Polypane's Founder Kilian Valkhof on Building the Browser He Wished He Had

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

I have built well over 200 websites, having started my first company, a web development agency, at age 16 and eventually growing that to 14 people. I ran that company for 14 years and during that time learned a lot about the craft, but also about workflows and inefficiencies for myself as a designer and developer, but also about the workflows and inefficiencies of the employees, freelancers, and customer teams I worked with.

I am very much a tinkerer and optimizer, so finding better ways to do my own work is always on my mind.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

Polypane is the browser for ambitious developers, developers that want to build better websites and also want to be more efficient while doing so. It has tools to help with responsive design, accessibility, and overall site quality. All the tooling doesn’t just tell you where the issues are, it also tells you how to solve them so you won’t have to waste time searching for a fix.

What is the origin story?

In 2015 I had just switched over to Sketch and loved the “artboard” feature in it. I could see my designs across different screen sizes side-by-side, easily compare them and make sure everything aligned. It really sped up the design work I was doing.

But in the browser, I could only see one size at the same time. That frustrated me so much I decided to hack together a prototype that did what Sketch did: show a site in different screen sizes side by side.

I loved using it but didn’t think much of it until I checked my hours and noticed that the same type of projects were suddenly taking just 40% of the time they took me when I didn’t use Polypane. That’s when I knew something was there. So I started sharing it out, getting feedback, and iterating on it. At the end of 2018 I left the web agency I founded and in May 2019 I launched Polypane 1.0. The rest is history.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

Hopefully working on developer tooling somewhere! I’ve been writing developer tools for as long as I’ve been a developer: CSS frameworks, jQuery plugins, image optimization apps, and more. Even now with Polypane being my full-time work I still tinker away on projects like Superposition and FixA11y, both of which I share out for free.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

It feels like it’s still early days, so active users and MRR.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

Developers are a notoriously difficult market because everyone promises them the world and they’re rightfully skeptical about any claims. They’ll tear right through marketing fluff and that’s great because, being a developer, I don’t like marketing fluff either. So I get to “nerd out” on features and technology choices and share that with my customers.

All the growth has been because of customer word of mouth and that has been amazing to see.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

Technology has always been a means to an end for me. I don’t enjoy programming at all but I love having built something that didn’t exist when I started and having that do something meaningful.

Beyond that though, I think everyone does well to bet on the web (and that includes Electron).

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

It has a great focus and high-quality articles!

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Go do that startup idea now, go out on your own and believe in yourself.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

The more polished you make something, the harder it is for people to see the quality that went into it, but also the more they’ll appreciate it when you tell them about it. Don’t be afraid to tell them about that.