ShipLog lets you build a beautiful changelog that is effortless to update, optimized for distribution (SEO & social), and that makes it easy to celebrate the makers behind the features.
Hey PH,
Lucas from CommandBar here. This launch has been my pet project for the past few months. TLDR - we rage built a changelog-as-a-service product from the ground up to power our own changelog, and now we’re releasing it as a product.
Backstory
Late last year, I took over our changelog at CommandBar. We ship so much cool stuff, but our changelog had grown stale and cobwebby.
I really wanted to do two things (1) figure out a way for our changelog never to fall out of date again and (2) celebrate the people actually building the stuff here. We ship so fast because we have a dope team, and I wanted them to get the credit they deserve.
I went looking for a tool to help with this and didn’t find anything that met my bar. In doing this, I found soo many companies either without a changelog, one that had gone stale, or filled with super perfunctory “bug fixes and performance” improvements. Adding a changelog entry should be the last 0.1% effort after you’ve designed, built, tested, and launched the feature. If updating the changelog is annoying, you won’t do it.
So I built the tool I wanted, and now we’re releasing it as a product :) A sleek, minimal, opinionated changelog editor. Everything you need, nothing you don’t. Fast.
Sure, Lucas, but there’re other tools out there. How’s this different?
We think there are also a ton of low-hanging fruit that we see in the very best (top 1%) changelogs (think Linear) that we think everyone should do, but that a lot of tools don’t make easy to do. Things like:
- Fast live editing so writing an entry is like writing a tweet
- Celebrate the builders behind the features
- Maximize distribution (SEO optimized, automatically generated social images for LinkedIn/Twitter, and sharing built-in) so that it reaches more people. If you write a changelog and no reads it, does it make a sound?
Try it out and help us make it better!
We want to make this available to as many folks as possible, so we’ve got a really generous free tier, which will work for most team’s needs. Paid plan is coming soon but it’s gonna be really cheap. And if you’re ready to go full send on your changelog, you can hire me, the self-styled “Changelog guy” to maintain your changelog for you 🤓
