Hey, we’ve just reached 5 million users

Pelin Kenez

Sep 2022@pelin

I got a Slack message. It says “we’ve just reached 5 million users”.

5 million people, working on all types of amazing products. 5 million people, from all around the world. 5 million people, delivering on the promise of design.

I felt good, I felt really good. It was a calm but proud moment. We’ve built something that people love, we’ve built something that at some point touched 5 million lives.

Dear Zepliner, thank you

Countless feedback emails, hundreds of calls, messages, Tweets. Thanks for making this happen. Without your support, we wouldn’t be Zeplin as it is today.

From seven years ago to today

Back in July 2015, we joined Y Combinator and moved to the Bay Area from Istanbul. 4 co-founders in a 2 bedroom apartment. We were working on Zeplin for long days and long nights.

“Hey folks, it crashes when I export assets”.

This was the first message we got after the 1.0 launch. Then we released 4 updates that day, from that apartment.

We want to help teams build beautiful products

We do. We started with handoff, a one-click process to export designs from Sketch, and people called it an “auto-magical” experience.

Over time we had more and more users. We listened to them all and learned more. Our focus on handoff grew into communicating design intention by sharing finalized designs, documentation, and the journey of a user, all in an organized workspace — with developers in mind.

We’ve only released 28 updates this year

”Every time I open the app, there is an update”.

This was a tweet we got from one of our users — and they weren’t happy.

We’re growing and we’re getting better at scheduling our updates. But seriously, as I’m writing this, there is at least someone in the Zeplin crew working in one timezone to make Zeplin better. Maybe Özge in Istanbul, Rian in Australia, Sertac in Canada, Kundu in San Francisco, Fran in London, Jamie in New York. Here are some of the great things we released this year, we hope they helped you.

Flows and Annotations, what a release! — with the ability to connect with Jira.

We made Domain Capture easier for IT administrators.

Oh, you can now Multi-select screens on the Web app, sorry that it took a bit long.

Zeplin can now auto-detect components without you needing to export them to a Styleguide. Did you know we call them Thoth components internally? 🤫

…and many more like customizing flow connectors, adding shapes to flows, linking components to annotations, sample projects for onboarding. We continue to work on more exciting things!

Again, thanks, we couldn’t have done it without you

Although we continue to grow our company and our product, one thing will always remain the same — that’s our user-first approach. Thank you folks, our dear users, for this milestone. It means a lot to us. We are so grateful you love using Zeplin, and we are dedicated to making Zeplin even better for you. Without your support, input and commitment, we wouldn’t be where we are today in helping teams build beautiful products.

So let’s raise a toast to efficiency, collaboration, our users, and delivering on the promise of design.

Cheers! 🥂