Hi all 👋
Excited to launch Faces today. More than 4 years in the making. Kind of.
All the way back in 2013 I created a site to showcase creatives and makers from my local community in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Ever since people asked me to create a similar site for their community. I was working on a lot of different products already and figured some other company would step in and create a service for this kind of stuff.
Few years later, late 2016, there still wasn't a simple service to create a visual overview of the people in a community. I did some quick Twitter research and it turned out more people were interested in such a page and even willing to pay.
So I created a few pages at $200 a pop (for the first year) for a handful of customers. Initially I literally just copied the codebase and did a find & replace for their community name, logo, etc. Later I replaced those with 'environment variables' so the codebase could be the same for each community, although there was still no way for customers to update those variables themselves and setting up a new page required me to spin up a new Heroku instance.
About 2-3 weeks ago I finally started working on a true multi-tenancy version of Faces. That means every community page is hosted on the same server using the same codebase. Basically it means that people can now create and manage their own page, without requiring my involvement. A true SaaS.
Anyway. That's where we are today. I'm excited to see what you'll do with it and let me know if you have any questions or feedback. 🙌
P.S.
Thanks to @espreedevora for pushing me to help her make a page for the LA startup community ( https://community.wearelatech.com ). Seeing her grow that community inspired me to turn it into a service other people could use as well.
Also shout out to @levelsio@flowen_nl@andreyazimov@oskarth for their continued support and feedback in our secret chat group. Thanks to @rpish for keeping BetaList up-and-running while I was off working on Faces. Shout out to all the beta testers and early customers @leonpals@itsakeller@mindaugaslt and countless other people 😍
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