6 weeks of coding increased my potential customers from 22,810 to 247,088

A year ago I released Django Doctor - a SaaS code review copilot that offers code fixes to Django problems right inside the pull request. Django is a very popular web for the Python programming language.

Now just over 13% of Django public repositories on GitHub use Django Doctor. That's OK market penetration and is paying my mortgage, but growth slowed down around the same time as my baby started crawling so I came up with a cunning plan.

Looking at the numbers on GitHub there is an obvious area for growth for Django Doctor - but it would require re-branding: targeting not just Python programmers that use Django, but all Python programmers in general.

There are almost 250,000 Python public repositories on GitHub as compared with about 23,000 for Django. That's almost 1000% more potential customers.

So the area for growth was obvious but so too was the barrier: the name. Why would a Python user that does not use Django think a product called "Django Doctor" would be for them? So a re-brand would be needed for this change. Fine. Must break some eggs to make an omelette.

The nice thing about this product change is:

• the framework for performing code analysis is already written
• the landing page and codebase audit UI is already written
• the integration with AWS serverless computing to perform the checks super quick is already written
• the integration with GitHub is already done.

I "just" had to write some the new Python checks, plug that in to the code suggestion engine and boom! 1000% more potential customers.

After 6 weeks of refactoring and 14,944 new line of code added later Django Doctor is officially dead and Code Review Doctor is born. django.doctor now redirects to codereview.doctor

To continue the growth next on the menu will be expanding to support Bitbucket and Gitlab and not just GitHub.