The road behind. The road ahead.

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.”

― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

In 1951 Jack Kerouac pounded out the first draft of Onthe Road in three weeks on a single huge roll of paper. I’ve never written a novel, but I get the sense that there are a lot of similarities between writing a novel and building a service like Pike13. Like Kerouac with his first draft, we worked feverishly to produce a minimally viable product—the simplest thing that we could build that delivered customer value—and released to Fit4Mom and some of our earliest customers in mid-2013.

Together with an ever-growing base of customers, our small team started its journey. In this case, the road was more of an endless loop of listening, building, measuring, and learning. With our clients’ input, we immediately discovered two major facts. First, we built something important—Pike13 is a mission-critical platform for our clients. And second, getting the product experience right was crucial.

Over the past eighteen months we've made getting the experience right and ensuring that we were building a robust technical infrastructure our top priorities. We've also made steady progress as we continued to release important functionality and an API along the way. By the end of 2014 we learned something else. Personal services businesses want to do more with Pike13. To meet our vision for building the must-have platform that powers the personal services economy, Pike13 needs to provide an ever-richer set of “core functionality.”

As we continue down the road in 2015, we do so with a larger team and clear views on the expanded functionality at the center of our customers’ business. We’re eager to release key features like promotional codes, wait lists, and inventory tracking. We’re also excited to take advantage of our API by providing deeper integrations with complementary services that Pike13 customers need and ask us for. While we continue to focus on our core functionality, expect to see more partnerships like those we have with Emma, MailChimp, and DocuSign. In addition, our open API is making it easier for other platforms—and even our customers themselves—to build integrations with us.

As we focus on the road in front of us, we can’t help but look further ahead toward true innovation on the Pike13 platform. We envision Pike13 becoming more of an intelligent personal assistant, using business data to anticipate your questions and answer them proactively.

We know that many of our early customers decided to come on this journey with us because they share our vision of Pike13 building innovative ways to make it easier to manage and grow their businesses. We maintain that vision and have spent the past 18 months laying the groundwork that allows us to achieve it. We can’t wait for you to be able to take full advantage of this investment.

Six years later, based on revisions of the 1951 manuscript, On the Road was published. As for Pike13, borrowing a line from Kerouac, “we gotta go and never stop going ’till we get there.”