FullStory

Coming off of Homebase going nowhere fast, when we put the prototype that would become FullStory in front of potential customers, it was a breath of fresh air.

We called the initial demo “project cowpaths” (after the famous “paving the cowpaths” analogy) – while this can have a slightly negative connotation in engineering, we intended it in the spirit of “understanding what your users are actually doing, so you can improve your product to suit their needs, rather than prescribing how they ‘ought’ to be doing things”.

After I demoed the initial prototype (seen below), we started showing it to potential customers, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. Keep in mind that this was before most people had ever heard the term “session replay”, so it wasn’t something they even knew they could want!

We spent the next few months banging the initial prototype into good enough shape to start selling, and almost immediately learned what it was like to have a product people actually wanted to use:

Since then, the company has grown to around 600 employees, and it’s been an amazingly fun ride. It continues to be a day job that I love, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. I could tell a lot more stories about this process, and probably will one day!