At Outlyer, our vision is to build a great company that has the potential to be a leader in our space. We spent a lot of time doing customer development before we launched our start-up 8 months ago to ensure we were solving a big enough problem and since then we’ve had phenomenal traction getting our new company off the ground. Here’s a summary of our progress since we started:
- We spent most of last year before we left Alfresco doing customer development, to ensure we were solving a real problem in the monitoring space. Off the back of that we published our research in February (What we learnt talking to 60 companies about monitoring), which got us a lot of attention in the space, and several large companies approaching us interested in being part of our Beta.
- Off the back of our customer development, we signed up two large customers early on who were running online services at scale, identified with the problems we were trying to solve, and were willing to work with us while we developed Outlyer this year. From those two deals alone we achieved six-figure revenue in our first 6 months.
- In February we launched DevOps Exchange, which after 3 meetups quickly became London’s largest DevOps meetup with 150 attendees and almost 600 members in the group. This quickly established our presence in the London scene and introduced us to some great companies that are now part of our private Beta.
- In February we also started the Microsoft Venture’s Accelerator, after a vigorous selection process. We completed the Accelerator at the end of April doing a pitch to 300 investors on demo day, and since then we’ve received a huge amount of interest and are now raising a seed round to help accelerate our progress so we can continue building on our traction
- In March, we hired our first full time developer, Tomasz, who frankly is just awesome, and is helping us build a great product. The core product has now been stable and in production with our first customers since March and we’re now finishing off the final parts to get to MVP before we open it up to a wider audience
- In May we flew over to Portland to do our first public preview of Outlyer at Monitorama, the video of which you can see here.
- Last month we finally started opening up Outlyer to a few select companies who are now participating in our private Beta and providing the feedback we need to ensure we continue building a great product!
However, this is only the beginning of building our vision and becoming a leader in the monitoring space. So in order to increase the chances of success we need the support of great people who’ve already build great, leading companies before. On that note we approached John Powell (my former boss from Alfresco after he acquired my last company) back in March, to see if he wanted to join our board to help guide us as we grew the company, and we’re pleased to announce that John chose to invest and join our board, which was officially signed earlier this month.
Introducing John Powell
John’s background is in Enterprise Software where he has helped build 2 category leading Enterprise software companies. He joined a small French software company as the first employee outside France and grew it to become the worlds largest BI company and the second largest software company in Europe. Business Objects was the first European software company to IPO on Nasdaq and culminated in a $7b acquisition by SAP.
He later founded and led Alfresco software as CEO for 8 years growing it to be the largest open source ECM provider and one of the largest private open source companies globally.
John had this to say about joining:
Having worked with the Outlyer team previously at Alfresco, and seeing some remarkable results in just the first few months of launching, I'm excited to be part of this tremendous opportunity and back a team I believe have what it takes to build a great company in the monitoring space.
Having worked with John before, we are really excited to continue working with John at Outlyer, and continue to learn from his years of experience building world class companies.