Newsletter / Archive

Spinal update for February: search and you will find

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I hope this first month of 2023 was a good one and you are still keeping your new years resolutions. It’s now about 12 months ago I started with some of the foundation of what now is Spinal (it used to be a very crude internal app I used at all my previous SaaS’).

January went way beyond my expectations. If this growth continues; buckle up. It will be wild ride, but really fun, I’m sure! 🎢👻

Interested in what is new at Spinal?! ☺️

(be advised: emojis incoming! 📨)

🔍 Global Command Menu #

This is a biggie! 🍔 Not only can you now navigate Spinal without leaving your keyboard (goodbye RSI 🐭), you can also search through your content and all your content settings (or your frontmatter values, for the nerds amongst us).

global-command-menu.jpg

Summon the Global Command Menu (GCM) with CMD/Ctrl+K. Type the name of your content type, any word in your content or content settings and it will appear right away. 💨

You can also easily go to Spinal’s documentation, blog or changelog from the GCM. Available to all Content Marketing Team accounts today! 🥳

Thanks to all those who beta-tested this feature! You personally made it 10 times better. 🙌

💰 Introducing pricing for the Personal plan #

Since launching Spinal, the free plan’s userbase has been growing exponentially. Way outgrowing the paid plans. And that’s when, as a bootstrapped business, you need to take a step back and rethink a few things.

The Content Marketing Team (CMT) plan subscribers are growing at a very comfortable pace too. So this is mostly a change made while still being comfortable, opposed doing while it might be (almost) too late.

So changes were in order. Let’s go over the details.

  • the content types limit will be increased to two (from one)
  • member limit will stay one (no change)
  • content limit of 200 (between your content types; new)
  • a one-time payment of just $49 (no subscription)

Current personal plan users are not affected.

📐 A free 15-day trial for the Content Marketing plan #

More and more features are introduced to the CMT plan, so it no longer has feature parity with the Personal Plan (which also isn’t free anymore).

So a free trial, with credit card needed, has launched. It will allow teams to give Spinal a solid try with all the marvelous features the CMT plan has. Check out all its features.


From the blog 👓 #

  • Optimising SEO guide for static site generators: Thé SEO guide for static site generators. Best practices, tips and ideas to help push your SaaS’ marketing site in the search ranking. ☕️ Read here (it’s long! 🫁)
  • 6 Strategies for Scaling Static Sites: A handful of strategies that can be used to maintain your productivity as your site grows. ⚖️ Read here
  • **Should you use Markdoc for your SaaS docs? **: Solid documentation for your SaaS product is not just for developer-focussed products (like API’s). Also non-developer products fare well with having good documentation. Markdoc is an OSS option, built at Stripe. 🩺 Read here

Previously inviting your team could be annoying as the default access would be really restricted. So when a new person joined, your Spinal dashboard would be empty. You then had to manually go in, set the access and the role, and… Yikes. 😅

You can now set which role and what access new members get when they sign up with an invite link. Next to that you can rotate your invite link: simply delete and create a new unique invite link.

🙋‍♀️ Other bits and blobs #

Quite a few other things were tweaked and updated: improved content type setup modal, manually unlocking content, and a lot of little UI tweaks to keep Spinal look sharp. 🔪

For all updates, be sure to check out the changelog.

🔮 Crystal ball time #

The amount of things happening in the future is off the charts. 😎 Things I’m seeing are:

  • editor improvements
  • content grouping
  • rectangles
  • car
  • power up

Yeah—these might not all make sense to you. Looking into the future is not easy, you know! Let’s see how far off I was next month. 🗓️

(cheating a bit here: some features are already in beta, and others in early development 👩‍💻).

That’s it for this time. Over to you. 🫵

What did you think of these updates? What is something that is sorely lacking in Spinal now? Do reply!

Until next time. ✌️

—Eelco, founder Spinal

Ps. our friends at Forestry are sunsetting their product, so here is a goodbye poem: “So goodbye Forestry” 🌲

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