Click, click … bug report, or why we invested in Bird Eats Bug.
We kick off 2021 with the announcement of our investment in Bird Eats Bug. We are excited to lead the €1.5m Seed round in the Berlin-based startup and join Dan, Francisco and Jacky on their exciting journey to build the go-to solution for pain-free bug reporting and ultimately the go-to video communication for Software Quality Assurance (QA). 🐤🍽️🐛
Whether you work in a tech team or not, you probably already have encountered the endless and painful back-and-forth after you encountered a software error. We certainly have, and we don’t even work primarily with software development (we still develop our own internal intelligence, read more about it here). Once you find a bug, the back-and-forth with the tech team starts:
“Which browser did you use? “ “What did you click on?” Just to end with: “Sorry I can’t re-create your problem”.
In the “best” case scenario, this only leads to user frustration, in the worst case, this leaves major software vulnerabilities that remain unsolved - and we all know what happened after an unfixed bug to Ariane 5 (c. $400m explosion of the first Ariane 5 rocket due to a software bug).
Enter - Bird Eats Bug: Dan, Francisco and Jacky have built a cloud-based solution that allows users to report bugs in just three clicks, and automatically enrich these reports with additional information, such as console and system information, as well as network warnings. Even better, Bird integrates with common issue tracker software, such as Jira, Linear and Trello. The previously endless process that used to include numerous back-and-forth messages becomes a 3-click process to record a bug and share it / upload it to a common repo / automatically push it to Jira.
You can sign up to Bird (for free!), to test how many clicks you would need to create a bug report, here:👉 https://birdeatsbug.com/signup
This tremendous process improvement is already a reason to back the team behind Bird, but there is more to it why we decided to invest:
- The “product is king” mentality of the team. Right from the start, the trio convinced us with an extraordinary product and design focus that is deeply rooted in the founding team and their past experience. Every UI/UX decision the team makes has the end-user in mind. And from my own experience, I can say that they succeeding at it — using Bird is actually fun, and the user’s love reflects that. Bird is a great example of “develop for the end-user, eventually paid by the organisation”. We love to back “product-nerds” early on, and we expect that this product-first approach will power product-led growth with no-touch sales in the future.
- Exponential-growth & stickiness potential: viral + network effects. Due to the massive process improvement of sending and receiving a Bird bug report, users are incentivised to invite other team members to also use Bird (=locally limited network effects). Once a team implements a process built around Bird, the software becomes sticky and embedded in processes. In addition, sharing bug reports within and outside of your organisation with users that are not yet clients could acquire new users for Bird naturally (=viral expansion), with €0,- marketing and sales spent. From our experience, such viral loops and network effects can drive exponential growth and stickiness with users in the future.
- Bottom-up & capital-efficient product-led sales: Based on the product-centric focus, the team relies on no-touch sale by converting free users of the product, which is a highly capital-efficient way of acquiring new clients. Capital-efficient companies are valued higher and their founding teams retain more equity (read more about it here). Bottom-up sales further powers the frictionless growth mechanism of network & viral effects.
- Global and massive market opportunity. Software is (still) eating the world, and companies of all industries feel the pressure to become software-first. Within the software development process, bug reporting and the QA process is one of the most time-consuming parts. Research suggests, that developers spent up to half of their time debugging. Imagine all that time freed up for new software projects, just because Bird eliminates the unnecessary back-and-forth.
Once the team has fully mastered the bug reporting process, the possibilities are endless: non-bug related technical-focused video communication (un-bundling loom?), automated bug reporting, or integration to software product to offer a channel for bug reports from clients. You see, we are quite bullish and excited for Bird’s future.
Team Bird, Welcome to the Nauta Family, we are excited to back you on this great journey!
🤓 Learn more about Bird on their website:https://birdeatsbug.com/
👩💻 Work with a great & experienced team: https://birdeatsbug.join.com/
🎟️ Sign-up here to stop the back & forth: https://birdeatsbug.com/signup
