ShipLog - The changelog your users will actually read

Hey PH, Lucas from CommandBar here. This launch has been my pet project for the past few months. TLDR - we rage built a changelog-as-a-service product from the ground up to power our own changelog, and now we’re releasing it as a product. Backstory Late last year, I took over our changelog at CommandBar. We ship so much cool stuff, but our changelog had grown stale and cobwebby. I really wanted to do two things (1) figure out a way for our changelog never to fall out of date again and (2) celebrate the people actually building the stuff here. We ship so fast because we have a dope team, and I wanted them to get the credit they deserve. I went looking for a tool to help with this and didn’t find anything that met my bar. In doing this, I found soo many companies either without a changelog, one that had gone stale, or filled with super perfunctory “bug fixes and performance” improvements. Adding a changelog entry should be the last 0.1% effort after you’ve designed, built, tested, and launched the feature. If updating the changelog is annoying, you won’t do it. So I built the tool I wanted, and now we’re releasing it as a product :) A sleek, minimal, opinionated changelog editor. Everything you need, nothing you don’t. Fast. Sure, Lucas, but there’re other tools out there. How’s this different? We think there are also a ton of low-hanging fruit that we see in the very best (top 1%) changelogs (think Linear) that we think everyone should do, but that a lot of tools don’t make easy to do. Things like: - Fast live editing so writing an entry is like writing a tweet - Celebrate the builders behind the features - Maximize distribution (SEO optimized, automatically generated social images for LinkedIn/Twitter, and sharing built-in) so that it reaches more people. If you write a changelog and no reads it, does it make a sound? Try it out and help us make it better! We want to make this available to as many folks as possible, so we’ve got a really generous free tier, which will work for most team’s needs. Paid plan is coming soon but it’s gonna be really cheap. And if you’re ready to go full send on your changelog, you can hire me, the self-styled “Changelog guy” to maintain your changelog for you 🤓

How did you determine your pricing model? Free to $999 a month is a huge gap. I totally see the value of a changelog service, because trust me, I hate writing these. Could this integrate into a Github Action or even in my CI/CD pipeline so that I can automate the changelog creation and use the output for my "What's New" section on my website or app store update?

This is awesome — and makes sense as an extension of the CommandBar portfolio. Would be sweet if this could emit a feed that connected to a product's Product Hunt listing to incorporate the latest updates!

this has been SO fun to work on and I'm SO impressed with what @lchanghoward and the team shipped in such a short time (I know there's been maaany late nights involved in this launch 🌙)

Congratulations 🎉

That's so nice, I could def make use of your app in the future, well played guys! GL on launch

I've been making changelogs in Markdown for the better part of 2 years now, and it's fair to say that I love Markdown's simplicity. What I found difficult to manage was the SEO part itself. Really like this solution where Markdown meets instant SEO features! Congratulations for launching it!

Super exciting, I really love the help with distribution. Early stage gets to busy...

Hey Lucas and the CommandBar team, Congratulations on the launch of CommandBar! It's inspiring to see the passion and dedication you've poured into creating a changelog-as-a-service product. I resonate with your belief that updating the changelog should be a seamless and integral part of the development process. I'm excited to try out CommandBar and contribute to making it even better. Best of luck with the future developments!

Love it! shout out to the team producing not only quality products, but also content on their blogs.