This is an interview I did with Jordi Gimenez. He is the founder of Bugfender.com, a service/tool that developers use to diagnose and troubleshoot issues in their mobile, web, or desktop applications.
Enjoy!
Please, introduce yourself and your business.
Hi! My name is Jordi Gimenez. I live in Spain, close to sunny Barcelona, and work remotely.
I started working on web apps as a full-stack developer back in 2006. The web was very different back then. I started with Java 1.5, and jQuery was just released. What times!
However, I was very curious and soon wanted to try other things, so I worked for a while as a security auditor for a large consulting company and then created my own business.
First, I was a freelancer making mobile apps for startups, but soon, it became a company with a team capable of delivering web and mobile apps for all kinds of businesses.
Bugfender was born out of this amalgamation of experiences, and I think they all contributed to what Bugfender is today.
How did you start your business?
I met my business partner, Aleix, while doing consulting. We were building an app for one of our customers, and they reported a problem, but we couldn't find a way to reproduce it.
It would have been great to plug a cable to debug the application on the customer's phone when the problem occurred, but of course, that wasn't possible! We had spent days looking into the code, but we couldn't figure out what was happening.
Aleix came up with an idea: He made a small addition to the app to gather all the logs and a server component to store and display them. My eyes widened when he told me: I had built the same a few years ago for a different application.
I started asking questions: had he looked at the existing products in the market? Yes. Had he found one? No. Were we, as a consulting company, willing to pay for such a product? Of course.
After that, we knew we were onto something! That moment was exhilarating.
How much revenue was your best year?
About $500k. For now, we reinvest the margin into improving the product. We're a bootstrapped company, so we started very small, and reinvesting is our way of continuing to grow.
When did you notice traction when building your business? The “Oh S**t!” moment, what did that feel like?
The first moment happened right when we decided to create Bugfender: we needed a logging tool for mobile apps and couldn't find a suitable one. So, at least, we had one user: ourselves. It made sense to build it.
The second eureka moment was some months later, when we verified that other people also had this problem and were willing to pay us to solve it: this had the potential to become a business, not only a side project to scratch our own itch.
What was your childhood like? Were you slinging candy on the playground?
Haha, I did not! But my parents worked hard and loved contributing to their jobs above and beyond, and they instilled these values in me.
My father worked at a bank and introduced me very early to saving, interest, and such concepts.
What has been your best marketing marketing channel?
The blog. We have tried all sorts of marketing channels, and at our stage, this is what produces the best return on investment. Also, our free plan is helpful in getting people to try the product and later on bring it to their workplaces.
Now that we have more money to spend and a more mature product, we'll likely try again other things that didn't work in the past.
How many attempts at building something did you make before you found what you’re working on now? Did you always have an entrepreneurial drive?
Many! Bugfender was born from a consulting company, which, in turn, was born from my freelance gig.
Since I was a kid, I've been curious and willing to experiment. This led to a lot of idea-bouncing with friends and colleagues, unfinished side projects, and finished products without a marketing plan. One could say this is "entrepreneurial," but I feel it's mostly "experimentation."
In many cases, I did not look into making money first (which might be why many projects didn't work out!). I learned later that finding customers is way more valuable than having ideas or solving engineering problems.
What is your biggest overhead expense?
Our most significant expense is hosting. We aggregate logs from millions of devices and process terabytes of data each day. Saving logs requires storage, and making them readily available for search needs computing.
What’s the most important skill you’ve learned?
Focus on what's important. As an engineering entrepreneur, I default to code, but is this the best use of my time? Other business areas also require attention: coordinating the team, planning the following features to build, understanding the customer's needs and helping them, how to reach new customers, accounting, security, etc.
There are so many things to do and levers you can pull that it's essential to choose what you spend your time on deliberately. Otherwise, you'll spend all your time doing "stuff" but not necessarily moving your business forward.
What do you spend the majority of your time doing, in a given week?
I call this "keeping the plates spinning." All founders do this, although their actions change with the size of their businesses.
For example, today, I'm interviewing a developer, meeting with the development and operations teams, consulting with our lawyer, and assisting customers with our product. If there's any time left, I'll work on coding. This is the reality of being an entrepreneur, a constant juggling act to keep the business running smoothly.
What do you know now that you wish you knew when first starting your business?
Log storage is expensive and, therefore, not a product for everyone. Some hard costs will drive the price of your product up, and there is nothing you can do about it. Cost optimization can be an exciting engineering challenge, but it has limits.
What’s a big problem you’ve faced as a business owner and what were the emotions behind it?
It's not easy at all, and it's only glamorous if you are successful. Entrepreneurship implies operating in unchartered waters. That sometimes works, but it often doesn't. Many founders put their heart and soul into their businesses only to see them fail.
I even experienced this with Bugfender: finding the first customer took us so long that we were close to losing hope and abandoning the idea.
Even successful companies face continuous challenges: changes in market trends can tank a successful product, valuable team members may leave, or competitors may launch a massive marketing campaign to steal all your customers. Being an entrepreneur comes with many headaches.
What is your best advice for someone who feels completely stuck?
As a consultant, I have worked on a great deal of products, and I've never seen a business fail because the product was not good enough. It was always because they couldn't find enough customers.
Consider sales first: many good products can't find their way to customers, and so, as a business, they fail.
Check out Jordi and Bugfender, here:
