DevTools Brew #50: From 0 to 100+ Customers And 50k Developers: My Journey as Qovery's Co-Founder
Hey folks, welcome to DevTools Brew #50!
If you're new here, my name is Morgan Perry, co-founder of Qovery, and every Saturday, I share the stories, strategies, and insights behind the most successful devtool companies.
It's already the 50th issue!!! To mark this milestone, I decided to venture over to the other side of the fence, sharing my 4-year journey as co-founder of Qovery with humility and authenticity. Let's dive in!
📈 From 0 to 100+ Customers And 50k Developers: My Journey as Qovery's Co-Founder
Reflecting on my 4-year journey as co-founder at Qovery - in the devtool space. While there's still much ahead, we've achieved significant milestones – 50k developers, 100+ organizations – and a product people love.
I will share the lessons learned in steering our venture from zero to 100+ organizations and over 50k developers. I aim to bring transparency and authenticity to illuminate both the obvious and counterintuitive aspects of this journey. Let's dive in! 👇
Transition from Large Companies to Startup Life
My first job landed me in banking in 2012, launching the first fintech (Hello Bank) for one of Europe's largest banks; my very first step into the tech world. Later, I ventured into the media industry, leading and managing various tech projects.
After four years in banking and media, I embarked on a bunch of entrepreneurial projects that taught me a lot about entrepreneurship and startup life, even if they didn't lead to profitable businesses.
It was during one of my projects that I met my current Qovery’s co-founders, Romaric and Pierre. Fun fact: at that time, I became their first paying customer, using their API to build my platform. Back then, I was a solo founder, and Romaric and Pierre were already working together on a joint project. After meetings, discussions, and helping each other out, it became obvious. The energy, values, and complementarity were so aligned that we decided to join forces to launch a new project together…Spoiler alert: it became Qovery 👀
The Birth of Qovery
A story of pivot
Qovery's inception came from a pivot during our time in the US Techstars Accelerator in 2019. I've briefly discussed it here, but we initially started with an AI project (yes, way long before the huge AI hype in 2023). It turned out that the time to market was very bad, and even no market at that point. Above all, the founder-market fit wasn't evident. No one in the team had a background in AI, and our market knowledge was very limited. However, what we were experts in and had been doing for years was managing large-scale cloud infrastructure (Romaric and Pierre have backgrounds at companies like Red Hat, Criteo, Ullink, etc.), and for me, on the business side, launching and leading tech projects in large companies undergoing digital transformation.
Fun fact: Qovery's very first idea was a Database as a Service (DBaaS), hence the name 'Qovery' (for Recovery). It was just for fun, as it didn't last long (maybe a few dozen days at best). We quickly realized the need was on a different and bigger value chain - even more painful to manage based on our experience in our previous companies: deploying and managing large-scale applications in the cloud.
The Future of the Cloud!
Bingo! Qovery’s vision was born. After the initial iteration in late 2019 and the launch in January 2020, the first version of Qovery came to life. I won't show you what that first Qovery platform version looked like, but here is the first version of our website 😂
Based on our founding team's solid experience in this industry, Qovery’s vision, and product traction, we quickly secured our Seed funding with top-notch investors and incredible business angels like the founders of Datadog and Docker.
Building Qovery - Initial Traction, Initial Challenges
More Traction, More Problems
Soon after the initial version and the launch announcement, we experienced significant traction from hundreds of developers eager to test our platform for easily deploying their applications in the cloud. How? Qovery's strength from the beginning has been our extensive communication, and investment in documentation and content (building an SEO machine – I'll touch on this later).
A little hack we used at the time was offering developers the ability to deploy apps for free in the cloud with Qovery. This hack was shared on our blog, Reddit, Dev.to, and other dev community forums. We know how fond developers are of this kind of thing #FreeFood 😅.
Quickly, we received hundreds of requests, and referrals, and started building a community around our vision and product, investing time in it.
While the traction was incredible, attracting users who ultimately didn't come for the right reasons and the main value of your product doesn't work; leading to a misalignment between our value proposition and our audience (more on this below).
Losing our first big deal $$
Beyond a positioning problem, we also started facing some performance issues on the platform during the first year, especially with the increased number of users. Back at the time, we started working with a fast-growing fintech startup (with the unicorn 🦄 status ) for which we had caused some downtimes. It didn't go well and the engineering team was very (very) upset - rightly so. They decided to cut everything off. After that fiasco and losing this big deal, we decided to slow down growth, freeze the platform access, and work tirelessly on the performance and stability of the platform (which lasted for 6-8 long months).
Driving Product-Led Growth & Monetization Challenges
No correlation between usage and monetization
Early in Qovery's story, reflecting our DNA and product vision, we invested in Developer Experience (DevEx or DX), enabling any developer to be autonomous in managing the deployment of their environments and applications. During the first two years (from 2020 to 2022), the number of users and usage strongly increased, but monetization had less success.
Let's go back to the context: we were in 2021. The laser focus for Seed startups in devtool like Qovery was driving product adoption and increasing usage. Monetization was not yet a hot topic, as we had time to prove our business model. In the first two years alone, we reached the number of 20k+ developers on the platform. However, on the monetization side, the number was less impressive (less than $3k MRR!!).
The focus that changes everything
Fast forward to 2022-2023, and the New World. With the market shifting (financial crisis), we had to adapt and make a drastic change in how we operated our business. It was no longer just about driving adoption and new users, but about generating revenue and validating that our value proposition had a strong business value. We then decided to refocus on the real market gap, refine positioning, and force ourselves to define the best Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). It took a few iterations, but we eventually found it and hit the mark.
Getting user feedback by any means
To operate and refine our positioning, we need concrete feedback. One of the counterintuitive things we did to gather feedback and insights from our users was to let them access the product and then….. block their access! Yes, it may seem quite drastic, but it was the only way to get concrete feedback. Back a the time, no user that signed up for our product wanted to waste time talking to us (founders). Keep in mind that we're dealing with developers’ audience, and the only thing that interests them is getting into the product and playing with it. No talking with founders. Everyone dodges those who might try to sell them something, right? 😅. But this hack worked so well, allowing us to suddenly understand the deep motivations and real problems of our users. The positioning and ICP were suddenly much clearer.
Revving up the machine, even stronger!
Once this market positioning/ICP job was done, we did what we do best: Keep investing in DevEx, shipping products, communicating, and creating a ton of content, showing how we're providing the best value to the challenges faced by our target audience.
Path to Product-Market Fit
Positioning is everything!!!
Qovery's vision remained the same: filling the gap between Devs and DevOps/Ops by providing the best developer experience to our users, leading to more autonomy and high release velocity. But refining our positioning and defining our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) was that's really what took us to another level and led us to a monetization path. We eventually realized the value Qovery brings to organizations and also transitioned from self-serve motion to a more Sales approach.
A Shift in mindset: from self-serve to Sales touch
That was a real turning point. Doing sales wasn't our DNA. We're a product company, with a strong investment in dev experience. From day one, we've invested in empowering self-service and attracted most of our users through PLG (product-led growth). By surrounding ourselves with the right people, with the support of our investors and our network, we took a step towards doing Sales, seriously structuring our sales processes, and closing our first 5-figure tickets, which was huge for us compared to where we were from (we'd been selling for a few hundred dollars a month).
All of a sudden, realizing the value we were providing for such high prices was a revelation for us, and significantly contributed to our revenue growth.
We're still a long way from being top performers in Sales, and we're still learning every day, especially with Enterprise deals, which is still a completely different approach.
Measuring for better judging
Some of the strong markers we had in achieving this product-market fit were:
Users and teams who love the product AND pay the right price (we're not cheap at all).
Strong user retention with very little churn.
Incremental usage over time.
Referrals from our existing users.
100% inbound in lead generation (still to this day – Qovery has no Sales, except the founders).
Team cohesion and alignment are key.
In the early days of a startup, there are a lot of changes/iterations going on. Some of these can be challenging, and even questioned by the team. Over time, it could also become exhausting for the team. Ensuring constant and clear communication about the reasons for iterations and how they bring us closer to our vision is essential. We are lucky to have such an incredible team who have always operated with excellence and shipped high-quality products at speed during these challenging times. Without this, impossible to achieve this PMF milestone. Shout-out to them 💜
Lessons Learned from 0 to 100+ Customers and 50k Developers
Positioning is Everything!!
When we started Qovery, we had a very clear idea of the problem we wanted to solve and the experience we wanted to offer. What wasn't clear enough was for what and for whom exactly. We started by positioning our product for a broad audience (and the wrong one) and selling an all-in-one solution. We quickly learned that we needed to focus. We started to focus on Platform teams and engineering team leaders with dedicated use cases. Once we refined our positioning and narrowed down our ICP, everything became easier from our marketing messaging to our product decisions to our revenue growth.The Path to Product Market Fit: Speed, Momentum, and Iteration:
The road to PMF is a dynamic journey. Optimizing for rapid validation, quick response to feedback, and continuous feature shipping is crucial for achieving Product Market Fit. This requires swift iteration cycles and a proactive approach to user needs. But remember, to achieve this, team cohesion and alignment are key.Building a Great Product Takes Time:
It’s easy to build an MVP. We shipped our V1 within <6 months. However, building software that solves real customer pain points and stands out from the competition takes years of iteration cycles. Patience and perseverance are crucial in building a lasting and impactful product.Keep Pricing Simple AND Don't Let Pricing Hinder Adoption:
We’ve changed pricing five times since we started Qovery. And it's quite common in the early stages as you find your model, change positioning, and evolve products. But avoid over-complicating pricing and prioritize product adoption. A mistake we made: initially charging based on deployments proved counterproductive, hindering the adoption of a vital feature. Since then, we aligned pricing with the value offered, adopting a balanced mix of usage-based and per-user pricing.Attract with Features, Sell with Outcomes:
As founders, we spent too much time showing off all the cool things Qovery could do. And it worked to attract and engage users with our product. But this is the wrong way to do sales. So shifting from a feature-centric sales approach to an outcome-based strategy led to significant growth in revenue and average contract value, especially crucial in dealings with mid-size and larger organizations.Content Creation: Slow Grind, High Impact:
We’ve invested in content since day one of Qovery. We’ve built an SEO machine where we publish ~5 blogs per week. These efforts have been a slow grind - allowing us to generate many sign-ups per day for nearly 3 years running. If we had judged our initial articles' performance alone, we might have given up. But over time, these efforts paid off, leading to significant organic growth. (Even today, 100% of our acquisition is still based on inbound strategies.)Branding is Your Most Valuable Asset:
Beyond the content in which we invested from day one, Branding was also a big bet. But it was only with time that we truly realized the reason. Operating in an industry like ours (Devs & DevOps tools), we quickly realized that trust, legitimacy, and authority were essential to enter organizations and be adopted by teams. Without it, you might have a great product, but no one will take the risk of integrating it.
Marketing isn’t all about growth and bulllshit; it's about how your users perceive your brand, your product, and how you become top of mind for your audience when considering a solution to their problem. It depends on your industry, but for Qovery, branding is a considerable asset, allowing us today to establish ourselves as a leader in our category and enter organizations more easily.Picking the Right North Star Metric is Crucial:
Your North Star Metric is your strategy, and your strategy is your North Star Metric. Choose wisely — Lenny Rachitsky. Picking the right North Star Metric (NSM) and nailing it is so crucial if you want your company to reach its maximum growth potential. Very much linked to our positioning refocus and market shift, but right from the start, we defined and tracked our NSM on a usage-based metric (i.e.; number of deployments per month), but eventually switched to a revenue-based one (MRR/ARR growth). It was a game-changer for us. By focusing all the efforts on this revenue metric, we could close deals faster and generate much better product adoption. But keep in mind that nothing should be set in stone. Expect your North Star Metric to change as your strategy shifts.Building a Community is Not a One-Size-Fits-All Solution for Growth:
When starting Qovery, as a first-time founder in the devtool space, I often heard about the power of community-led growth for widespread adoption and growth. But I now have a different take 👇
Community Building: Not One Size Fits All: Building a community can be a game-changer, but it's crucial to have a precise purpose at the community's inception, aligning with the mission, audience, and/or business model. At Qovery, early community investment provided feedback and brand awareness. However, strong adoption and business growth from the community didn't quite click.
Lesson Learned: Clarity on why and for whom you're building a community is crucial (Positioning is everything!!!).
Strategic Shift: From Community to Ambassadors: After months of building and growing our community, we decided to shift from a community-centered approach to turning power users into brand ambassadors.
Lesson learned: While Qovery's community offered tons of feedback and raised brand awareness, aligning it with the right audience and the right market was crucial. Early on, despite a thriving Discord community (now closed), we realized the significance of clear positioning and defining our Ideal Customer Profile. Why? It ensures feedback aligns with our target audience, preventing misdirection of our product vision.Quality > Quantity: Focusing on turning existing power users into ambassadors has been a game-changer and much more impactful from a product and business growth POV. This aligned with revenue goals, boosting awareness, and earning recognition—like being acknowledged as a Leader in our category on G2.
Sales and Marketing are Just as Important as the Product Itself:
You might have the best product in the world, but it will still fail if you don't have an effective sales strategy.
As Qovery founders (two of whom have engineering backgrounds), our initial focus on product development yielded positive results. However, as the company grew, a stark truth emerged – sales and marketing are equally vital pillars. Realizing that sustainable success requires embracing a sales-centric approach, here are some pivotal steps, especially for founders from technical backgrounds 👇
Sales is not an auxiliary function but a core element of your business's success. It's not just about the product but how effectively you communicate its value.
Building a robust sales strategy involves defining your target audience, crafting compelling messaging, and developing a repeatable process.
Relationships play a pivotal role. It's not just about closing deals but fostering long-term partnerships. Identify key stakeholders in your client organizations and build relationships with them. Turn satisfied clients into brand champions who advocate for your product.
Ensure that the sales process aligns with the technical aspects of your product. Provide adequate training to understand the intricacies of the product and effectively convey its value proposition.
Final Word
I've spent the past few months writing and sharing stories about the most successful devtool companies on Devtools Brew. Humbly, I thought that my journey could also help some first-time founders in the devtool space, as my journey would be closer to their reality (Qovery not being IPO yet – but that’s the plan 😅).
This retrospective also made me realize the path traveled and especially articulate the mistakes and decisions we’ve made. But without those, we would have had a completely different path. It is often said that “no mistake, no learning”, but all I can say is learning is only possible by trying and sometimes (often) failing. The only thing that matters is taking action. Be patient with the results, but impatient with the actions.
Resilience, abnegation, and determination remain for me the most fundamental traits of an entrepreneur, especially when starting a company without a network or experience as a founder.
Hopefully, you could draw some learnings from it. Feel free to connect or comment; I will respond with great pleasure.
Take care! 💜
It’s already over! If you have any comments or feedback, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Thanks for reading,
Morgan
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