Specto: Nobody Is Going To Wait Two Seconds For Your App To Load
It’s been nearly fourteen years since the iPhone launched, and today we spend roughly 20% of our waking hours on a mobile device. We expect it to be fast - lightning fast. And yet, despite the $240B spent on top of mobile apps in 2020, most companies have far underinvested in mobile app performance relative to traditional web performance.
Specto is a mobile application performance monitoring (APM) platform that offers a simple SDK integration while delivering an unprecedented level of granularity to mobile developers to quickly and accurately diagnose performance issues. When we met founders Jernej Strasner and Indragie Karunaratne, it was clear that they had unique insights into the problems surrounding mobile app performance - as well as the next-generation solution.
They had worked in this area for years at Facebook, where mobile performance has a direct impact on billions in annual revenue. The stakes are high, and the two built the tooling to keep Facebook’s apps performant. What Jernej and Indragie recognized was that most companies would not have the engineering capability to build this same quality of monitoring and insights.
Over the past two years they’ve recruited an exceptional team of engineers from Twitter, Airbnb, Algolia, Elastic, and Paravision, and have completely rethought performance monitoring from a mobile-centric point of view. My former colleagues at Quora saw the value of Specto’s solution immediately, and companies like Notion have already reduced Android start-up time by 15%.
Besides its truly exceptional technical team, we were compelled to invest in Specto for two key reasons:
- First, mobile developers have inadequate monitoring solutions given the rapid proliferation of device types, OS versions, carriers, and global audiences. It’s clear that with the increase of consumer and enterprise activity on mobile converging with this “mobile-first” generation’s expectations for seamless mobile app performance, diagnosing and fixing client-side mobile performance issues will become essential for customer retention and revenue maximization. Traditional approaches approximate performance, whereas Specto can collect and trace performance on actual end-user devices. The fidelity of this data enables a superior approach for diagnosis and root-cause analysis of performance issues.
- Second, when we looked at market cap creation over the last few years, over 80% of technology IPOs in the top two stock markets (NYSE and NASDAQ) had a mobile focus. At the time we invested, the average valuation at IPO was nearly 4x larger for companies with mobile as a core focus vs. companies without any mobile focus. According to App Annie, app store spend reached $143B in 2020, representing 20% YoY growth.
In short, mobile performance is an imperative for any company of scale, and yet most are still under-optimized.
Companies of all sizes can use Specto today. Developers can try out Specto for free by signing up here: https://dashboard.specto.dev/auth/signup
Bain Capital Ventures co-led a $3.25M seed investment in Specto along with our co-investors Fuel Capital and Susa Ventures, and we’re so proud to be bringing the mobile ecosystem to a new level of performance.
