Launch: Migration Wizard

Many developer tools, especially CI systems, struggle to gain adoption because they require a costly migration from potential customers. This makes sense since companies would rather spend their time on things that deliver business value for their customers rather than constantly moving from one hot piece of technology to another.

One of Blacksmith’s core value props has been that it’s a one-line code change to adopt us if you’re already using GitHub Actions. However, we noticed that customers had to do more work to leverage our faster colocated caching (or one of our language-specific cache actions). They also need to potentially make these changes across dozens of workflows across all their repositories. Additionally, any new feature launch of ours can require yet more changes to customer workflows.

Today, we’re launching a migration wizard in Blacksmith that automatically migrates GitHub Action workflows to Blacksmith runners and our colocated Actions cache. With a few clicks and without opening their IDEs, customers can now use our migration wizard to create a pull request that migrates all their GitHub Action workflows to Blacksmith.

Our migration wizard had only been live for a few hours before we started seeing results.

This customer (who discovered us completely organically) signed up, installed our GitHub app, and ran their first set of jobs on Blacksmith within 5 minutes. We truly believe this makes Blacksmith one of the highest leverage things an engineering org can do to improve their team's velocity while cutting down on their CI bill.