Product Update Week 1

Welcome to our inaugural product update post. Our goal is to give everyone a look into the product updates released over the past week. Transparency and insight into the development of the Aeonry platform are core to our culture, and we want people to feel excited as they see momentum building toward the initial release of the platform.

This was the first week that our landing page and website were live. Most of our focus this week was on designing, publishing, and making the Aeonry landing page and blog accessible.

We started by using the Webflow platform to build the landing page. This allowed us to use a visual editor, AI assistance, and quick iteration to arrive at a design we liked. The platform was easy to use, but it quickly became cumbersome because it does not allow custom applications to host pages at the root of a domain. This meant we had to host the landing page at /landing instead of at the root, which was not what we wanted.

We are a company of engineers, so this was a problem we knew how to solve. We made a fast decision to develop our own landing page and host it on a more traditional hosting platform. Even though we have extensive experience with AWS and GCP, we chose a managed hosting provider so we could focus more on product development than infrastructure.

Our first attempt was with Fly.io. Getting an app running was very simple. From the initial brew install flyctl to having the landing page live took roughly 30 minutes. This was far faster than what we could have achieved with AWS. However, Fly.io's managed database pricing was higher than we were comfortable with, so we quickly shut down our Fly.io account and began looking for an alternative.

We found that Render was a good option that met our pricing expectations. While the deployment process took a bit longer, around one hour, it was still very fast. Aeonry is now hosted on Render for the foreseeable future and will use other cloud services from different vendors as needed.

The final activity this week was ensuring that the Aeonry landing page and blog were accessible to Google. We added a sitemap and submitted it for indexing. The best time to start acquiring organic traffic is long before the initial product launch, and we hope this early investment, along with regular blog posts, will pay off over the long term.

In our next post, we will return to discussing the ethos behind Aeonry and its development.