@katrina super cool! also a fan of what you've built.
what inspired you to build Marquee / have a vision of what the modern publishing platform will look like?
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@katrina Thank you for including a self-hosted option!!!
How would you describe your key differences (apart from self-hosting) to Contentful?
For reference: https://www.contentful.com/
I work with the team over at http://narrative.ly/ and have always been really impressed with the format, layout and readability of the site. I then happened to notice that they used Marquee.
Similar but not exactly the same as exposure.so -> http://www.producthunt.com/posts...
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Hey! Thanks so much for the kind words, Tom. We feel really fortunate that we've gotten to work with some great publishers like Narratively and, most recently, the Wilson Quarterly (part of the Wilson Center). Every project we've worked on has been a great way for us to work through real-world challenges faced by organizations working on in-depth narratives, and incorporate those lessons into the core Marquee product.
Our team has been pretty heads down over the past few years as we've worked to build out our vision for a modern publishing platform. We've gone from a pretty simple Markdown-Dropbox app in early 2011 to a suite of editorial tools backed by a flexible content API and some great development tools.
I'm happy to answer any questions about our product or how we went about building it.
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Thanks so much, @GeoffreyWeg!
Up until now in order to use Marquee we've either given access to a very limited personal plan (which was free) or provided access for clients who have retained us to build custom sites on top of our platform. Because we're a really small team of only 5 people, we've decided that we can be most effective by focusing on solutions for organizations instead of providing a consumer-level product for individuals.
The platform will be gradually opened up for publishers, developers, and web agencies to build their own projects on Marquee using the same tools we do (all of our development tools are released into the public domain). We're in the process of finalizing our dev docs and starting to discuss how to structure things with third-party developers who have shown interest. If anyone on Product Hunt is interested in learning more about building on top of Marquee, you can contact us at hello@marquee.by.
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Thanks @dshan! There are a bunch of great website builders and blogging platforms out there, but it's not really where we see ourselves fitting into the market. Our product is geared more towards professional publishers, content-producing organizations, and agencies that are building web publications and apps for their clients.
As we roll out the product, licensing the platform will likely start at $500/m and go up based on the size of the team, level of support desired, and the extent to which the client would like to tailor Marquee's editorial tools to support their workflow (we've built everything to be highly adaptable to a wide range of publishing models). This license will include access to the editorial tools, API, and managed hosting. We'll also still offer custom development services, which vary based on the complexity of each project and includes access to our editorial suite.
We realize it's not a consumer-level price point; but we think we can best serve our clients by focusing on developing deeper relationships with fewer customers.
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Thank you @eriktorenberg! Really appreciate it.
Our entire team has been working together for almost six years. Before creating Marquee, we ran a small web agency in Miami. While building sites for clients, we began to notice a shift in what we were being asked to create. We started to see clients moving away from blog-style publishing and instead focusing on producing fewer pieces of higher quality. This was around 2011 before Snow Falling was a thing.
As we built projects out, we began to run into limitations with the current approaches to creating content-heavy sites. Existing CMSes were a huge problem - anything we wanted to do required extensive, ugly hacks, never quite worked right, and were a pain to maintain. We then started to build the management solution from scratch using Django, but our clients often had limited budgets and we never felt we were able to provide a polished admin system for the people that had to use it daily.
We built Marquee because we wanted talented people to have a simple way to tell amazing stories, but to do so we needed to make sure that editors, designers, and developers could focus on what they loved doing without getting in each others' way. This required a completely different approach to how admin apps and sites talked to each other. Exploring, refining, and optimizing that approach is what have been trying to do with Marquee.
Backchannel
/ syndicate