Spinal update for February: search and you will find

Hey there!

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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! 📨)

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).

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

🔗 Improved invite links #

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” 🌲