Honey Badger

In 2009, Josh Wood was a freelance PHP developer looking to break into Ruby on Rails. He met Ben Curtis through a blog post about contract work and started collaborating. Their third co-founder, Starr, joined the same ecosystem of contract work under Ben. The three developers stayed connected in chat rooms while taking day jobs at a Seattle startup, never losing sight of a shared vision to build something together.

By 2011, all three were relying on Airbrake (originally called Hoptoad) for exception tracking—a tool that had been transformative for developer productivity. But after the original agency sold it to private equity, the service deteriorated rapidly. Alerts would fire but the UI would show only loading spinners, making it impossible to diagnose errors. Worse, support was non-existent. When Ben emailed with a question, he got a shrug. That frustration became their founding moment.

Around May/June 2012, the three decided to build the solution themselves. They had the perfect constraint: they were already freelancing and knew what they needed. Josh would wake up at 4-6 AM to hack on Honey Badger before his client work. The others fit it around their schedules. By September 2012—just 3-4 months later—they had a product ready to launch.

They didn't aim for perfection. They built what they themselves needed as developers, knowing their professional network faced the same pain.

Their first paying customer came in September 2012, right after launch. The initial 10 customers were almost entirely from their professional network—developers they knew and had worked with. Josh and the co-founders simply emailed their contacts: "Check this out. We're building this. Want to try it?"

Many early customers were ex-Airbrake users with nowhere else to go. Honey Badger became the obvious alternative. Word-of-mouth took over from there.

The biggest lever proved to be pricing. Early on, they were underpricing and had rigid ideas about not limiting features. They didn't want to do to users what Airbrake had done to them. But as they scaled into thousands of customers, some (like eBay) were effectively running denial-of-service attacks on the infrastructure.

They experimented with usage-based pricing and volume limits—important moves that hit a nerve. Choosing the right value metric (errors/month, retention duration) meant customers felt they got more value as they paid more. When they finally enforced limits (generously), it unlocked another growth phase.

Word-of-mouth and community participation remained their primary growth channel. They didn't become "marketing gurus," but they invested obsessively in customer support and product quality. By year seven, they were maintaining sub-1% monthly churn—meaning retention almost entirely replaced the need for aggressive customer acquisition.

In year seven, Honey Badger does over $1M in annual recurring revenue. The three founders plus two full-time employees (Ben Findlay as marketing manager, and one other developer) run the company at a 30-hour work week—a target they're transparent about in job postings. They're fully bootstrapped, own 100% of the company, and are highly profitable with SaaS margins that most venture-backed companies would envy.

They've learned to hire people aligned with their ethos—people with side projects and entrepreneurial spirits. Ben's hiring brought analytical rigor to marketing, forcing the developer-heavy team to measure experiments rather than just "shipping and feeling good about it."

The company is stable, profitable, and intentionally small. Growth is slow and steady, but it's theirs. No VCs, no pressure, no 80-hour weeks. Just three developers, a small team they picked, and a product their customers actually love using.