Unleashing Rapid Product Growth: Maintaining Quality and Reliability

Being new to the SaaS space, we were not deluded in believing that this would be an easy journey. Because of this we’ve had to diversify the way that we operate to stand out from the rest and build a product that people are excited to use, and that genuinely helps businesses grow.

From our three core business values, to our customer-first approach, this post will explain how we are able to be the best without being the biggest.

Infrastructure

We started the development of PaceKB in late 2022 and released v1.0.0 in March 2023. Due to how recent this was, we were able to take advantage of modern advancements in technology to build a scalable product that requires as little intervention as possible.

Our core application is written in TypeScript (Next.JS) and is hosted on AWS Architecture connecting to our PostgreSQL database engine. All of our code is serverless meaning that there are no physical servers that we need to maintain. Whenever a user requests data from one of our API endpoints AWS automatically provisions an environment to run that specific API function from and it returns data exactly the same way a server running 24/7/365 would, apart from there being no maintenance required. This alone removes the need for us to maintain these servers, allowing more time for product improvements.

We’ve also written PaceKB to implement ISR (Incremental Static Regeneration). This means that whenever you’re accessing a PaceKB-hosted Knowledge Base you’re likely to have a very fast user experience with little delay in requests. The goal of ISR is to serve users a cached version of data and in the background refresh it for the next user, ensuring speed whilst staying as up-to-date as possible. Again, this makes PaceKB run lightning quick, taking away the need for large resources solely working on speeding up older code.

Our 3 Core Values

When we started PaceKB we defined three values that would stick with us even until now. These were designed with the goal of speeding up slow processes and innovating fast.

1. Innovate Rapidly and Take Risks

Being far newer to this industry than our competitors, we knew that we had to stand out and be different from the rest. We believe that the best form of customer research is real-life testing, therefore you will often see that we release many features in beta staging rapidly whilst we collect feedback that will shape the future of that feature. We also take big leaps in the background with the development of large new functions that nobody has ever done before to make the Knowledge Base industry more advanced than ever. We will be revealing one of these advancements in the next few months.

2. Focus on the mission

We are big believers in quality over quantity, hence why some releases seem like they lack large amounts of features when in reality the features that have been developed are the most needed to progress PaceKB to the next level. We are taking PaceKB in a direction of being very scalable, therefore all decisions we make must take this into consideration along with the goals set-out in our mission.

When development deviates from the mission it becomes a huge bottleneck and delays our future plans for PaceKB.

3. If it’s a bottleneck, make it easier

This is a simple one, and it’s a shame more businesses don’t adopt a similar focus. We evaluate every area of PaceKB regularly and identify the biggest bottlenecks that slow us down. These can be anything from:

• Functions taking too long to load
• Unstable infrastructure
• Features that are slowing down more important development

We take these bottlenecks and either try to simplify or get rid of them. Being fast-paced means that we have no time for time-wasting as every second counts.

Customer-First Approach

We strongly believe that our customers should shape the future of PaceKB, and that’s why we’ve made it incredibly easy to leave us feedback. From our feedback website, a feedback widget on your Dashboard, or our active and engaging social media profiles we encourage anyone with any feedback to let us know, and the likelihood is we will implement your feedback fast. Especially if you’re a business looking to use PaceKB but we’re lacking in an area that’s important to you, let us know and we will make it work for you.

As it stands we’ve implemented over 90% of feedback requested from users, and the other 10% either is awaiting further feedback before we make a decision, or not requested enough by other customers.

If you’re looking to get started using PaceKB, sign up via our website: https://www.pacekb.com/sign-up or you can contact us using our Live Chat located in the bottom right of your screen.