How BugHerd came back from the brink | Hacker News Reader

How BugHerd came back from the brink

smartcompany.com.au

65 pointsmerricksb26 comments

Loved reading this. I’ve been a happy user of BugHerd for six years now across two companies.

But it’s true that waiting for a couple of QoL features have been painful. Please let someone see all their assigned bugs across all their projects at once. :) I had hacked this together with the XML API at one point (as JSON was horribly rate limited) and then paid TacoApp to write the same integration, but it’s not functioning anymore.

Thanks for sticking around :) I know it's frustrating to see so little action over such a long period of time. We're slowly rolling out a bunch of stuff which we really should've added years ago... We have some other wish list items we're working on at the moment, but a "user dashboard" is on our roadmap I promise! :)

Sweet! I am enjoying the emails listing the updates.

What is the current "sweet spot" of the product? The perfect customer, if you will.

Digital Agencies get the most value (because they tend to have more projects on the go), but any web team wanting feedback from stakeholders will enjoy it.

Love Bugherd. Been a happy user for ages - first used it at an agency years ago where it saved us _so much_ time and effort in QA.

Since then I’ve introduced it everywhere I’ve worked as there’s nothing else like it.

It’s great to hear the company is in good shape again and I wish the best for everyone involved.

(Our agency head had to send round a number of all-hands emails warning NOT to mispronounce the name, especially in front of clients)

I don't understand business much but it looks it was really nice of them to return the money to investors. They could just let the investors bear the brunt of their bad investment without giving a damn.

> They could just let the investors bear the brunt of their bad investment without giving a damn.

Not if they wanted to continue running the company.

The investors owned part of the company in return for giving them money. Possibly they owned a majority of the company. For example, the investors would make more money by forcing some sort of fire sale of the companies assets which you don't want if your goal is to continue running the company.

As majority owners, we certainly could have continued to run the company indefinitely as a "lifestyle business" (and there's not much anyone could have done about it). But my belief is that if you take investment you have a responsibility to those investors to return their capital come hell or high water.

At the time, we didn't entirely know whether there were still growth opportunities or what else we could try if we kept going. But we knew we wanted to keep trying. Some of our investors wanted out, and we gave them (and all the other investors) the opportunity to sell their shares back to us. It means everyone who wanted it got their money back (which for an investor is not actually a very good outcome, but better than $0), and we got to keep the company. I'm appreciative of them allowing us to do it.

Huh, I actually thought they were dead. Glad to hear they're still going.

(founder here) Definitely not dead! Far from it! Profitable and still growing.

September was our largest single month growth since April 2014 and we'll easily beat that this month. Lots has changed with the app in the last 12 months and lots happening as we speak. If you haven't looked for a while, drop in and take a look!

Hey Alan! Glad things have turned around and are on the up :)

Awesome! Will do, next time I'm working on something customer-facing.

>>> Two years of development had been done that hadn’t made it to market

That seems fairly hard to do ... it sounds more like abandoning one product to pivot to another that never made it?

It was a pivot that failed.

Even though we were growing quickly, the data showed that we'd landed on a local maxima with the original product. Our churn rate was around 3%/mth and the vast majority of churn was "because we don't have a project in QA". We felt we could address that with a different offering (you'd call it a pivot). That pivot failed to deliver a product that resonated the way the original did.

Fortunately, we hadn't shut down the original product (which was still growing), and so the mistake was not fatal.

That name seems easy to mispronounce.

It's an Australian company, I'd wager it's a deliberate choice :)

Probably toned it down from "Yeahitsfuckedmate.com"

Surprisingly accurate :)

Haha, I miss you Alan.

I'm not a native English speaker, can you explain?

I mean, I can see how it would be a problem if you were to mispronounce the 'g' as a 't', but a g and t differ enough that I can't imagine that happening.

Or is there another mispronunciation that I'm missing here?

If you don’t enunciate the h it sounds like “buggered,” which has a few potential meanings. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Buggered

In Australia buggered colloquially just means “broken and tired”.

The toaster is buggered (broken). We’ve had meetings all day and I’m buggered (tired)

I'm guessing OP had in mind "buggered" — i.e., to be sodomized.

Errr... no... just no.

Words have meanings. Some words have multiple meanings, but many people will think of the most common meaning when encountering a word outside of any context that would imply otherwise.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Buggered

Please don't take this as a criticism! I think it's great that this firm has such an adventurous name.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com