#105: The Boring Edge & Traceable Pivot

November 9, 2025 – DevTools Brew #105

I’m Morgan Perry, co-founder of Qovery. Every week, I share the raw, often uncomfortable lessons from building and scaling a tech startup from 0 to 1 and beyond.

In today's edition:

1. The Boring Edge

   → The discipline of tiny decisions that quietly compound over time, the part no one tells you about scaling.

2. Traceable Pivot

   → How Jyoti Bansal built three unicorns by iterating faster than conviction.

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The Boring Edge

The discipline of tiny decisions

I used to think big shifts built great companies.
Now I see it’s the small, boring decisions that decide if you’ll last.

It’s not the strategy, the roadmap, or the next release that matters most but the dozen small choices you make every day when no one’s looking.
Those decisions are invisible in the moment.
But they compound quietly.

At Qovery, I’ve seen how the real edge comes from what happens in the margins - in the quiet moments no one sees.

The sales notes written clearly enough for someone else to act.
The product feedback from users. Iteration documented. What worked, what didn’t, and why the assumption failed.
The post-release reviews where we slow down to ask why a workflow felt natural or broken.
All those small details, actions and reflections stacked over time turn into a product that makes sense.

Every team has its own rituals.
They share wins, losses, blockers, and progress each week.
It’s repetitive. Sometimes it feels heavy.
But that’s how the signal stays clear.
That’s how small teams keep moving fast without chaos.

It’s the same with the team dynamic you’’re building.
The all hands. The offsites. Monthly co-works. All the team rituals.
Those moments don’t change the roadmap but they definitely change the rhythm.
They rebuild trust, context, and alignment so that the next hundred small decisions fall in the right direction.

There’s no secret strategy behind it.
Just discipline.
Being present.
Playing the long game.

People talk about startups as sprints inside a marathon.
I’ve come to believe it’s mostly a marathon, just broken down into thousands of short, precise runs.

In our space, you can’t cheat time or market dynamics.
If you want to understand how cycles unfold, I shared a piece on it a while ago

Building a (great) company takes years, often decades.
If you want to build something extraordinary, focus on the things no one else cares enough to do: ie, the small, consistent actions that quietly compound until they look inevitable.

Do what others won’t, and you’ll get what others can’t.

No one celebrates those details.
But they build the difference between a company that reacts, and one that compounds.

That’s the boring edge.
That’s the part no one tells you about scaling.

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Traceable Pivot

How clarity compounds faster than conviction

While writing about The Boring Edge, I kept thinking of Jyoti Bansal - founder of AppDynamics, Harness, and Traceable. One of the few people who’s built three unicorns by embracing iteration over conviction.

What struck me in the conversation with Jyoti Bansal wasn’t how he found product-market fit but how many times he had to rebuild it.
It’s about being disciplined enough to iterate when everything you believed stops working.

At Traceable, almost every assumption was wrong at first.
And that’s exactly what made it right in the end.

1. The product (“what”)
They thought Traceable’s job was to secure APIs.
It turned out customers first needed to discover them.
→ Pain often starts one step earlier than you think.

2. The customer (“who”)
They aimed for mid-sized, cloud-native startups.
Turns out the real urgency came from big enterprises (finance, healthcare), where compliance and risk had a price tag.
→ Go where the pain is real, not where it’s trendy.

3. The motion (“how”)
They built for PLG and self-serve adoption.
But in cybersecurity, the real motion is top-down.
→ When the buyer changes, the whole system must change.

Jyoti personally joined 100+ discovery calls, not to sell, but to listen.
They documented every insight, assumption, and failure.
They built discovery as a habit, not a checkbox.

And that’s where the compounding starts:
one small iteration, written down and acted upon, becomes the base for the next.

What I take from it:
→ Validate fast, adapt faster. The speed of iteration defines survival.
→ Stay close to reality. Founders can’t outsource learning.
→ Document everything. Knowledge compounds when it’s written.
→ Don’t chase perfect assumptions. Chase the truth as it unfolds.

Even after three unicorns, Jyoti’s still running experiments, invalidating what doesn’t hold, and adjusting.
That’s not luck. That’s a system.

Because great founders don’t just find PMF once they build the system that keeps finding it again.

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That’s it for me today! :)
Thanks for reading and Happy Sunday!

(Still no brunch this Sunday, just a double espresso, without a fig cookie, and the usual deep dive before noon. But can’t wait for my tartare “au couteau”… shared, of course, that’s what makes it perfect).

— Morgan

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Do you like personal lessons like this? More insights/stories from other devtool founders? Let me know, I’m always open to feedback.

You can reach out to me on LinkedIn.

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