I clearly remember meeting Nikhil and his team, The Commit Company, for the first time at the 2022 Conference. They seemed to be the odd ones out. Fresh energy and a creative vision to do something different. Reminded me much of our own “startup days”. Being a product person myself, I could instantly connect with Nikhil and his way of thinking. Much later, Jigneshbhai from Greycube told me that “I distinctly remember the first time you and Nikhil met. I could see that you guys hit it off instantly”. Over the last few years, Nikhil and I would meet over conferences and odd meet-ups and continue our chat about products and technology. It felt like meeting an old friend, like you can continue a conversation you left off several months ago. I was always egging them to do something in the products space.

In the meantime, thanks to the same talk Nikhil gave at the 2022 conference, Commit found a product to build, but for someone else. While they were great customers, I could see that they were also unhappy that they did not ultimately own it. After much prodding, they started building Raven, a tool for inter team communication. While we funded the initial part of Raven via the Frappe incubator, I was keenly following its progress. We tried implementing it thrice in Frappe, but had to cancel it twice because it was not ready. We got lucky the third time. Building a chat tool seems deceptively easy, but because it is a “real time” communication tool, each interaction has to be solid and smooth. Once they released V2, I used my “social capital” at Frappe to push people to use Raven. The first few weeks were not smooth and Nikhil, Hussain (who was helping us deploy it internally) and me were in constant chat over Telegram reporting bugs and the Commit team was fast in fixing most of them.

Once Raven was live, I think the folks at Commit finally saw the “kick” you get from building your own product. For those who have never done this, the feeling is quite special. When someone uses a product you have built, you somehow become a part of their daily lives. It is beyond just a “transaction”. There is a natural affinity people feel towards the people who build products they rely on for their daily life. Think of how revered is Steve Jobs. Part of his following is because many people who use an Apple product, feel personally connected to Steve Jobs (or his spirit, if its floating somewhere out there). When I travelled to Egypt earlier, the story I heard about the pyramids was that the people who built it, were aiming for immortality. And the pyramids make us remind them even today and this is why maybe they succeeded in their goals. I am not saying that the products we build are going to be immortal, but there is none the less, a deep satisfaction in making products that are integral parts of someone’s life. Products embody not only your labour, but also your ideas and personality and somehow your own spirit. For creators, this is the ultimate feeling. Once the folks at Commit experienced this, they were hooked.

Even though it took some effort to convince Nikhil (the final push came during Hussain’s wedding!) to merge Commit into Frappe, I think it was worth the effort. The engineers at Commit are product creators at heart, and Frappe was the right place for them where they could focus 100% on this. For Frappe, Nikhil brings the right kind of skills that we need. He comes from an accounting background and has several original insights in making ERPNext better - as evidenced by the Mint tool that he has made. Commit is also interested in making native mobile apps which is a blind spot for us. This will ensure that the underlying technology (React) becomes a first class part of the Frappe ecosystem.

Finally Nikhil and his team will focus on making Raven a first class citizen of the Frappe product ecosystem. With the new LLM driven paradigms, having a first class chat will be integral to running those experiments. We will also aim to make Raven a platform tool for the entire Frappe community to interact, like discord. There are several ideas to explore here.

Everyone at Frappe is super excited to invite Nikhil Kothari, Janhvi Patil, Sumit Jain, Aditya Patil and Prahthamesh Kurunkar to be formally a part of Frappe. Looking forward to fun times and great adventures ahead!

Also read: Related posts by Nikhil (official announcement) and Prathamesh from The Commit Company.