Being a startup doing the first public showing of a new product so far only known by our early beta customers we traveled to Kubecon + Cloudnative last week quite excited and anxious to see how our product would resonate with the community. As a sponsor we had a booth where we had the opportunity to present the platform to everyone who wanted to drop by and talk.
So Wednesday morning, we were 9 excited people waiting for people to come talk to us….And nothing happened. We didn’t have the best location ever, down an aisle far from where all the buzz happened, and we could only see from a distance how other companies had a lot of traction at their stands, and I foresaw that we would be standing alone for three days. Also, our cool t-shirts had not arrived but were seemingly lost somewhere in France, and our equally cool stickers were impossible to unfold. What a misery.
People wanted to know more, and suddenly we had waves of people coming in who got demos – we had 5 demos running at the same time.
This could be a sad blog post about how everything goes wrong, but suddenly after some time – probably only 20 minutes, but 20 long minutes 🙂 – the first couple of people stopped by looking at the demo loop on the screen. We had chosen to have a demo showcasing the product running on the screen as we found this was the best way to present the platform. And it worked. People were intrigued by the unique UI we have, where systems can be created visually by dragging micro services, frontends and DBs/queues/JWT into a canvas and connecting them through APIs.
It’s needless to say, we were thrilled to be able to talk to so many people about the future of software development platforms and to showcase our product to so many people. The feedback was very positive, and we found that the whole premise we believe so much in and have built our platform around was resonating incredibly well with the audience. Many of the people stopping by told us about their Backstage initiatives, which after many months – some even years – didn’t have any traction amongst their developers and now they were pleased to see a platform that works out of the box. A product you don’t have to customize and set up forever before getting value, but a product where everything is set up from day one and where you, down the line, can make plug-in-based customizations if needed. People were surprised at how much Kapeta helps in the actual development phase and not only with deployments like traditional IDPs. It was a wow moment when people saw how whole systems were generated in seconds and how all boilerplate code was taken care of, no matter what database or provider was used.
So after three days with literally hundreds of demos and excited conversations we returned back to our respective locations, tired but very happy. Now even more energized to continue to build out the platform to serve all the companies and developers who are looking for a product like Kapeta.
Thanks to everyone who stopped by. It was truly an honor.
And if you are curious about our t-shirt situation, then yes, they arrived Thursday 😄
