
Launch HN: Airship (YC W18) – Controlled rollouts of new features - platypus-d
Hi HN! We’re Alvin and George, the founders of Airship (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.airshiphq.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.airshiphq.com</a>). We built Airship to help companies roll out new features carefully, instead of blindly deploying.<p>You may have seen that a million users are revolting over Snapchat&#x27;s redesign, dropping their App Store rating below 2 stars. You might also remember when Digg launched a redesign in 2010 that caused a 30+% dip in usage in a matter of days. To avoid unpleasant surprises, companies like Facebook and Airbnb have developed their own sophisticated tools to carefully roll out their new features, test and measure their impact incrementally, and roll them back when signs of trouble appear. This way they can be informed about how users receive the features, and can fix mistakes without jeopardizing their entire user base. Then they can publicly release the new feature with reasonable confidence about its likely reception and effects.<p>Alvin and I discovered the importance of controlling feature launches and monitoring them carefully when we worked at Zenefits together. Many companies would like to be able to mitigate risk through controlled feature rollout and rigorous testing, but don&#x27;t have the resources to do it. This approach is proven to work, but remains expensive, since only companies that can afford in-house tooling, and often a dedicated team to maintain it, can do it. It struck us that there was a need here for a product, so we started Airship to build it and make feature rollout accessible to everyone.<p>To use Airship, you install one of our SDKs. Then you can flag or gate code with if&#x2F;else blocks calling a single function provided by our SDK. This automatically gets wired up to controls in the Airship dashboard which allows you to control targeting rules, rollout percentages, and whitelists&#x2F;blacklists.<p>Key features of Airship:
- Gradually roll out and A&#x2F;B testing of entire features, not just copy and superficial changes
- No performance hit (checking whether a customer has a feature takes &lt; 0.1 ms)
- 0% downtime (no dependency on Airship’s services, so effective downtime is 0%)
- Complex experiments using attributes of Users, Groups (e.g. location, purchase amounts, device types, etc.) as well as other object types (Product Listings, Pages&#x2F;Posts, etc.)<p>We&#x27;d love to hear your feedback and hear about your experiences, ideas, and needs in this area!
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petetnt
While I'd love to test out Airship, not being able to do that without signing
up is pretty much a non-starter for me. When I say pretty much, I can often be
persuaded with having at least the documentation available without signing up.
For example Logrocket ([https://logrocket.com/](https://logrocket.com/)) needs
signing up, but the documentation is all there and I can immediately see the
effects it will have on my app if applied.

~~~
rahilsondhi
+1. With this kind of product, I want to see docs and code snippets
immediately. What kind of code do I have to write to use your product?

~~~
alviny
Thank you, really good suggestion. We'll see if we can put snippets on the
main page to help with this.

~~~
Techonomicon
Why hide it? Me signing up gains you nothing, I can just use some throwaway
account, or make some RandomDude32@usa.com which you gain zero from. But to
the op's point, I'm not going to go through those hurdles, I'm just going to
move on.

One of the biggest draws for this sort of thing from the dev side is "how far
am I going to have to bend over to use this".

Freely available documentation sounds like a no-brainer.

~~~
platypus-d
We thought that the onboarding flow should take you through the product first,
where the docs is readily available. In hindsight, making the docs more
publicly available makes sense.

Here is the docs:
[https://airship.readme.io/v1.0/docs](https://airship.readme.io/v1.0/docs).
We'll also link them in our home page in the next iteration.

~~~
petetnt
That’s awesome, thank you!

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amasad
Wanted to drop in a quick review of Airship (disclaimer: I got to know the
founders through the experience of being early users).

We, at Repl.it, started using it for a very risky rewrite of a core part of
our product -- the IDE
([https://repl.it/site/blog/ide](https://repl.it/site/blog/ide)) -- and it
helped us roll it out safely, turning it off when we needed to, when we get a
user bug report Airship could quickly tell us if that user has the feature on,
etc.

Since then we've been using it for virtually every feature release and
experiment. We couldn't be happier with how smooth the service is:

\- The service is reliable and fast.

\- The UI is simple and instant.

\- The SDK is simple and easy-to-use.

~~~
waterside81
Cool service. Heads up, your Go version is really out of date with some
potentially serious security holes. You should probably upgrade to 1.10

~~~
amasad
Updating a lot of our languages as we speak ;) Thanks

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lquist
I really like the product (and may use it!), but the landing page is very
confusing. You get to the meat of the issue in your HN comment, but I see very
little of that on the landing page.

~~~
alviny
Thank you - that's helpful feedback. We'll improve the marketing page with
some more details in the next iteration.

~~~
WingH
A good example is this image in your homepage:
[https://www.airshiphq.com/dist/static/media/control-
targetin...](https://www.airshiphq.com/dist/static/media/control-
targeting.bcf9a31c.svg)

This image serves absolutely no useful purpose (What is it?). It would've been
much useful to see a screenshot of the product where you could set feature
flags to at least give us an idea on what your product does.

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runako
Congrats on the launch!

You're probably already aware, but if not here's a heads-up that there's a
company called Urban Airship that is in a related space (and based on what
they do, your space could be in their sights). Just something to think about.

Good luck!

~~~
alviny
Thanks for the heads up! We've taken a look and so far seems like we add value
in different ways since they focus on mobile engagement, but definitely will
consider this going forward

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dabeeeenster
Is there a reason your pricing jumps straight from $0 to "Contact Us"? Surely
there's a $50/month plan or thereabouts that would be relevant to a lot of
smaller companies?

Congrats on the launch!

~~~
platypus-d
Right now, we're working with each each company, even small ones, to find out
the right price point for them. If you have any questions on pricing, email us
at hello@airshiphq.com

~~~
jaxn
The lack of published pricing immediately makes me think it is too expensive
for me. I pay for plenty of services, but "contact us" pricing either means
"Enterprise" expense, or pushy sales people.

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whoisjuan
How is this different from LaunchDarkly?

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bpicolo
There's room for more than one player in the market here, it's a super
important sort of tool where the open source versions are all pretty mediocre.
OSS solutions tend to be statically configured, which non-engineers don't tend
to have access or ability to configure. That's not to say you couldn't OSS
something here, but it'd be a real effort to host.

~~~
phoenix24
what are the open-source alternatives, if you don't mind me asking?

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pkaeding
This site has a pretty good survey of the open-source options in various
languages: [http://featureflags.io/feature-
flags/](http://featureflags.io/feature-flags/) (you have to pick a language
from the menu to get to the page specific to that language, as the page I
linked to is more of an overview of the concept, and there doesn't seem to be
one page that lists them all).

~~~
RileyJames
FeatureFlags.io is owned and operated by the CTO of LaunchDarkly. It’s not a
survey, it’s an infomercial / microsite for LaunchDarkly. It states
“contributed by LaunchDarkly” at the bottom, but considering it’s owned by
them that doesn’t seem to adequately sum up the situation. Not sure why they
wouldn’t just call it as it is.

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justswim
As the CTO of a growing website
([https://www.kapwing.com](https://www.kapwing.com)) we have been looking for
a tool to make it easier to test certain features / changes on a smaller
scale. I signed up reluctantly because I am curious about how your SDK works.
But I was disappointed that I wasn't able to find any examples or info on the
amount of work it would take to integrate.

My initial questions are: \- Will this work with frontend React code? \- Do I
need to create separate database hooks? \- Can I create UI experiments without
writing code? \- Does it integrate with Stripe if we want to test conversions?

~~~
platypus-d
We will be reaching out to you shortly to get your questions answered. Thanks
for the feedback!

~~~
marcc
Would you be willing to answering them here (or link to your site with these
answered)?

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hemantv
This looks cool. How long have you guys been working on this?

For everyone else if you want to see their api's not very hard to take a look
from their SDK.

[https://github.com/airshiphq/airship-
ruby/blob/master/lib/ai...](https://github.com/airshiphq/airship-
ruby/blob/master/lib/airship-ruby.rb)

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tams
Congrats on launching!

Regarding your pricing page: I feel the "10,000 API calls" and "75,000 API
calls" limits on the Hobby and Growth plans would deserve some context. Is it
10k API calls per day or month? How fast do I exhaust it?

You comment mentioning that you emphasize local computation was helpful and
the pricing page might benefit from including it.

~~~
marcc
Agreed. It's hard for me to buy a service that limits the number of API calls
when I possibly can't control this directly. What about changing this to the
number of MAU (monthly active users), or features, or some other unit I can
grok when I think about my product and how I'd use your product?

~~~
alviny
If you're interested, let's talk. Outside of the published tiers we already do
something different. Can reach us at hello@airshiphq.com.

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avinashjdsouza
SDK-only deployment or do you have an API that we can plug into a webapp?
Wasn't mentioned too clearly on the site.

~~~
avinashjdsouza
Also, colour me dense but I'm a marketer/PM and I can barely understand what's
on the landing page. And there's no way that sales needs feature flagging.

I know it's early days but maybe slightly simpler copy where you tell me what
feature flagging actually is?

On the flip side, I learned something pretty cool today! :-)

~~~
jpochtar
Sales can use feature flags to enable secret features for a customer they’re
talking to. For example to demo a not-yet-shipped feature. They can use a
feature flag to mark a customer as “enterprise” so they get a different
version of the product. Overall, I’ve found it useful for customizing my
product for the person I’m in person or on the phone with, without touching
code or affecting all users.

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billybones
I've been watching this team for over a year and have been consistently
impressed by how fast they're iterating, how thoughtful they are about this
problem, and the care they put into doing it right. Rooting for this company!

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justswim
For anyone looking for the documentation it seems you can find it here:
[https://airship.readme.io/v1.0/docs](https://airship.readme.io/v1.0/docs)

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twostorytower
Is there anything Airship can do that you can't do with Optimizely?

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jaxn
How does this compare to something like Flipper?
[https://github.com/jnunemaker/flipper](https://github.com/jnunemaker/flipper)

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vogt
There's lots of talk about controlling the user experience and doing UI
experiments on the landing page and no instance of direct marketing to UX
professionals. How come? Just curious.

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basicsbeauty
Congrats on the launch.

Couple questions

1\. Is this another A/B testing framework? Or is it for feature enablement?

2\. What level of granularity(user, cohort etc.) does the platform support?

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alviny
1\. Feature enablement leads very naturally to A/B testing so we're tackling
both.

2\. Actually fairly granular, especially if you have properties or attributes
you want to filter populations on.

