Hi Reader,
I’m writing this from the countryside near Barcelona, where the Kit team is halfway through Create Week - our second company hackathon.
I’m leading a project I’ve been wanting to build for about 5 years: a proper demo account for Kit that’s filled with real-feeling content and data. You know how when you’re trying to show someone how a product works, but the account is full of empty states or placeholder text like this?
Not ideal. So our sales team is often stuck using our founder Nathan’s account on demo calls, and for brand and marketing assets we end up doing a whole lot of photoshopping.
Hopefully, that’s all gonna change after this week tho!
My group includes people from two different engineering teams, plus sales, marketing, Brand Studio, and data all working together. And despite leading the project, I really don't understand how any of this works on the engineering side. All I know is, it's much harder than you think it is!
But I’m grateful for the smart engineers on our team because we had a breakthrough on day one. You should have seen my face when they cracked the ability to create a demo account and fill the charts with data.
After years of trying various approaches to solving this empty-state problem, seeing those charts actually populate was pretty magical.
Meanwhile, myself and the sales and marketing folks have been creating example emails, automations, forms, and landing pages to fill the account so that we have examples of as many Kit features as possible, because our goal is for this demo account to help creators understand how they would use Kit in their business. We’ve also been working on documentation of all this content so that anyone in the company can understand it and use it to demo Kit to creators.
Today is our last day of building before we present to the company tomorrow, and there are still a few features that need to be coded. We’ve got three 90-minute sessions today to figure that out.
I’m really excited about the potential of this project. Sales will have something real to demo on calls, our brand team can take screenshots for product imagery, marketing can showcase it in educational content, and engineering gets an account with realistic data for testing new features.
This has been a dream internal tool for me for 5 years. So since we’ve been asked to pick a song to walk out to for our presentation, our song is gonna be “Hey Now (This Is What Dreams Are Made Of)” from the Lizzie McGuire movie. 😎
Anyway, back to building. Fingers crossed we can pull together everything we need in these final sessions!
I'll tell you about where we ended up, as well as share some reflections from this week spent in person with the Kit team, in next weeks issue.
More soon,
