A new serverless database, Vite's rocket growth, Apollo's new dashboard

This has been a jam-packed week in developer tooling! If you're in Product or Marketing, there are lots of launches you can learn, and strategic moves you can copy or counter.

Let's get into it!

Hot Product Launch

Competition in the serverless database space reminds me of the red hot front-end framework wars from 2017-2021. Every month there was a new competitor with a different angle on building a UI.Nile just entered the market with a focus on multi-tenant apps, making it easy for fullstack developers to spin up a SaaS. The product's unique value prop is interesting because it may solve an advanced problem that is not the starting use case for choosing a serverless database. I think Nile's founders know this, which is why last week they launched templates, with step-by-step tutorials and walk-thru videos.

Building starter projects is usually an after-thought for Product teams, and can often be handled in a haphazard way by DevRel. But in my experience, nothing attracts conversion and activations like a well done template that demonstrates the tool's common use case.

Nile launch - serverless postgres with a multi-tenant focus

Nile templates launch post

Nile's template for Nextjs

Hackernews reaction to Nile's launch

Backend Products

✨ Directus, the headless CMS had a launch week, and landed content versioning, a suite of tools for agencies for project tracking, an extensions framework.

(Confession - Directus has not been on my radar, so I was surprised to learn that the project has 23k Github stars. It looks like they're enjoying a lot of growth over the last two years)

✨ Supabase, the serverless database has a new SSR client which "configures Supabase to use Cookies, which is required for server-side languages and frameworks".

✨ Sanity, the headless CMS announced the "latest improvements to Sanity’s Next.js toolkit, which combines the might of our client library,@sanity/client, and Next.js, all in one convenient package".

Enterprise Watch

Each week I select news of a developer tool startup that has taken a step to win large customers.

✨ Apollo released a "new and improved insights dashboard in GraphOS Studio to provide scalable observability tools to API owners operating a supergraph."

Now this is the type of feature Sales can demo to an economic buyer to close a deal! Gold star ⭐ to Apollo's product team.

Front-End Products

✨ Vite is enjoying spectacular growth, both in usage and projects that rely on it.

This week Remix announced a switch to Vite. Unfortunately for Remix, its usage has flatlined, even though the project was acquired by Shopify exactly a year ago.Which projects also support Vite?

Storybook 7

Angular 16

Preact

Redwood 6 

(New to Vite? Watch Jeff Delaney of Fireship explain Vite in 100 seconds.)

✨ Remix, the front-end framework launched v2 two months ago, and now has better support on Netlify.

✨ FusionAuth is a new authentication and authorization platform, and they announced a $65 million growth equity investment from Updata Partners.

DevOps Products

✨ Gitlab now enables you to create rules to set target branches for merge requests

✨ Github Universe is this week, Nov 8-9, live San Francisco and virtual

💡Need go-to-market help with your next set of product launches? Or need help arming your sales team with case studies? Hit reply to this email, and let's talk about your sales goals. - Hashim Warren