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 did — deprecating and launching . Jonathan Taplytics DevCycle Why pivot? 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 by building a better developer experience (more on how later). LaunchDarkly 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 in 2021. valued at $3 billion How did they make the pivot? Jonathan shared some interesting tidbits on what they did well. — 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. Have good relationships with your big 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 ) while also continuing to maintain the Taplytics platform for those customers who are still in the process of migrating over. Ensure continuity for your customers — OneSignal With this approach, Jonathan shared that they were able to bring almost all their key customers with them. What does developer experience mean? I have a healthy skepticism of founders claiming they will win with developer experience. In , I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone say developer experience wasn’t crucial, but the reality is that very few companies create great developer experiences. 60+ DevTools interviews 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. 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 not about building the flashiest and most marketable 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. It’s about continually iterating on the core features. — DevCycle tries to make every piece of software that their clients install open source. With CNCF, they are leading a project called — a vendor-agnostic interface for feature flagging. Open-source & standardise interfaces OpenFeature 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 & . You can hear them in the . Andrew Brad full episode here Also published . here

The writer was physically present in relevant location(s) to this story. The location is also a prevalent aspect of this story be it news or otherwise.

Between Two Computer Monitors: This story includes an interview between the writer and guest/interviewee. 

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Pivoting for Success: Jonathan's Startup Journey from Taplytics to DevCycle

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