What does it mean to launch?

After almost 2 years of development, learning, and growth, we’re finally launching Graphite out of beta! But what does it actually mean to launch? https://www.producthunt.com/posts/graphite-6 What’s changing? ------------------ The answer for current users and customers? Nothing. Well, not technically nothing—folks might miss the little “BETA” badge on the top of the screen, but the rest of the features people know and love are here to stay. What’s changing for developers who don’t use Graphite yet? Everything. Starting today, there’s no more waitlist—anyone with a GitHub account can sign up for free and start creating, reviewing, and merging “stacked changes” (the workflow used by engineers at Meta & Google to stay unblocked on code review). But what do we hope to gain by launching? And how did we decide that now is the right time? Why launch? ------------- The most obvious answer is marketing—we need Graphite to grow. Launching out of beta means we can post here on Product Hunt, announce on our social channels, and spam our investors and friends; all in the name of reaching as many potential new users as possible. While we’ve learned so much from our wonderful beta community and early customers, we’ve always known that if we want to build a lasting company and truly move the state of software engineering forward, we’ll need to scale by orders of magnitude. Today, the space of code review tools is extremely consolidated: engineers at the largest companies like Meta and Google use amazing internal tools to stay unblocked and ship quickly, and everyone else is stuck using GitHub. We want to challenge that model and give every developer state-of-the-art workflows and tools like stacking and merge queues—all without having to change their team’s existing tooling and processes. Launching Graphite gives us both a moment (today) to share these ideas as broadly and as loudly as possible and a platform on which to create the developer experience we believe every engineer should have access to. Why now? ---------- The “why now” is also pretty simple: we’re finally ready to scale. As you may know, Graphite began as a small internal tool that we built without any idea of the immense support and enthusiasm it would spark from the developer community. It’s taken us almost 2 years to craft a tool intended for a team of 6 into a product with the functionality, performance, and polish to support tens of thousands of engineers collaborating on millions of PRs. We didn’t want to launch until every new user could pick up Graphite and immediately find value, and we pushed ourselves to keep iterating until we were confident we’d achieved this. We’re proud of the product we’ve built and the team we’ve grown to help us get here. What’s next? ------------- Today is the culmination of almost 2 years of hard work for us here at Graphite, and we’re only just getting started. In the coming months you’ll see us continue to constantly refine our core product, respond to your feedback, and ship amazing new features like a desktop app and Graphite AI. Version 1.0 is the best Graphite has ever been, and we promise it’s also only going to get better. As we look to Graphite’s future, we also want to celebrate and thank our beta community members and early customers who have helped us get to this point. We wouldn’t be launching anything today without your constant feedback, feature requests, bug reports, and encouragement. From world-class devtools and fintech products, to breathtaking art installations, to the first generation of safe, sustainable fusion reactors, the things you’re building with Graphite inspire us every day, and we can’t wait to show you what we’re working on next!