Omar Gabr, CEO and Co-founder of Instabug talks to Professor Julian Birkinshaw about the serendipitous way his app came to realisation.
A forced pivot
In light of the response, Gabr and Soliman decided to pivot the website (a “forced pivot – we didn’t really have a choice”) to a simple in-app tool. They then recorded a short video showing how someone reported a bug by just shaking their phone, uploaded the video to Hacker News and, in yet another aha! moment, were amazed by the response: “People loved it!” Gabr remembers. “One hundred people applied to use the product on the first day and we had dozens of questions concerning how to use it, the cost and so on, including enquiries from some very big software companies – and it wasn’t even a product yet. We realised that it wasn’t just a problem that Egyptian developers were facing – it was a global problem for the whole development community. That was when we thought we should do something significantly bigger than the website and the app.”
Gabr and Soliman went to Silicon Valley and got feedback from some of the top software developers in the world, and “it was extremely obvious that we needed to double-down and build this product,” Gabr says.
With the global tech community taking up the concept at breakneck speed, the founders built a minimum viable product for testing which, besides securing support from a startup incubator in Egypt, won first place at the 2013 MIT Enterprise Arab Forum (along with prize money of $50,000) in a gruelling competition that involves pitching to more than 40 expert judges and coaches.
The company went on to grow exponentially, securing backing from legendary venture investor Y Combinator, as well as Accel Partners.
Effect of the Covid pandemic
Surprisingly, given that one might expect software development to slow down in the wake of the global Covid-19 pandemic, Instabug secured dozens of new enterprise customers and saw overall usage grow by 45%, a scenario Gabr attributes to the fact that, with more people spending more time at home, there is simply more app downloads and usage.
The company has been “touching profitability” since January 2015, a situation Gabr attributes to the fact that the founders have always run a disciplined business and “kept an eye on our burn before it was mainstream.”
Continually adding features to the product, Instabug has evolved to offer real-time contextual insights throughout the entire mobile app lifecycle through its bug and feedback reporting, secure crash reporting, and in-app surveys.
Much like penicillin’s ability to repel bacterial infections, Instabug’s ability to help eradicate a different kind of bug was discovered purely by accident – but an extremely happy one for developers everywhere.