The Product Tales: Browserstack
Started in 2011 by IIT Bombay alumni Nakul Aggarwal and Ritesh Arora, Browserstack caters to one of the most important stakeholders of the tech ecosystem — the developers, by providing them a platform to test their code (prototypes or WIPs) across various combinations of browsers and operating systems to identify potential bugs — automatically as well as manually.
The problem solved by Browserstack:
In this SDLC cycle, testing becomes a huge bottleneck which might lead to a significant delay in projects. As this segment was underserved, the founders of the company decided to come up with a product that later went on to be adopted by global tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, etc to optimize their testing cycles.
A website/app might work perfectly on the local system or on the latest version of Firefox on Pixel’s flagship phone. But will they work fine in any of the older versions of the browser in a Samsung phone? Or on a Dell Laptop? Developers and testers spend a significant portion of their bandwidth ensuring the compatibility of their software across devices, browsers, and platforms.
This need for compatibility arises from the core problem of fragmentation — the sum of the differences between devices, platforms, browsers, and networks. These differences cannot be solved by simply developing a single, universally interoperable framework.
In the absence of compatibility testing, the developers are bombarded with cross-platform bugs that can arise due to an update in browsers, operating systems, as well as devices. This is where Browserstack’s cloud-based testing platform (which provides automated and manual testing capabilities) comes into play and tries to address the biggest pain point of the developer community. It also enables the developers to test their prototypes and WIPs(work-in-progress) in the local environment too; thereby empowering them to not worry about maintaining highly complex test environments and to focus on shipping high-quality products with a faster time to market
Product Portfolio
Browserstack has primarily 4 main products — Live, Automate, Enterprise, and Percy, all of which are built to support testing on desktop browsers, mobile browsers as well as apps.
Moreover, they provide several tools to augment the over software testing experience:
Business Performance
In the initial years, the company provided access to the testing tool for free to the entire developer community, did not spend any money on marketing and let their product do the talking. It received unprecedented interest from the community which made the founders realize that there is a huge opportunity to be tapped into. In the coming years, the company grew organically to become a global Business-to-Developer (B2D) SaaS organization where they followed a subscription-based revenue model.
After being bootstrapped till 2018, Browserstack raised its first funding of $50million in 2018. In July 2021, it raised $200million in Series B funding to become India’s most valued SaaS start-up at $4 billion. With an EBITDA margin of 27.7% and ROCE of 75.5, the company’s financial performance has been impressive, to say the least. It has tripled its no. of employees to 750+, has 50,000+ paying customers across 130+ countries, and 4 million developers on its platform. With the additional funding received, the company has expanded its physical presence with 15 data centers present across 7 countries.
With a mission of empowering developers to build amazing experiences, Browserstack has grown organically and rapidly to become a global force to be reckoned with in the software testing environment. With a clientele boasting of names like Microsoft, Expedia, Twitter, Amazon, and Barclays, and with the rapid adoption of cloud-based testing in the coming years, expediated due to the pandemic, the sky is the limit for this homegrown start-up.
References:
- https://ajuniorvc.com/browserstack-saas-unicorn-bootstrapped-testing-app-browser-india-startup/
- https://www.browserstack.com/company
NOTE: The Product Tales is a blog series that aspires to encourage readers to dig deeper into the digital products which one may come across on a daily basis. The blog’s objective is to highlight the end-to-end thought process behind the business model of these products so that the reader gets a root-level understanding of the same.
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