Checkly
Code, test, and deploy synthetic monitoring at scale.
Three months ago Checkly was a bootstrapped solo project run by me from a desk in the back of a Berlin fashion label's spare floor space.
Now we are six people on a mission to give active monitoring and E2E testing a very serious kick in the butt. We raised $2.25M from Accel and group of cool founders and Angels.
I wrote a massive blog post about how that all happened, what the motivation is and everything in between. I hope it helps other solo founders find out what they want to do with their business.
https://blog.checklyhq.com/from-bootstrapped-to-venture-backed-in-3-months/
Just had the 100th customer join Checkly. Interestingly, the SaaS startup lore is all true. Getting from 0 to 10 customers takes as long as getting from 10 to 100 customers.
Of course this is due to compounding effects. You learn, you're name spreads etc. etc.
Keep chugging!
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Congrats @tnolet
A year ago I wrote a Chrome extension to record Puppeteer scripts. This is handy for E2E testing, web scraping etc. I open sourced the code and the extension if free on the Chrome store. Now it has 6000+ Github stars! Crazy!
It's actually bringing in quite some traffic for Checkly, but the most important thing is that is pushes the Puppeteer community forward a bit.
I wanted to make a SaaS platform that made scripting interactive browser scripts more reliable. This has been a notorious problem due to the tech just being kinda bad.
Also, many companies use e2e scripting in their build tests. Lot's of effort goes into maintaining these. Why not leverage these scripts for day-to-day monitoring?
This means the tool stack used by developers to write these scripts should be the same as the tool stack used by ops / devops people to monitor their site transactions.
This didn't really exist.
First customers came probably through blogging and being active on Reddit, although it is hard to pin down exactly.
The beta period also brought upwards of 500 leads, some of which converted later.
One major change was refocussing on an higher segment of the market, i.e. SMB's and SaaS companies with at least 10+ employees. This means you have to add features that companies need and expect regarding invoicing, team management, support etc.
2 Comments
Congrats mate!!
What are your strategies for customer acquisition so far if i may ask?
Congrats. The website/product looks really solid, mature.