I enjoyed the post, and the startup looks cool as well. I can clearly see the pain point. I think it will be a challenge positioning this product, because in order for a customer to be able to use it, presumably they already need relatively mature DevOps pipelines, in order to give Release(Hub?) something they can deploy/manage. And if I already have automated builds and a CI pipeline, is it really that much more work to automate sandbox deploys as well? Why wouldn't I deploy to my own infra, or some hosted k8s service, or GitLab Auto-DevOps?

I'm sure you've thought about this challenge, so I'm curious what your plans are in terms of adding value outside of "deploy to sandbox" workflows that can be replicated by CI tools and cloud providers (keep in mind that VC-funded startups, presumably your ideal customer, often have $100k+ in cloud credits to burn through). I see data snapshots, so that's a start maybe. But are you working on anything that will be hard to replicate?

(Also, unrelated, but I love the design!)

Does anyone get any use out of chat bot corner pop ups other than feeling patronized? You could create one that calls your users names or responds with middle finger emojis and nobody would notice.

On our blog it has been pretty good to get newsletter signups. We tried just having a 'subscribe to our newsletter' section but no one filled that out. I moved it over to Intercom as an experiment and it actually worked. For our main site it's barely worth it... we get a few questions here and there.

A good DevOps pipeline is generally a good investment.

It might seem like the cherry on top, but being able to move fast and safely break things makes development more fun, not just for the developers.

This is an advertisement for a service disguised as an informative article. The info it provides is pretty basic and it's just farming clicks for signups from HN.

I only do video demonstrations now, even internally.

They go a lot quicker as I can edit out unnecessary typing etc. Then there's no need to be on site and do a demo just send a link.

That works for some use cases, but what I've found makes the best demo is to ask the potential customer what pain points they are experiencing and then I cater my demo exactly to their pain points. Making the demo interactive helps get the prospect to engage. When I get the customer talking it's amazing what they will tell you and the demo can take better shape.

Oh c’mon I thought it was well written and NOT just a sales pitch for the product. The author clearly had experiences to share and this product demonstrated a solution.

I agree! It's too late to edit my comment for clarity, but I'm glad I read the OP. It's not "just" a sales pitch.

Do people really need a tool to do this? This is tech sales 101. Everyone does this.

Everyone most certainly does not do this.

Source: I’ve seen a lot of demos that would have benefited from this and am responsible for a group who is not yet doing this, but needs to begin doing so. (I agree it’s elementary tech sales, but it might 201 level as a lot of places succeed without it; we’ve been selling to semi-captive internal customers so long that we didn’t prioritize this. Other companies clearly get by without this as well, even to fully arms-length customers.)

I worked with a bunch of startups and none of them did this.

I hate to say it if you're sales people are not doing this, especially technical sales, you should hire a different team. This is literally sales 101. Especially for a commission based/incentivized job this is first year stuff,