For most founders, landing Fortune 500 customers like GrubHub, Warby Parker & RBC Royal Bank is the definition of success.
Imagine, then, telling these customers that you’re pivoting from your successful product to focus on something new.
But that’s exactly what
Taplytics is a broad A/B testing platform for marketing teams. While DevCycle is a feature flagging tool built for developers.
Taplytics actually has feature flagging, but DevCycle is much more focused and plans to compete directly with incumbents like
But with Taplytics, they built so many features, and every customer was using them in a different way that it became hard for such a small team to maintain.
Meanwhile, feature flagging is a much narrower problem where most customers will have similar use cases.
In addition, Taplytics required lots of face-to-face time selling to executives, while DevCycle is more of a bottoms-up, self-serve sales process.
Finally, we didn’t cover it in the interview, but feature flagging is a huge market. LaunchDarkly was
Jonathan shared some interesting tidbits on what they did well.
Have good relationships with your big customers — they were able to bring many of their customers on the journey with them. There was two-way trust, and they struck me as a very transparent team.
Ensure continuity for your customers — For feature flagging, they shared that DevCycle would be a direct (better) replacement. For Taplytic’s other features, they communicated clearly and shared alternatives (such as
With this approach, Jonathan shared that they were able to bring almost all their key customers with them.
I have a healthy skepticism of founders claiming they will win with developer experience.
In
So when Jonathan shared that he would beat the incumbents by building a better developer experience, I asked him what he really meant by developer experience.
It’s not about building the flashiest and most marketable features. Your focus is on building a great core product that delights more than frustrates. As an example, they spent months on a custom testing system to ensure the consistency and quality of their server-side SDK. The team even jokes about having a landing page that just says, “DevCycle, well tested.”
It’s about continually iterating on the core features. Iterating on core features can be boring when compared to shipping new things. So, they have a specific team focused on their core features.
Open-source & standardise interfaces — DevCycle tries to make every piece of software that their clients install open source. With CNCF, they are leading a project called
Overall, this was a very brave decision to make, and only time will tell if it was the right call. However, I do believe that their commitment to quality and focus is credible, given the tough decision they made.
P.S. I’m a lazy writer, so I condensed this write-up to only be about Jonathan. Even though the podcast conversation also included the equally great
Also published here.