The Knack team on web applications, online databases, and beautifully designed products.
Holy moly, does that say Retreat #6?!
Team Knack gathered in upstate Wisconsin in July 2018 for another round of quality time, long-term planning, product brainstorming, coffee overindulging, and some good old-fashioned competition.
Continue reading...For most of us here at Knack, remote work is more than just a facet of our company culture — it’s a lifestyle we feel lucky to take part in, one that we treasure and that’s become integral to how we operate. (That being said, we do get together twice a year to bond as a team, hash out big ideas, plan next steps, and compete to see who can drink the most coffee).
Continue reading...A few weeks ago we had our 4th retreat in Salt Lake City, Utah. We caught up as a team, hashed out ideas in work sessions, and hosted our first “KnackCon” for our customers. Now that we have another successful retreat in the books, we wanted to share some of the highlights with you!
Team Knack! We are getting better at group pictures!
We also actually took individual pictures!
We couldn’t get enough of the sunset views.
Or the post sunset views, equally as beautiful.
Oh nothing to see here, just giant mountains and rainbows.
Retreats are always perfect for big picture strategy sessions. Some of us are paying more attention than others.
Success team making things successful on the front lawn.
We had such a great time visiting customers in Miami we decided to host our first “KnackCon” at our house with customers from the area. It was invaluable to hear more about how they use Knack and talk through what future updates might bring!
Retreats are perfect for the engineering team to go deep on challenging issues. This year’s focus was on database performance. Steve decided to join because we were being loud outside of his bedroom.
Exploring downtown SLC.
It wouldn’t be a Knack retreat without game night! It may have taken us longer to agree on what rules to play by than actually play the game. What does it say when the founders are picked last in playground-style team selections?
The front lawn was the perfect setting for a somersault race.
Somehow Lime-a-rita cheers have now become an official retreat thing.
Leaving our mark on Salt Lake City!
A few years from now when “KnackCon” is hosting thousands of users at a major convention center, we’ll look back at our 4th retreat in Salt Lake City as the humble starting point.
Organizing events for our customers is something we’ve always wanted to do more of. We had our first taste of how impactful these could be during a customer visit with the Miami Dolphins during our 3rd retreat.
When we noticed that quite a few Knack customers were located in the Utah area, we decided to set aside a night and invite them all to visit us at our retreat house for snacks, swag, and conversation. It was time for KnackCon to become a reality!
Continue reading...This month, we’re happy to announce the arrival of not one but TWO new Knacksters! Our team has grown exponentially over the past couple of years, but we’ve never had two additions in such a short span, and we’re very excited to hit the ground running with these folks.
Jessie and Craig during their interviews (we may have a habit of secretly snagging screenshots from time to time).
Jessie Tully is our newest Customer Success team member. She has a background in product consulting and is something of a data wizard. She works from her new home in Beacon, New York, though during her trial, she was living in Brooklyn less than two blocks away from me! During group interviews, it’s customary for candidates to give a short presentation on a topic of their choice. Jessie’s was about how she makes bread from scratch. We were all drooling during her slideshow and I’m still distraught that I wasn’t able to procure some before she relocated upstate. I haven’t given up hope, though.
Our second new Knackster is Craig Lafferty, a DevOps and systems engineer. Craig works from home in Wisconsin, adding vital representation to the Midwest Knackster contingent. Craig has a passion for maker spaces and democratizing more of the tools and knowledge to build things. His background is in corporate America, but we won’t hold that against him — it made him realize how much he missed the speed and agility of working with a small company.
We want to extend the warmest possible welcome to Jessie and Craig! We can’t wait to see what they bring to Knack. We know their contributions will make our product and our team even stronger, and if they also include homemade bread, that would be okay, too.
Here at Team Knack we really value our remote culture. In fact, we see it as more of a lifestyle choice than a working condition. Increased time with family and pets is a huge draw, and proximity to our refrigerators doesn’t hurt, either.
For Walk to Work Day 2017, we decided to quantify another positive byproduct of working remotely: shorter commutes. Some of us work a few steps away from where we sleep, while others (Steve) are overachievers who actually drive to a coworking space.
Differences aside, one thing is clear: none of us is likely to win a Fitbit challenge anytime soon.
Take a look at the breakdown below, and if you’re looking to shorten your own commute, be sure to check out our jobs page, since we’re always on the lookout for new Knacksters!
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We returned from our third official Knack retreat a few weeks ago. It was an epic 6 days in Miami where we met 8 new team members, ate way too much food, and somehow got some great work in. Some of us are still recovering.
We're working on a full write-up, but thought we'd share a few images here in the meantime.
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I recently returned to a backyard full of snow after having spent a great week in Puerto Rico at the first official Knack corporate retreat.
We posted a great summary here of the entire retreat.
Along with getting to know our team and work together in person, it was also an apt time to reflect back on how we got there.
It wasn't that long ago where working together with a team of 9 in a beautiful setting would have seemed a bit like a fantasy. Not every startup explodes on the scene in a matter of months.
We've taken the “long way”, which made the retreat that much more gratifying.
Continue reading...Knack is a web application platform that makes it easy for anyone to build widely distributed, highly customized, data-driven web applications.
Ok, that was way too technical, so let’s break down exactly what we mean by that.
Web applications and online databases can be hugely complicated. There’s a reason that most web apps are built by computer geeks (wait, that’s us!) with computer science degrees. You need to design the database, code the interface, host the data, and make sure this all works together. It’s not simple.
Making this easy is our primary vision. We are distilling this process into digestible steps, wrapping it all in natural language and a simple interface that anyone can understand.
Along with simplifying this, we want you to enjoy using Knack. We will not require you to learn a programming language and we will not allow you to get frustrated with a 10 step process.
Today’s web apps need to do a lot of heavy lifting, both in how they are delivered and who they are intended for:
Knack enables you to distribute your web application across multiple platforms and use cases:
Today’s internet is offering more and more solutions for virtually every niche possible. And yet you will still struggle to find that perfect match for your exact requirements.
When you can build your own app you can match it to your exact specifications rather than trying to fit into someone else’s solution.
Knack was designed from the beginning to be highly customized:
Today’s web apps are largely driven by data. You need to be able to easily add data, manipulate it, share it, and understand it. It needs to play well with social media and other apps and APIs.
Data is front and center when building Knack apps. We make it simple for anyone to create online databases and build web applications based on that data.
And that’s just the start. We have an amazing road map in place to capiltalize on the future web where data is all-pervasive. Sign up to get started building your own web apps today.
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