Interesting idea :)

As for mobile, we wanted to focus primarily on text to tell the story. Illustration is there for support, but we didn't want it to be distracting or lose real estate on small screens.

Hey Ian, maybe you are thinking of Working Not Working: Human? (disclosure: both are our clients)

Jonathan Calugi did the illustrations for both sites and he certainly has a distinctive style. You can check out more of his awesome work here: https://www.behance.net/Lovers

Thanks Eric!

Siteleaf + GitHub Pages FTW!

Hey Justin, thanks for the kind words! Glad we were able to allow you to ditch Wordpress, and join the static web party. It’s fun over here :)

Also glad you’re still using Pizza Compass. Still blows our mind how much press that got at launch. Kind of a bummer when publications like Los Angeles Times are excited to write about your joke app instead of your legit products :P

Fun fact: For at least a brief moment, we were able to beat Angry Birds in the App Store paid app charts. That was a huge achievement we’re still proud of to this day.

Another fun fact: When the Apple Watch first came out, I was determined to get Pizza Compass up and running (could you imagine!?). Actually got pretty far before realizing that the watch doesn’t have a compass. Oops!

That totally may be a thing we're planning. And we totally may already have an awesome name for it ;)

Glad you liked it! We made the video ourselves, using an app I love called ScreenFlow.

Sawyer found the song in the Vimeo Music Store, which was great because I probably would have picked something weird (see: v1 video).

For the video content, I just recorded my screen going through the motions of using the app and pieced it all together using ScreenFlow’s built in editor (it’s a lot like old school iMovie, in the best way).

We do our tutorial videos in the same way: https://vimeo.com/siteleaf

Re: #3 I wish we could say we have a secret formula for this, but really just involves experimentation and determination. Not everything we’ve tried has been a success, but typically everything we do is built with a purpose in mind and one that scratches an itch. We feel like if it's something we’d use, others may feel the same way. Even if it's not, just having the thing exist for yourself (or one client) may be “real” enough to start. We actually had 2 working versions of Siteleaf for years prior to the v1 public launch. Nowhere near as polished as it is now, but all along the way we had clients using it. So it served a purpose (we didn’t have to use Wordpress!) and was the “real deal” to at least some people.

Re: #2 It’s definitely tricky to balance self-initiated projects with client projects, especially in the beginning of your company/project. Consulting brings in money (and can pay really well!), and self-initiated projects usually just cost money (and getting paying customers is hard!). From the start we mostly just worked on our own products in downtime between clients, which resulted in a very sporadic schedule. It really helps to be passionate about the self-initiated project, and that drives you to find the time in whatever small ways you can.

We’ve also experimented with different ways of building our own products. With Symbolset, for example, Mike and I slowly poked around with ideas for nearly a year before we actually launched something.

Gazette on the other hand, was built in one crazy week. Myself, Sawyer, and Larry spent a weekend hacking together some code and polished it throughout the week. When we launched it wasn’t even fully functional yet (except for the sign up form), but we knew we had 7 days to complete and ship the first issue. We made the deadline, slightly stressful but super fun. Even though Gazette is no longer around, it was a great learning experience (pro tip: if you build a product, charge more than $1.99/mo if you want it to be sustainable).

Hey David, thanks for showing up early to the party!

We have a bunch of stuff on our Siteleaf roadmap, partially dictated by Jekyll’s roadmap which is kinda nice. Awesome features trickle down to us like Gem-based Themes, we’re really excited about this one!

Besides what’s in the Jekyll pipeline, our plan is to continue building out and improving the UI to make it even more client friendly with more Jekyll coverage (editable defaults, data files, etc), third-party gem support, and possibly some add-on features which extend beyond Jekyll's functionality. Stay tuned!

Would love to hear if you have any specific feature requests too :)