![]() John Resig, the founder of jquery, tweeted about liking the product/ too to his 200k+ followers. ![]() However, the Internet blurs all the boundaries and by being truly developer-first at heart, BrowserStack was always meant to be a global product. Since Indians loved using free products (they still do), the beta version was launched in 2011, free to use. From facing problems with IE to becoming resellers of IE, they found their product idea. The first iteration of BrowserStack was a simple tool to give developers the ability to test their website by building a virtual environment on a browser.Īs a sign of the times, the browser their virtual environment used was Internet Explorer. There was a clear problem in the market and the founding team decided to tackle it. The team found that on Twitter, Stackoverflow and Reddit, more than a 100 people were complaining to Microsoft because of the difficulty in using IE to test their websites. Ritesh and Nakul did exactly what many now-successful ‘developer-first’ companies like Stripe and Twilio used for product-market fit testing. To start out with this product-led growth, they would begin with what now is the first step in the “SaaS Playbook” A Market Safari This would become an inspiring tale and curious case of what’s now widely called product-let growth. With their strong background in tech-focussed consulting, Nakul and Ritesh were well equipped to get it right. They had to build a product that they themselves as developers would thoroughly love, and enjoy using. They were often the first ones to leave harsh feedback on public forums if given the chance.īut Ritesh and Nakul knew what the litmus test for their product would be. It was known that developers wouldn’t settle for the minimum viable product. ![]() The beauty lay in the fact that the boundaries, literal as well as philosophical, all vanished, as the product went wherever the developers sat. They marched in with the same conviction and perseverance that they showed as third year undergraduates, to found BrowserStack.īuilding for builders appeared as a monstrous challenge, but even so, it had a certain charm. They exhausted all there were at the time to put together a sentiment analysis algorithm in college. Trailblazers since college, Ritesh and Nakul went through more than 70 research papers on ML/AI. Their Ruby on Rails blog became one of the most popular Ruby blogs on the internet. They contributed to the open source community, and were among the first few adopters of Ruby on Rails in India. They would read all the blogs, forums, and interact with the global developer community. Right from their college days, Ritesh and Nakul used to think and act global. Ritesh and Nakul weren’t new to making a global impact with their technological acuity.Įven as they continued functioning out of a coffee shop, they never thought of “going global” as an explicit to-do bullet on their agenda. It would turn out to be a bigger challenge than even they thought. ![]() In all that they worked on, testing was the biggest challenge. In the ‘Aha’ moment that all entrepreneurs wait for, Ritesh and Nakul hit upon a realisation. The next task was to test the website across browsers and devices.Īs they went through the motions, they realized it would take at least 4 days to download virtual machines, complete set-up and debug their code.Īll of this while working on Internet Explorer with 3G internet. The website was up and running in two days. One of the to-be co-founders for Browserstack reverse-engineered a WordPress template. To do so, they decided to start a website to scout for projects. Ritesh and Nakul, though, wanted to leverage this to expand their consulting business. India was still operating on 3G, the average internet speed in 2010 was just 0.8Mbps. The big daddy was Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.īundled with Windows, IE’s market share was a whopping 41.1% globally and almost 60% in India. Chrome and Firefox were in their infancy. The internet itself was in its early days.Īt the time, an internet user had very limited options for devices or browsers. Ritesh and Nakul’s Internet access put them in less than 10% of the Indian population. ![]() The duo ran a business to help businesses on something called the Internet. In 2011, Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal were brainstorming in a Mumbai coffee shop. Last fortnight, BrowserStack raised $200M, at a valuation of $4Bn, making it India’s most valuable SaaS startup. ![]()
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