ZenML is dressing up 💃🕺
ZenML is dressing up 💃🕺
How we are re-positioning us in the crowdy MLOps landscape
Hey, this time it’s Adam. I’m totally overwhelmed and super excited about the following newsletter! Since our last one 4 weeks ago a lot has happened on many layers. It also feels like an eternity - Let me give you an overview even though it was hard to decide where to start :-)
🚀 Launch Day
Over the last weeks, we worked hard and are now really happy that we could pack everything into the Launch Day on Wednesday. It contains our new “Minimum Delightful Product” MDP with release 0.8.1., the docs, the website with new messaging, and the positioning and overall strategy that we set up in our second retreat. Please read Stefan’s release blog post - he’s bringing together all news at ZenML with the overall development in the noisy MLOps space. It’s really a great read :-) We also met with our community for 4h during our first “ZenML MLOps Day”. See the full recording on youtube.
But why have we done all of this?
We got and saw many questions about ZenML’s positioning and competitors on our and other channels. We understood the importance of clear positioning and communication and the best way to change it in the first place was our landing page. ZenML as an open-source MLOps framework will clearly separate us from opinionated and locking-in horizontal platforms or highly specialized vertical ML tools for individual pipeline steps. We really underestimated how much traffic we got on our former, fairly simple website. With around 2-3k unique visitors per 30 days we are reaching interested users but let them disappear with all their questions in mind. So we redesigned it!
We wanted to make the landing page as delightful as possible, catch users with their interest, and directly funnel them to what they are looking for in our Docs, Slack or Github. We also added fancy GIFs and a new explanatory video → but see it for yourself: https://zenml.io/
Also, we launched our interactive roadmap with a voting function. We got the first proposals and upvotes on feature requests and integrations. Looking forward to hopefully getting the communities’ buy-in with this!
🧘♂️Retreat #2 2022
Retreats are amazing! In February we set out what we wanted to build for our community. We set up and since then executed a clear roadmap and got all the loose ends together with all features and integrations, we wanted to implement. This marks an important step as we now can go out with our “Minimum Delightful Product” (MDP) and get detailed feedback from the community. ZenML is now heavily focused on standardization, extensibility, and reproducibility. How to make use of that now? For this, we met in Munich to kick off Retreat #2 for the next quarterly cycle. Now we need to figure out whether we got our positioning right. So ZenML has to get into more people’s hands. We are prioritizing active outreach and also approach companies for more structured engagements in so-called “Design Partnerships”. If you have somebody at hand that would benefit from ZenML or could have feedback, please send her/him over to us! 🙌
🕺 New Rockstar joining our Core Team
Felix joined us at ZenML. We can’t be more excited! He just switched from a Munich AI company, that recently was sold to Meta and is really kicking off his open-source career → check out his GitHub contributions
New Opening!
We’re now looking for another role for the first time: Chief of Staff (m/w/d) - if you know somebody, let us know!
🤩 ZenML got some viral PR pushes
It’s always good to get feedback for what you’ve built - especially from people that have a good standing in MLOps. This time we got amazing pushes from Clem Delangue, founder of the recent 🦄🦄 Hugging Face, Ed Shee and Seldon, and Richard Socher, Founder of you.com. Also, Safoine wrote his first blog post about CI/CT/CD with ZenML and got a lot of attention with 250 visitors and just today we released Ayush’s ZenFile.
We also got pushed through Github Trending and Reddit and now surpassed the 2k Github stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
That’s it! Thank you for reading ‘till the end - here’s a cookie 🍪😏 Have a nice weekend!
See you next time,
Adam