Honeybadger

Honeybadger Profile and History

To start a company with three founders and have the same headcount five years later is unexpected, to say the least. Yet here we are-five years and thousands of enthusiastic customers later. This is the story of how three guys with an app have thrived amid an excess of venture-capital-backed competitors. Honeybadger was born from our frustration when our favorite error tracker stopped caring. Ther e are many error tracking apps on the market today, but in 2008 there were few choices; Hoptoad (later renamed to "Airbrake" due to a legal dispute) was the first of its kind, and our favorite. "Honeybadger was born from our frustration when our favorite error tracker stopped caring." We loved Hoptoad because it notified us of bugs in our Ruby on Rails apps before our clients could complain; it was truly revolutionary. It also had a fun name, was easy to use, and was built by people we admired: Thoughbot-they were Ruby developers, just like us! Our lives as Rails developers were great, and we used Hoptoad daily to keep our applications error-free. Hoptoad was eventually renamed to Airbrake, and in 2011 sold to a competitor. The new owner did not seem to care about Airbrake like Thoughtbot did. They raised the prices while their infrastructure suffered, and our error notifications became unreliable. The final straw was in 2012 when Ben and Starr (who worked together at a Seattle startup) had an error in their Ruby on Rails application. They got an email about it, but when they clicked through to the UI, there were no details. Ben emailed Airbrake's customer support and said, "we had this error in our application, but there is no detail about it in your UI... can you tell me what's going on? They basically responded, "yup, we see you reported an error to us, but the detailed information isn't available." "The user experience was so bad that we decided to build our own exception monitoring app." Ben was exasperated at having what he said repeated back to him verbatim. He turned to Starr and said, "we should just build ...