We just shipped on-prem via the same approach. Much lighter weight than we anticipated, and Replicated has great support.

Agreed. It's much easier to hire for Python skills today than it was even 2-3 years ago.

While Python may be 'under assault' from a conceptual point of view, the job market would beg to differ!

First off, congrats on shipping! That's a big step.

As others have suggested, I think you need some serious help with positioning and messaging. I showed up to your site wanting to try it just because it was new (early adopter stereotype), but I couldn't tell what it is.

The Medium article is better, but I think you'd be well served to partner with someone who is really good at branding and messaging. This isn't just about window dressing, it goes a bit deeper than that.

For example: you need to show me one painful problem your product solves within 2 seconds of me coming to your homepage. When in consumer mode, I don't really care if you're solving ten painful problems - just show me one very clearly and I'm almost sure to kick the tires on the product. A strong branding & messaging partner will intuitively know how to help you do this for your product, in addition to providing a more user-level view on how to talk about it.

I think you have an interesting idea here after reading the Medium post. If you can help me use Slack as a to do list and you're solving that single problem really well, that's definitely something I'd pay a monthly fee for.

That said, while I would gladly pay SaaS-level monthly fees for sexy todo integration in Slack, if you make me learn an entirely new vocabulary to do it (loops and whatnot), this cost alone immediately prices out my interest.

I really loved "The hard thing about hard things" by Ben Horowitz -- he directly addresses this issue, and his writing style is light years more engaging than your typical management literature.

Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan is one of my favorite books of all time, and if you like it there are 2 more in the series.

Very smart, noir sci-fi with a lot of heady concept play -- some consider it to be genre-defining.

Remote can be great, but it does kind of seem like it requires somewhat better (and more technical) management than having everyone on-site.

If a bunch of programmers are in the office, it's a lot easier to see them at a desk and sort of say, "yeah looks like they're working..." With remote developers, whoever is in charge of their productivity needs to be technical enough to eyeball what's getting done, know that it feels like about the right amount of work (or not), and be confident in their appraisal of the team's productivity.

I think oftentimes remote teams can be much more productive, but requires either a more political technical technical lead or a more technical PM to really work.

I'm a manager these days, and I think it's two very different roles. While I was never the best developer (and probably will never be), the managerial role is kind of awesome because it's about amplifying others' ability to be great.

Management is much more of a service role (and much less of a directly creative role), but I've found it to be a good fit because you get to serve a bunch of wicked smart people, which is super fun.

Good management is all about reducing total cognitive load for your engineers: keeping stakeholders off their back, taking heat when things go awry, being a crap umbrella for the team so they can work, etc. Done right it's immensely rewarding, but definitely not in the way programming is.

Also - in my experience the number one thing you want to look for in vetting a 'good' management job is the quality of the executive you'll be reporting to. Are they a strong, fair leader? If yes, go for it. If no... you're gonna have a bad time.