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James Mikrut
@JamesMikrut
Published On

Our First Launch Week (And Building in Public)

Author
James Mikrut headshot
James Mikrut
@JamesMikrut
Published On
Dark textured card that reads: Launch week (and building our site in public)Dark textured card that reads: Launch week (and building our site in public)
Dark textured card that reads: Launch week (and building our site in public)Dark textured card that reads: Launch week (and building our site in public)

The next 20 days are going to be wild. Today, we're announcing our very first Launch Week, starting on November 14, 2022. And to commemorate, we're going to completely rebuild our website, in public, and then open-source the whole thing.

The Payload team recently just completed Y Combinator's Summer 2022 batch and it was intensely productive for us. We got a lot done over the summer, including moving to a fully open-source MIT license as well as launching 1.0.

We want to keep that pace going. One of the great parts about YC is that you can learn from your fellow YC alums, and one open-source alum in particular that we're perpetually inspired by is Supabase. We're consistently amazed by their progress and really respect how they model their launches after a "pseudo" YC Demo Day that serves as a milestone for their team to focus their efforts toward. It also serves as a deadline. And we work well when deadlines are involved at Payload.

So we're going to have our own Launch Week, and it's only 20 days away.

During our first launch week, we'll be highlighting a lot of the work we've been doing over the past few months as well as announcing some significant new features in development now—all aimed at making Payload even more powerful.

To mark this special occasion, we're also going to be doing something pretty crazy.

And we're going to open-source it. All within the next 20 days. It'll be a great codebase for the community to learn from, demonstrating countless features:

  • Modern, professional NextJS development
  • Block-based layout building
  • Using Payload's form-builder plugin
  • Leveraging MDX to render our docs from Payload's core directly into pages on the Payload site
  • Implementing Algolia Docsearch across our documentation codebase
  • Implementing a robust preview environment for the frontend, connecting Payload and NextJS seamlessly
  • Using Payload's GraphQL API to fetch content from the CMS
  • Lots, lots more

Sounds crazy, especially when you consider that in parallel to our website rebuild, the team is also working on delivering a new suite of features and improvements to Payload itself.

Starting today, the mad dash to get the new site completely built by Nov 14 is on. We'd love if you follow along. Things are going to get pretty interesting and the code will be flying.

Why rebuild our site?

Good question. Seems like this is the first mistake of every startup ever. Focus on your site and marketing stuff too much rather than the product. But the catch here for us is that we're also actively working on Payload Cloud, and when we release Payload Cloud, we need to make some significant upgrades to our site. Because Payload Cloud will be built directly into our website itself (and that will all be open-source as well).

Rebuilding our site is the first step toward getting the Payload Cloud UI in place.

What's Payload Cloud?

Payload Cloud is our solution to the problem of how hard it is to deploy a CMS, even in today's web where there are a fafillion hosting platforms to choose from. The problem isn't lack of hosting platforms—the problem lies in the complexity of having to manually go out and sign up for a variety of different services and then wire them all together.

To host a CMS, you need to provision for 4 distinct concerns:

  • Database (MongoDB Atlas, generally)
  • Permanent file storage (S3 or similar)
  • API layer (Vercel / Netlify are obviously great)
  • CI and blue / green deployments

You can manually hook up all of these vendors and then plumb them all together, but in the end, you'll be paying quite a bit. And you'll have had your dev ops hat on for a bit too long. Instead, we're going to deliver on all of this, in one fell swoop, just by connecting your GitHub repo and then watching it deploy.

And there will be a free tier. Just in time for Heroku to get rid of their free tier.

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Join our community on Discord

We've recently started a Discord community for the Payload community to interact in realtime. Often, Discord will be the first to hear about announcements like this move to open-source, and it can prove to be a great resource if you need help building with Payload. Click here to join!

Get up and running with one line

Getting started is easy—and free forever. Just fire up a new terminal window and run the following command:

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npx create-payload-app