Lessons learned from writing a weekly changelog for two years

When I got my first iPhone I would binge download apps.

I’d open the app store week after week, to see the release notes of my apps. Every week, I’d look forward to the new Cut the Rope levels that got released.

When starting a startup I wanted to replicate that feeling. I wanted to let early believers follow us along our journey. So users could buy our software both for what it is right now, and what it will become!

At June we want to build a next generation analytics product that is delightful and simple to use.

The product we’re building is ambitious. It will take us years of development to reach our vision, but we needed to start somewhere.

I wrote the first line of code for June in September 2020. In October we wrote our first weekly changelog.

So it's now been two years since started publishing every week a new update.

This had a lot of unexpected benefits:

1. Momentum for the team - When you keep getting better week after week, the momentum feels unstoppable. It forces the engineering team to think about the customer impact of their work.
2. Faster feedback loop - As we release new updates weekly to our users, we get to start conversations with our most engaged users about what we ship.
   
   It only takes us a few weeks to verify our assumptions.
   
3. Scope constraints - We plan our work on a weekly basis. Every week we ask ourselves, how can we get the most out of this week? What can we do to accelerate our trajectory towards becoming an iconic company?
   
   We scope everything ship to what a single full stack engineer can build in one week.
4. Product marketing with no product marketer - We're a small team of only product builders. We don’t have a marketing team we can rely on. The weekly changelog is a way for us to stay top of mind!
   
   We currently send our weekly changelog to 5,000 people and around 2,000 people read it every week. This helps us both activate and re-engage users that didn't activate over time!
   
5. A community - We created a loyal following of users and advocates. These people amplify our initiatives like the June School and our product launches
   
6. Product leadership by example - We sell software that helps you build great products. We’re also transparent with how we approach our work and many companies find it inspiring.

If you’re interested in running a weekly changelog yourself, here’s our own codebase, it’s open-source so you can try it yourself.