This news has been many months in the making.
Today Derek, Tom, and I are proud to share our new look and name with the world. Factor House has arrived, and Operatr.IO is no more.
We are proud to be an independent, engineering-led software house. Our new name, Factor House, represents us, our software development style, and our business approach.
Software houses specialize in building bespoke, high-quality software products. In software design, code refactoring is the process of restructuring existing code or changing the factoring to improve its design, implementation, and structure without impacting its functionality.
Factor House reflects our commitment to our craft, passion for product development, and pride in our independence.
Building cutting-edge, high-quality enterprise software is at the heart of what we do.
Hey you! Don't you know who I am?
Nothing about bootstrapping a business is easy, including naming it. Truth be told, Operatr.IO was never meant to be our name. It was changed up in one of those 'your first idea won't work, and you need to make a decision right now' moments that often occur in the early days of launching a startup.
Because of this, our name lacked meaning and personal connection right from the start. It never complimented who we are or what we do. We've all worked in big organizations where this matters less, but Kpow and Factor House are deeply personal to us. Our founding team consists of Derek and I, who are married, and Tom, who is a long-time friend and collaborator.
Kpow is a passion project for us, bringing together 20 years of enterprise development experience and over 10 years of specialization with Apache Kafka®. We've all put everything into Factor House and Kpow and have worked tirelessly to get to this point.
But our lack of pride in our company brand impacted our ability to thrive.
None of this initially mattered because we're engineers who just want to build great tech - everything else was secondary. Because of this, our product Kpow is the exact thing we set out to build. No pivots, no compromises. Kpow continues to evolve every day, and our vision has expanded - but we built it, and now it's time for us to shout about it.
Factor House is the vehicle for us to do that.
The need for our company brand to evolve has been compounded by having the quality of our product recognized by global industry leaders; we regularly close deals with Fortune 500 companies yet are virtually unknown in the wider industry. This juxtaposition has motivated us to rebrand properly, expand our product offering, and take Kpow to the broader Kafka market.
We've come a long way
In our next major release we're excited to ship the free, community edition of Kpow (perfect for individual dev use) along with a beautiful brand-new Tailwind UI.
Our team are currently hard at work on our next major feature which is ksqlDB integration. If that interests you, get in touch!
I could show you a screenshot of Kpow from three years ago - but wow - thanks to the input of our amazing users we have come a long, long way.
Hello, we've arrived!
2022 has given us a series of small victories from 10xing our revenue, onboarding Fortune 500 clients, paying proper salaries, growing the team, setting up our first office, and the ceremonial burning of the desk in the bedroom (co-founding a company with your husband is one thing, a desk in the bedroom is another entirely). I digress. However, the best moment for me was seeing our new logo and brand identity for Factor House for the first time and thinking:
'We're a proper company now. We've arrived.'
Next week we are taking the team on a US tour sponsoring the Strange Loop and Current 2022 conferences. We're excited about the opportunities this will bring.
And after that? Well, you'll just have to wait and see. But we've got big ideas.
Kylie Troy-West is the Co-Founder and COO of Factor House.
Factor House build Kpow, a simple, secure, enterprise tool for Apache Kafka®.