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We launched Known Pro today. It's the best way to reach your audience, wherever they are on the web, from a single platform. It's also the culmination of a lot of work over the last few months.
We made an important decision, back in November: we were going to test whether a premium version of our service was viable. Traditionally, one of the ways this is done is through crowdfunding, but we decided we would put another twist on it. We would run a pre-sale, and we'd only collect money once the product was ready to roll out.
Earlier this year, we rolled Known Pro out to our pre-sale customers. They've helped us learn, given us great feedback, and enabled the product to be fully released. This morning, we pushed the button.
You can publish to an unlimited number of social profiles and pages from a single platform. You can use your own JavaScript and CSS to customize your site. You can publish from any device. And most importantly of all, you can export your data, self-host the entire platform on your own server, and be - in the Internet sense - the master of your own domain. In particular, I'm not aware of another web service that will give you a full database export of your content in a way that you can use directly on your own server.
So what's next?
There are more people signing up to the free Known service, and creating their own self-hosted sites, than ever before. For an open source project that emerged from the indieweb community not long ago, it's exciting to be in a place with recurring revenue, excitement, and an awesome community of its own. We're strong participants in the indieweb community, but we're also exploring other places where people need to own their own data: in particular, groups who need a truly private place to share resources. More on that soon.
We'll be working on a new design for the Known platform. We'll also be looking at other ways that individuals need to interact with content that they publish elsewhere on the web. And mostly, we'll be working on our mission to make Known the best place to communicate from your own space on the Internet.
Check out Known Pro. Let us know what you think. And stick with us: we're really just getting started.
