“Timing, perseverance, and 10 years of trying will make you look like an overnight success” — Biz Stone
This classic quote by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone hits the nail on the head. Just like every other company, Codacy wasn’t an overnight success. It took a lot of hard work and dedication to get to where we are today — 60,000 developers and thousands of organizations happily using our product.
Of course there are some tricks to get to where you’re headed a bit faster. You could double down on Facebook Ads, or reach out to the media with the hope of receiving some press coverage. For us, one of those shortcuts turned out to be GitHub Marketplace.
Launched earlier this year, Marketplace is GitHub’s platform to effortlessly discover and purchase apps that can be used throughout the development process, extending the functionality of the service. For users, it’s is a great way to find tools that enhance their GitHub experience. For companies, it’s an amazing opportunity to market their product to over 25 million active developers. In this article, we’re sharing what we’ve learned from promoting our product on Marketplace.
Expanding our audience
One of the most important things we’ve learned while growing the company is that you need to be where your audience is. For us, the biggest part of our users has always been based in the US — but when we got started, we didn’t have a network there.
That’s why it made total sense for Codacy to take a chance on Marketplace. With GitHub being the world’s leading software development platform, it offered us a chance to tap into the fastest growing and largest international community of developers. We made sure to get in on the launch, as this allowed us to reach the largest number of people from the get-go.
This turned out to be a great choice — last month, we topped the charts of GitHub’s Marketplace, making Codacy the highest-grossing app on the platform. Over 4,000 people signed up since the launch, confirming our hunch that it could be an important new channel for user acquisition.
But joining Marketplace didn’t just get us a bunch of new users. The opportunity to join came at the perfect moment — right when we were raising a new round of $5 million in VC funding, which supports our continued investment in building the highest quality product for our users. We recently announced this at GitHub Universe, where our co-founder Jaime was invited to talk a bit about our journey (min 27:48).
The best part is that Marketplace is just getting started. The platform is getting more advanced each and every day, adding new features on a regular basis. Just a couple of days ago free trials were added, giving customers a chance to try out an app before committing to a subscription. This is great for developers, too, as trials are a great way to give users a small taste of their product before trying to convert them to paying customers.
Of course it’s not just about the way you market your product — it’s critically important to have a great product in the first place.
Codacy offers an easy way to get feedback on your code by delivering an automated review of common security concerns, code style violations, best practices and code coverage. We make paying back your technical debt a breeze — select the hotspot files you want to focus on during your next cleaning sprint by looking at advanced statistics like churn, complexity, duplication and number of lines of code.
For a top-down view of your project, we make it easy to track its quality evolution over time with our dashboard, and it’s even possible to customise your code analysis by applying a specific code analysis pattern or changing the parameters to fit your taste.
The competition can be tough, so you need to be confident that you’re offering the best tool for the job. At Codacy, we’re extremely confident about that. Not only do we cover more code languages than any alternative, we offer a more complete tool in general. The quality assessment we’re able to give our customers about their products is best in class. People are looking for the best way to standardize their development quality by measuring key metrics like static analysis issues, code coverage and duplication, and we’re offering just that.
In addition to this, Codacy is extremely easy to install, making it the single most accessible option when developers pick a tool to standardize their code quality.
Automated code review software might be a newcomer to the tech industry, but in the last couple of years we’ve seen it evolve into a high engagement element of the developer tool stack with great market dynamics. That’s because we’re solving a real problem — on average, reviewing code takes up 28 percent of developers’ time. By using Codacy they can easily shave off 30 to 50 percent, enabling them to spend more time creating and less time reviewing. We’re also leading the effort to standardise code quality across languages, forcing the entire community to adhere to the same quality standards. And by allowing people to lead discussions about code quality, we try to figure out what it should be focused on.
All of this makes us excited about the future, and we can’t wait to see where we’re headed in the coming years. Here’s to the next 60,000 users.
