2022 In Review

It's been an exciting year at Cleavr and with the larger Little Bets family of tools and services. We've been hard at work on improving the core of the Cleavr system to make it better, more reliable, and more intuitive for our users.

Our goal has been to minimize support issues and enhance existing features to make the system more user-friendly. Our team has been looking at ways to resolve common support problems and respond to user enhancement requests.

Focus on improving support and minimizing recurring requests

At the beginning of the year, we conducted an evaluation of the tools and services we were using to gather improvement ideas and issues from our users. Consequently, we decided to discontinue the use of a few of the tools and integrated them into our own service, Feedmas.

By implementing Feedmas, we have been able to gain a comprehensive view of our user needs and collaborate more effectively as a team. This has allowed us to aggregate ideas and requests to a single location, identify common themes, and prioritize common issues.

As a result, our support queue has significantly decreased despite an increase in our customer-base. We are now able to devote more time and resources to our main goal for 2022: improving the Cleavr core.

Pinpoint where the breaks are

Continuing with the support theme, we had been receiving numerous requests where it was difficult to determine the source of the issue. Investigating these issues took a significant amount of time and resources, making it challenging to ascertain whether the issue was related to Cleavr or not.

In order to gain a clearer picture of where issues are happening, we decided to pivot some on a side-project we working on called Doneo.io.

Doneo.io was created in order to provide organizations with a better way to manage their domain records. We have since expanded the scope of our initial concept to encompass a wider range of services related to domains, such as uptime monitoring for endpoints, troubleshooting diagnosis, and analysis of nameserver, DNS records, server port, and application issues.

Doneo.io offers a streamlined approach to identifying issues, providing a rapid resolution time of seconds rather than hours. This includes the ability to ascertain if the issue is related to a configuration managed by Cleavr, or if it lies outside of its scope.

First half of 2022 - focus on new features

The first half of 2022 was busy on two fronts.

The first front was a lot of what was mentioned above, where were building systems to better handle customer issues and feedback so that we could then focus on improving customer experience.

The second front was implementing quite a few new features.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Team accounts and management
• First-class support for Next
• First-class support for Directus
• Gitlab Enterprise Edition self-hosting
• Oracle Cloud integration with their free server tier options
• Soketi app installation
• Monorepo support
• Two-factor authentication
• Firewall management
• PM2 optimization for multi-core servers
• Clean disk space
• Persistent file-storage deployments
• Provide logs for backups

In the first half of the year, we were successful in developing new features. We then shifted our focus to refining our feedback and issue collection and analysis processes before dedicating our efforts to the main components of Cleavr.

Second half of 2022 - focus on hardening the core

By leveraging the lessons learned and services provided by Feedmas and Doneo.io, we have been able to focus our efforts on hardening the Cleavr core to reduce common support issues. This has resulted in fewer support issues and a decrease in time spent resolving them.

As we approach the end of 2022, our current effort has been to improve the deployment experience. As you can imagine, deployments have an nth degree of ways they can happen and an even high number of ways they can go wrong. We made it as easy as clicking a couple buttons to deploy the standard app for multiple different frameworks. Now, our focus has been harden the process and provide more insights as to why a deployment may have failed.

We're excited about the progress we've made and the improvements we've implemented. We hope that these changes will make Cleavr more reliable and easier to use for all of our users. We're looking forward to continuing to work on improving the system core and making Cleavr the best it can be!