our plans for feature sprints and customer-focused iterations and improvements went out the door so that we could focus every ounce of energy on improving our infrastructure and application reliability.

Infrastructure

I always hoped we’d have to solve some real scaling issues at some point – I just never envisioned that being two weeks into our launch. But we had a significant number of users sign up who had a lot of data between their blog content, social media integrations, and every other kind of integration we track – it essentially increased all of our costs and forecasts by an order of magnitude. Daily crashes, five figure AWS bill forecasts, and unhappy users was not my idea of a stellar launch.

Enter SingleStore. While we struggled to ship much of anything in the first 4-6 weeks after our launch, it was entirely because every hour of focus across our entire team was focused on re-architecting our system to handle the scale that we were experiencing. SingleStore was a vital part of that story. It’s hard to over-emphasize what a game changer they’ve been for us. But just imagine our user dashboards loading (and sorting and filtering thousands of data points) in less than 1 second instead of 20-30 seconds and AWS bill coming down under $1,000 from $20,000. Game. Change. Er.

We did a more technical writeup of the migration efforts here. We continue to make significant improvements as we grow, but thankfully, the biggest hurdles are in our rearview mirror.

Changes

Documentation

Some of the earliest (and most helpful!) initial feedback we received was that Otherboard does so much that people aren’t entirely sure where to begin. Because we’ve been staring at designs and living in the Otherboard ecosystem for years now – and new customers are, well, new – we took for granted so much about the user interface and experience.

In the last 6-8 weeks, we’ve added dozens of in-app tooltips to explain every part of Otherboard that might not be otherwise intuitive. Additionally, we’re slowly rolling out new product and feature tours via Intercom in the coming weeks to help new users walk through everything that Otherboard can do for them.

Bugfixes

We have absolutely the best users in our Otherboard community. We’ve received nearly 100 support requests since we launched from dozens of different users – many reporting features and enhancements they’d love to see, but also many providing super helpful bug reports. I can’t begin to say how thankful we are for these folks who are in the trenches with us, making Otherboard the best that it can be.

We’ve fixed dozens of finicky bugs over the last several weeks:

• Fixed persistent connection issues with Google Analytics (including ensuring your GA4 properties work flawlessly)
• Improved the accuracy of Google Analytics pageviews that are pulled in on a daily basis.
• Massively improved reliability of all queued jobs across our platform.
• Countless improvements and corrections across every area, including Accounting, Pinterest, UX tweaks and so much more.

Enhancements

In addition to fixing what was broken, we’ve shipped loads of enhancements and general improvements throughout the entire platform:

• Improved UX in the Sheet view (especially on laptop screens that need to scroll horizontally)
• Ability to check or uncheck workflow phases, and be able to sort and filter by them.
• Bulk edit alt text on missing images, right from the Sheet view (or from the existing interface in the WordPress view).
• Greater visibility on the Integrations page into the status of your data synchronizations across all your services.
• Literally hundreds of minor quality of life improvements, and thousands yet to come 😍

Roadmap

Outside of feature requests and bug reports, the number one question we get asked from users is “What’s coming next?”

We’ve been absolutely delighted by the level of engagement we’ve received over the last 90 days. Based on the consistent customer feedback we’ve gotten, we’re looking forward to launching the following features in shortly forthcoming releases of Otherboard:

• More robust access to your historical keyword search data
• Improved image and alt text management
• Support for multiple different services per integration (different ad networks, analytics service providers, etc.)
• Improved functionality around service integration migrations (using multiple accounts across Google’s services, migrating between service providers and maintaining historical data).
• New and improved content calendar functionality
• Much more 😎

Want to learn more about the upcoming features on our roadmap, and learn about how you can influence that roadmap?

What’s Next?

With a 90-day whirlwind behind us, what should you expect for the next 90 days and beyond? We’re expecting three major shifts in the next 3 months: Stability, Communication, and New Features.

Stability

With the last three months being fraught with launch hurdles and woes unexpected – we’re finally on the other side (knock on wood!). The amount of platform stability and scalability we’ve experienced in the last 30 days has been a great encouragement, and we expect this trend to continue. Rather than resting on the engineering laurels that got us this far, we expect to continue refining our infrastructure and data architecture to ensure Otherboard remains a highly performant, scalable and sustainable platform for months and years to come

Communication

Between living in Intercom and Slack, it can feel like we’re communicating much more clearly, widely and and consistently than we actually are! We’re aiming to fix that. In the coming weeks, you can expect communication from us in the following regular ways:

• Monthly Facebook Live: Starting the first week of April, we’ll be scheduling monthly Facebook Lives showcasing the latest and greatest updates to Otherboard. Want to know when we go live? Sign up for our newsletter.
• Monthly Email Change Log: Starting at the end of March, we’ll be sending out monthly emails letting you know about new features and fixes being shipped in Otherboard.
• (Bi)Weekly Blog Updates: You can expect case studies, education, new feature demos, customer interviews and more every 1-2 weeks.

Feel free to let us know in the comments or via Intercom if there are other avenues or types of communication you’d like us to consider!

New Features

We’re more excited than anyone to begin to focus our engineering efforts on new features 😍. We’re so excited about so many parts of the roadmap that we’ve been able to share publicly, and many that we haven’t!

Over the next 3-6 months, we’ll be sharing more about new partnerships, integrations, and features inside of Otherboard (like new ad networks, Open AI integrations, social integrations, and revolutionary workflow features) as we continue to grow Otherboard into the best content management solution for WordPress blogs.

Nearly two years of development to launch. Three months of break-neck speed improvements. And truly, we’re just getting started 🚀.