VI. Case Studies

Garrett Dimon

Garrett Dimon built Sifter on the side

Product: Sifter (acquired). Garrett is now runs marketing at Wildbit.

Audience: web developers, project managers, founders.

Garrett was frustrated that his clients wouldn’t use the bug trackers on the market. He set out to make something better: a tracker his customers would use. Initially, he decided to make it open source. However, after sharing it with other developers, their advice was to turn it into to a SaaS app instead. The result was Sifter, a web application he’s been running profitable since day one.

Building an audience was almost accidental for Garrett. He hadn’t set out to build a business, so he shared his journey. People resonated with his openness and curiosity.

Your audience doesn’t need to be huge, but your launch will be a lot easier if you have one. Garrett had a pre-launch list with 1,000 email addresses, 2,000 Twitter followers, and nearly 6,000 people subscribed to his RSS feed. That audience helped him generate $1,000 in revenue in his first month of business.

Businesses (especially software development companies) pay money for tools. Garrett promises them Sifter will simplify their bug tracking, which in turn saves them time and money.

Three things you can learn from Garrett:

1. Ask yourself, “Do you want to start a business?” Garrett warns developers that there is a lot more to running an app business than writing code. “If you just want to create stuff, and write code, starting a business is not the best way to do that,” he says.
2. Don’t compete on features. It’s possible to do less than the competition and do better. Deliver outcomes for your users as opposed to new features, and they’ll be much happier.
3. Frustration with existing products isn’t enough. Don’t build a business just because you don’t like the current offerings. You have to be genuinely passionate about the problem. “Once you start building, you quickly learn that all of the shortcomings in the products that they hate weren’t born out of laziness, but simple tradeoffs.” Garrett has always been genuinely passionate about workflows, which makes Sifter a good fit for him.

Garrett’s written a book about the lessons he learned building Sifter called Starting and Sustaining.