What a remarkable few days it has been. Last Friday we posted a lean product development site on Hacker News to see what sort of interest we would get in creating a chat product built around our favourite source repository, GitHub.

We quickly shot to #1 on HN and over the course of a few hours recieved over 30,000 visits to gitter.im.

The message was received loud and clear. On Monday we started full steam ahead building Gitter.

Background

For much of this year we've been developing Troupe, a chat product for teams and businesses. Whilst building GitHub integration into Troupe we started wondering what the product might look like if it was built on top of GitHub rather than merely providing some light integration.

This week we effectively forked Troupe and are adjusting some of the scaffholding to match GitHub's user, organisation and repository models.

We will continue to run Troupe in parallel, but no more features will be developed on that product as we're 100% focused on getting Gitter out.

Join us on this journey

In spirit of transparency and listening closely to the community, we've created a public Trello board where anyone can vote on the features they want to see in Gitter.

Please feel free to email us on team@gitter.im if you have any feature requests, comments, or just want to say hi.

We're also available on @gitchat.