Burn Outs, Developer Privacy and Kloudi's first Public Release
Summarising the last quarter of 2020 and how it led to us release our self-hosted native app for our users
We have been entrenched deep in work and resetting our mental health for the last couple of months of 2020 and have missed sharing this through our newsletter. Publishing these newsletters and having you folks read it, had almost started to feel like the early 90’s when you would write to your penpals. So here is a little bit of what has been happening with us and Kloudi towards the tail-end of the year 2020.
2020 started out as an interesting year. There is a lot that happened and a lot that didn’t. For all that happened, we were glad, but there was still an overload of emotions building up within us as founders because of a lot that didn’t. The misses of 2020 had slowed us down mentally and eventually physically by the end of November. The extent of our burnout as founders led us into our introspective shells. While conversations with you folks and your continued feedback and engagement kept us going, we still started to question our ability to trudge along and solve this problem.
What we understood is that the power of listening for the right message from your customers can guide you through the dark. We understand that you folks love our product and expect the best to be delivered and no less. In every right, you as customers and believers deserve the best. We have tried taking the route that founders typically do by sharing an MVP and expecting you folks to rejoice over what we shared, but you told us that we were wrong in expecting that. You made us realise that it wasn’t your belief in the idea or us or even your patience that was drying out, you just wanted completeness in a product, and for that, you were ready to wait.
We as founders sometimes dig a hole for ourselves imagining consequences that don’t even exist. We were hard on ourselves, even when our customers weren’t. We were putting ourselves accountable to VC timelines even when we didn’t have to. Not realising that the problem was difficult, that a team of two is as strong as it gets, that our customers were right all along and that our vision and path had never failed us.
Having said all of this, we are back stronger and more resolute. We haven’t stopped building and striving to give you the best. Most importantly we heard you when you said that you wanted to see that we cared for your tool data and privacy. So as we begin this year on a high note and with high hopes, we give you Kloudi’s desktop app. Our desktop app works 100% locally hosted from your desktop environment. It does everything that our web app and IDE plugin do. Right from connecting your tools, to searching and viewing your relevant data across tools, to taking actions across tools. When we say that Kloudi is the universal command line for your engineering tools we mean it. Be it web app, IDE or now the desktop app we are omnipresent. We 100% care for your privacy and security and do not read into any of your data in any of our form factors that you use. If our toddler status as a startup still bothers you even a little bit and makes you think about security, we want to make sure that you don’t. We want you to worry about bigger things while we deliver you the best. Hence our newly ready to download Desktop app ensures that you have no qualms whatsoever and it works well with any OS.
As for the burnout, a tip from our experience; Listen, introspect, go with the rhythm. You can only go as fast as the wave, trying to move faster will only tire you out. Most importantly don’t forget to breathe.
-Sneh and Nitish
Interested in trying out our Kloudi’s mac app? Go to https://kloudi.tech/get-started and let us know your feedback.