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Göran Sandahl is Director of Growth at Airbrake LogicMonitor, frictionless error monitoring and performance insights for your entire app stack.
Victoria talks to Göran about having a product-led growth engine, how Airbrake can help developers identify and solve errors and bugs in applications, and developing a product geared towards a specific segment of the market.
Airbrake (https://www.airbrake.io/)
Follow Airbrake on Twitter (https://twitter.com/airbrake/), GitHub (https://github.com/airbrake/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/airbrake.io), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/c/airbrakechannel), or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/airbrake-io/).
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Transcript:
VICTORIA: This is The Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with us today is Göran Sandahl, Director of Growth at Airbrake LogicMonitor, frictionless error monitoring and performance insights for your entire app stack. Göran, thank you for joining us.
GÖRAN: Thanks for having me.
VICTORIA: Wonderful. So just tell me a little bit more about Airbrake and how it all got started.
GÖRAN: So Airbrake is, as you said, an error and performance monitoring tool. It was actually, funnily enough, started as a side-project within thoughtbot. So it's a little bit full circle here joining this podcast here. But I'm a recent addition to Airbrake, so I don't know the details of the time when they started over ten years ago. So talking about Airbrake and the journey since then, lots of things have happened with Airbrake.
It has gone through multiple acquisitions since then, both from industry players on the infrastructure side to various venture capital investors buying the company. And now Airbrake is owned by LogicMonitor, who bought Airbrake somewhat like a year ago. And it focuses exclusively on the developer audience for LogicMonitor.
And I lead growth, so I work with our growth team. We have a product-led growth engine. So we don't do a lot of traditional sales or anything like that, so a lot of it is word of mouth. And this is something that drew me to Airbrake was its strong kind of grassroots movement in Ruby and other web and application languages. So that's what I know about Airbrake's early days, which isn't a lot.
VICTORIA: Right. It was the very first exception monitoring service in the world. And we grew it to have three people working full time on it. And then, like what you said, it was sold to someone else who went on to continue to grow it. And it has been through several acquisitions. And from your perspective today, where is this service originally called Hoptoad [laughs], and then now it's Airbrake? And what kind of scale are you seeing? What are your customers like today?
GÖRAN: Obviously, I don't know exactly how the product looked like back then. But a lot of it, I think, has stayed the same. It focuses on simple error monitoring, simple performance monitoring, and simple deployment tracking. So it's pretty much the same focus I believe in the product. This is what makes it stand out still today.
We can talk about observability, and happy to do that. This is my third company that I've been working for as a monitoring company, so I