Get product feedback, fix bugs faster and drive 5-star reviews to your app

Instabug is an in-app feedback and bug reporting for mobile apps. It allows regular mobile users or beta testers to submit their feedback or report bugs about any mobile app in the most intuitive way; by just shaking their device! It also enables teams working on mobile apps to collaborate with each other more efficiently using it’s dashboard, where they can assign bugs, comment on them and add tags.

Kevin William David interviewed Omar Gabr, CEO at Instabug to know more.

Hi Omar, So tell us about Instabug?

Instabug is a B2B SaaS company. With bug reporting, crash reporting, and in-app chats, the Instabug SDK helps developers build better apps for their businesses.

Tell me more about why you are building this?

When my co-founder and CTO, Moataz Soliman and I were in our last semester of university, we decided to build an app. We soon realized that there are parts of the app dev process that are unnecessarily tedious and time consuming, especially when it comes to beta testing. We weren’t happy with the tools that were out there, so we built our own, abandoned the app, and focused on improving the tools.

How is Instabug different from what already exists in the market?

No other company offers the level of detail that we do when it comes to the user data and logs that we provide our customers. Instabug is known in the market to be the top bug reporting tool for mobile apps, which gives us a strong foundation to expand our crash reporting and in-app chat products. And no other company offers this specific combination of tools, which we believe are crucial for building a successful app.

Who uses Instabug? What types of roles do your customers have at their companies?

Our customers are companies building apps, indie devs, and software agencies. We work with developers and PMs. We’re really glad to have tens of thousands of businesses using us across a range of industries and app categories.

How are your customers using Instabug?

Some companies use us to get feedback about newly launched features from their small beta testing group, other teams use Instabug to report bugs and collaborate on fixing them with their dev and QA teams.

“Instabug makes it easier for our beta testers to quickly send feedback directly from within the app, helping us identify and fix critical issues in an easy-to-use testing environment.” — Billy Pham, Beta Program Manager at Lyft.

“Instabug’s messaging ability has enabled us to quickly close the loop with testers and keep them engaged as vital members of our testing team. It makes it easy for anyone to start sending feedback and reporting bugs.” — Talton Figgins, PM at Disqus.

“As soon as we integrated the SDK and saw our first bug report we knew that we’d made the right choice. It was just so easy and seamless! Now we have instant feedback from our users, which is greatly accelerating product development.” — Darius Emrani, PM at Yahoo.

Have there been unique use cases for Instabug that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

Most companies use us during their alpha, beta, and production builds of their apps.

What was really unique and surprising is that developers started to use Instabug to report bugs from their own builds on their simulators. It was much easier for them to report bugs to themselves through Instabug compared to manually extracting the logs and the device details.

That’s interesting!

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

Honestly, what worked for us early on was focusing on developing a product that developers would love and, on top of that, providing exceptional user support. We believe these two key factors is what enabled our customer base to grow through word of mouth.

One thing we make a point of doing is to meet our users in person. We visit them at their offices and see how they physically use our products to discover any insights, but also just to interact with them face to face. We do this any time we visit a different country.

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

Our main challenge in the beginning was getting our first 100 customers. We were somehow outsiders to the dev community, yet we wanted to reach the best apps. We cold e-mailed hundreds of Silicon Valley companies and got nowhere. Then we changed our approach and got creative with our e-mails, making them more personal and authentic, and it worked. From receiving zero responses, we booked meeting after meeting where we pitched Instabug. We gathered people’s honest feedback, learned our weak spots and strengths, and refined our products even further based on the comments we received.

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?

Instabug integrates with 15 of the most popular tools used by developers. Our most used integrations are for forwarding bugs automatically to JIRA and Trello and getting feedback instantly on Slack. We wanted to make sure that we don’t disturb our users’ workflow, so we found the tools they use and built each integration on its own based on each use case. For example, JIRA has a two-way integration, so if an issue is marked as closed on JIRA, it gets closed on Instabug as well.

What are the top products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

JIRA: Project management for our engineering and product teams.

Trello: Project management and collaboration for our marketing and operations teams.

Stripe: For our payments.

Slack: For everything from Stripe notifications to sharing GOT gif’s.

GitHub: For staying sane.

AWS: For cloud computing.

Kubernetes: For our infrastructure.

CircleCI: To build faster.

Google Apps: For collaboration.

New Relic, Heap Analytics, Chartio, Google Analytics, Baremetrics, Segment: Because we can’t get enough analytics.

Bonus secret tool:

Akelny: A food ordering slack bot we built. At Instabug, we’re either eating, thinking about eating or planning what to eat next, and we do so together. But with a BugSquad of 50+, we faced issues grouping orders, managing bills, and paying back the correct amount to the right people. It was a mess, so we decided to do something about it and developed a bot that fetches menus for us, collects everyone’s order, places the order online, and then let us know exactly how much each person is supposed to pay. We’ve been using it ever since and now we can focus completely on the important part: eating!

Originally published at siftery.com.