The following interview is a conversation we had with Harpreet Singh, CEO of Launchable, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Over $12 Million Raised to Build the Future of Software Testing
Harpreet Singh
Very nice to be here. Thank you for inviting me, Brett.
Brett
Not a problem. So to kick things off, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and maybe just a bit more about your background?
Harpreet Singh
Sure. So I came to the US in 1998, so I’ve been here for a while. I came here to do my master’s and I originally wanted to do something in AI, so I think I was like two decades too early. The other thing I wanted to do was there was this company called Sun Microsystem, which I can best describe as the google of its days, and it had invented a new technology called Java. And as a software developer I was really excited about it and all I wanted to do was come in and work for sun, which I did for about ten years. I realized, like, I’m not a big company guy and jumped into a startup called Cloudbees. I was in the early five or ten people size company.
Harpreet Singh
I eventually was the head of product vp of product and design there and took the company up to 500 people. I joined Atlassian and was head of their developer product called BitBucket. And eventually I started Launchable Inc. About three and a half, four years ago.
Brett
Now take us back to 98 when you were first moving to the US. What was going on inside your head?
Harpreet Singh
What was going on inside my head, fundamentally, really. I’m a technologist at heart and I think I lucked out by graduating in computer science. Just when things were sort of taking off and the year 2000 was around the corner, the.com boom was just starting, so it felt like really exciting. And I worked for a CEO back india who was just fantastic. And what I realized working for him is like, well, if I really need to compete, I need to have a master’s and my bachelor’s not going to cut it. And that’s where I naturally looked to the US, and I decided that, know, I should come in, spend some time educating myself, and then see where I can take myself.
Brett
A few other questions we’d like to ask. And the goal here is really just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder. First one Founder do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Harpreet Singh
So I actually admire three founders, and I had the fortune of working for all three. The first I already mentioned, his name is Anand Deshpande, and he founded a company in Pune, India, called Persistent Systems. It just crossed like 1 billion in revenue, and it has like, I think, 15,000 people working in that company. And when I worked for them, they were like less than 40 people. And I was, this kid just out of college, really was hustling my way, and he took me under his wings and I learned a lot from him. The next Founder I really liked was Sasha Labore. He was the Founder and CEO of Cloud Bees, which is a DevOps company, and it’s a leader in DevOps. And I worked for him for maybe eight years.
Harpreet Singh
And the last person I really admire is Scott Farquar, who is the CEO, Co-CEO of Atlassian. And I worked for him for a short while, and I was thinking about this. The thread that ties them together for me is like they were all people for ceos. They really cared about the people. They cared about building a great culture, they cared about hiring really smart people and then listening to them. So I think that’s fundamentally what I have taken away from all three.
Brett
What about the title of Co-CEO? Is that something that you took from your time atlassian?
Harpreet Singh
Yeah, that did inspire me. I saw that working. And when I started this company with my Co-Founder, were peers back at Cloudbees, and we both felt passionate about building a company. We both felt like a CEO role is something that we wanted to grow into. And having seen this work atlassian, I was like, yeah, why don’t we do this? It makes for better decisions. You have to sound your decision with your Co-CEO. You just can’t make them unilaterally. So there’s a higher bar in terms of crossing that bar before you make a crucial decision. And I think that makes for a better company. And then the other thing is you can split stuff that you don’t want to do, and likely the other person would want to do that.
Harpreet Singh
And we tend to kind of split things that way, so that works out as well. So instead of just completely being overworked, jumping from task after task. We can easily divvy up things, so that works well as well.
Brett
We had Henrique on from Rex a couple of months ago, and they also have the Co-CEO partnership there. And how he described it is they have an internal CEO and an external CEO. So in his role, he’s the one who’s speaking to investors, he’s doing media interviews and all those types of things, while the other Co-CEO is focused more internally. So for you, what was that kind of split, and how did you guys divide up who was going to be responsible for what?
Harpreet Singh
So I don’t think we have like an internal and external CEO thing. It’s more like maybe Atlassian. In Atlassian, Scott and Mike, I think they just divide this by business functions. One guy has a set of products, set of associated things around it, and the other guy has the marketing function. So in our case, what we did is I sort of evolved into picking up sales and marketing and go to market strategy, while my Co-Founder evolved into sort of picking product. He was an engineering person and he picked that up. That’s how we’ve split things up, and then along the way, things have naturally evolved. So, as I said, one of us likes something, the other doesn’t, the other guy just picks that up. Right. That’s how we’ve done it. So there’s no internal, external kind of thing going on.
Brett
Got it. Interesting. Another question we like to ask is about books. So is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you and how we like to frame this? We got this from an author named Ryan Holiday. He calls him quickbooks. So, a quickbook is a book that rocks you to your core. It really influences how you think about the world and just how you approach life. Do any quickbooks come to mind?
Harpreet Singh
I’m a voracious reader, so I read quite a bit. So books tend to leave these marks on you. So I can’t say there’s, like one book that completely rocked my world and changed my worldview, but a couple come to mind, so one is so good, they cannot ignore you. And in that, I tend to offer these to nephews and nieces and so on.
Harpreet Singh
And the premise by the author is that too often people are saying that they want to run after passion and find something that they are passionate about, as opposed to passion comes in once you get deep into a particular subject, which is an interesting sort of perspective, which is quite contrary to what’s being taught to people when they’re young, which is like, go find something that you’re really passionate about when they actually don’t know much about any areas in life. So I find that very instructive. The second book is from the same author. It’s called deep work. And that book is about really, it’s made for the world today, where our attention is distracted by so many things, Instagram and tweets and Facebook and so on, so forth.
Harpreet Singh
And the author makes an argument that if you have to do anything serious, you have to really do deep work. And by that, you have to go really deep into a subject.
Brett
Right.
Harpreet Singh
That book has kind of spoke to me in terms of my thinking, which is, like, when you are working in a big company, you tend to have all your time slots booked out in 30 minutes increments. And so if you want to do anything serious, it takes months to kind of get there. I liked it so much that we sort of brought one of the concepts back in our company, and that concept is called get shit done.
Brett
Right.
Harpreet Singh
Atlassian has that, actually, but we brought it in, and one of our most popular blogs is around that topic. And what that is we just say in our company that there are no meetings on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Now, it’s not a mandate. It is something that we encourage people, and what it does is those three days, you can just sit down and spend time thinking and really producing quality work, and that quality work pushes you, like, months ahead. That’s something that I’ve brought into the company.
Brett
Nice. Is that the Cal Newport book?
Harpreet Singh
That is the Cal Newport book.
Brett
Nice. Yeah, I love that book. I read that a couple of years ago, but now that you brought it up, I need to go back to that because it’s a fascinating read, and it’s really useful. Yeah.
Harpreet Singh
And for those listeners who want to bring this in, I’ve seen people skimp on this in terms of they’ll say they wanted to get shit done days, and then they’ll keep, like, 2 hours. And my response is, 2 hours is never enough. So if you want to bring in something, at least keep half a day, because it takes, like, a while to get yourself in the context of doing deep work, and then it takes three or 4 hours before that work gets produced. So, like, at least half a day is something that they should start by experimenting. And a lot of your listeners are like founders, so this should be something that you bring across the company. The earlier you bring in, the better it is.
Harpreet Singh
It’s very hard to sort of put this in when somebody walks in and they have, like, I’m going to jump from 30 minutes to 30 minutes. Meeting mindset.
Brett
Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Now, let’s switch gears here and let’s dive deeper into the company. So how we like to start this off is let’s talk about the problem. What problem does Launchable solve?
Harpreet Singh
So we are in the DevOps space, and the problem that we solve is almost all organizations are writing tests, and these tests take a very long time to run. And the longer it takes you to run and sort of go through these tests, the slower is your release cycle. But you really can’t skimp on running tests.
Brett
Right.
Harpreet Singh
So what we do is we have an approach called predictive test selection. It’s a machine learning based approach, and we can look at your code coming in, and we can predict which tests are likely to fail based on your past commits. And by sort of predicting that, we can just run those tests first and we can help devs and QA find errors much earlier without spending the entire cycle of running tests.
Brett
Right.
Harpreet Singh
So we’ve kind of bring in about 40% to 80% reduction in testing times once people bring us in.
Brett
And take me back to 2019. When you were first launched in the company, what was it about this problem specifically that made you say, yes, that’s it, let’s build a company around that, because I’m sure there were probably a lot of problems that you’ve encountered throughout your career that you could have built a company around. What was about this problem specifically.
Harpreet Singh
Right. So we actually thought about a lot of problems in the context of where should we spend our energies on? And a word here about my Co-Founder. My Co-Founder has created a software called Jenkins, which every engineering team out there uses, right. It’s about sort of productionizing your continuous integration and continuous delivery bills. And we both had worked together at Cloudbees, actually building an enterprise company around it.
Brett
Right?
Harpreet Singh
And so as were looking at this, were looking at companies that we’ve helped over the years with DevOps transformations. We came to this place that were taking them far enough, but it wasn’t fast enough for organizations. And his unique insight, this was his idea. His unique insight was like, look, we can connect all these tools and we can create all these processes in your software development lifecycle, but what’s really slowing you down are the tests. And nobody is actually looking at optimizing tests because you know what, everybody’s figured, well, that’s a tax that I need to pay, right? I’m going to run them. And no matter what I need to run them. Nobody’s looking at optimizing that. And it truly was like a think different moment for us.
Harpreet Singh
We were like, the last 20 years, people have been saying, create more tests, run more tests. Nobody is saying like, no, you can actually run less tests to get the same level of confidence. And we think we can do it. And that’s really what made me jump into the company.
Brett
And can you talk to us about the scale that you’re operating at today? So any numbers that you can share just around growth or adoption would be super helpful.
Harpreet Singh
I think we are still in the early stages in terms of growth. We have a small customer base that’s doubled in the last year. What we find is when customers bring us in, they tend to really love us. So we’ve managed to double the sort of footprint with the customers that have come in the last year or two. We’ve got a number of them over to six figures, which generally takes a very long time to get there. And I feel pretty pleased that we’ve been able to get these early customers to like six figures and doubling their footprint. It’s almost like once you press the turbo button on your car and it starts going fast, right, your bills start going faster and you’re getting faster feedback.
Harpreet Singh
It’s very hard for them to sort of now say, I’m going to press this button and slow my engineering down. That doesn’t quite happen.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a Founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we’ve built our service to do. You show up and host, and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. Now back today’s episode. Talk to us about those first early customers. What were those conversations like, and how’d you manage to get them across the line?
Harpreet Singh
Yeah, so the first customer that we actually got was, I would think of them as a unicorn. This was BMW. And as a startup, BMW doesn’t quite work with startups. So we actually found them at a conference where my Co-Founder was speaking. We got talking and we pitched what the problem that were solving? And they said, that’s a problem that they have.
Brett
Right.
Harpreet Singh
So we brought them in as what we call them as product advisor program. It’s sort of our take on the design partner program that vcs talk about the difference being in the design partner. The focus is really about what does the web page look like and what widget are you going to press. And given that we are a data machine learning company, we needed more in terms of understanding the problem space itself. So we call them a product advisor. We brought them on and they used the product for maybe like six months or so. We didn’t ask them for payment. And at some point they felt confident enough to actually say, we are going to roll this out to our developers. And that’s sort of how we won the confidence and then made them a customer.
Brett
Right.
Harpreet Singh
We had a similar play with a number of other early customers, except were using LinkedIn outreaches. We kind of solved this enterprise like problem. And one thing that I failed to mention is one of our sort of insights into the company was like, there’s so much data in your delivery process that we want to kind of use the data to use bring in AI and machine learning techniques to sort of fundamentally rethink the space, right? So what we needed was access to this data. So our early sort of pitches were hard because we are now a startup telling somebody, hey, we need your data, you are a bigger company and that’s why you have this data. Send us this data, and this is what we are building.
Harpreet Singh
So it was a lot of one one conversations where when the pain was high enough, they felt comfortable sending the data to us so that we could learn and kind of go back to them.
Brett
That’s a pretty impressive first customer to land.
Harpreet Singh
Yeah, we think so.
Brett
And what was the journey like to finding product market fit? How early on was it that you started to really feel that way?
Harpreet Singh
I think it was somewhere around the time where we started thinking about series a is like, we felt like we had a good enough set of customers, an early set of customers that told to the fact that there is a problem here. Right. We didn’t quite know whether what the best way of getting these were, but given sort of me and my co-founders, decade and a half or two in the space, we kind of were like, hey, this problem is real. And here’s customers like BMW, and there’s a handful of others that tell us that this is a valid problem.
Brett
Right?
Harpreet Singh
So that’s sort of how we started thinking, well, we may have a product.
Brett
Market fit and what’s the go to market motion look like today?
Harpreet Singh
So today it is what I would call it in a version of inside sales, transactional sales, and we didn’t quite get here right away. Right. Our first sort of emphasis was like, let’s build a product led growth company. Because I was atlassian, I’d kind of seen that up close and personal and seen how that worked. There’s magic in that. Certainly all vcs want you to do that. But having seen that up close and personal, I was, huh, this worked for Scott and Mike atlassian. We should try this. And we tried that out for maybe six, seven months. And then we came to this place. No, the problem that we are solving is truly enterprise. So we started talking to enterprises and went for an enterprise sales motion. And in that journey, we felt like the vps of engineering would immediately latch onto the problem.
Harpreet Singh
They would get what we’re doing, but then the solution would be handed off to somebody on the middle lines to take over. And they didn’t quite have the context as the vps had, and we would flounder. And so we finally came to this place that, oh, the right place to land is somewhere on the middle management, your director of engineering, director of QA, they are close enough to the problem. They see the problem day in and day out. And if they are motivated, they can drive that, because the vps of engineering usually see the big picture very well.
Harpreet Singh
So we’ve kind of gone sort of all the way, and now we are like, okay, went to PLG, went to enterprise, and now we are on this inside sales, I would call sort of middle up or middle down, however you call it, when it comes.
Brett
To your market category, how do you think about the category? Is it software testing or what is the category?
Harpreet Singh
Yeah, that has been a challenge, actually. So the approach that we’ve done is so fundamentally new, right, that we don’t quite fit in any existing categories, which if you are like a product marketer, that is a very exciting thing, because you can say, I’m just creating a new category. But as sales and marketing, it means you have to go and educate the market on this, right? So we don’t quite fit the testing management or the testing standard scenarios. We don’t fit the observability scenarios. So we brought like this layer that sits about all sort of testing frameworks, and that’s very hard to categorize. Now, meanwhile, what’s happened in the last six months, as we’ve been talking to the enterprises that we are helping, we found that, oh, were looking at this from, I would think, like a surgeon, we had like a surgical knife.
Harpreet Singh
We knew, like, if you had long test run times, we can come in and voila, in like two months, you’ll be running faster. That’s a very surgeon way of thinking. But there is a broader problem here, which is how do you deal with issues that come in once you run your tests? Like there’s a whole swath of workflow and things that happen that nobody seems to be solving for. And we’ve decided to take a solid aim for that. And we call that the sort of the bug triaging issue, triaging problem. And that, I think fits in the larger bug category, management space. However, even we don’t quite fit that space too. What I think we fit is like we’re creating a new subcategory in that bug category and helping there. So the category, I think is test failure intelligence and management.
Harpreet Singh
So that’s where I think we’ll soon start talking about. You’re the first person I’m talking to outside the company about that breaking news.
Brett
Here on the podcast then about the new category that’s coming. My question is just around noise. So if we look at the landscape today, there’s a lot of startups that are in this general space trying to sell to engineering leadership teams. So from a marketing perspective, what are you doing to rise above the noise and really capture their attention?
Harpreet Singh
That’s a great question. And the thing is, one of the problems in this space is when you’re selling to devs and quality engineers, they are really suspicious of anything that sounds marketing, right? And I used to be a developer, I transitioned onto the doc side and marketing and so on. And so my marketing side creeps up in my copy and I’m instantly corrected. Within the organization. It’s no, it’s not going to be real. So what we have done is we’ve really focused on creating good quality content, right? So we are creating a bunch of blogs around a number of what we internally call as pillars. And those pillars are what we are sort of going and writing content. And that’s really how we are pushing, getting ourselves differentiated.
Harpreet Singh
The other piece that works for us is me and my Co-Founder are very well known. He much more in the industry than I am. And so anytime he speaks, people listen. So we tend to use him judiciously. So between that and the blogs and then sort of LinkedIn, sort of outreaches, that’s how we kind of tend to get to people to listen to us.
Brett
And when I look at the website today, the messaging is just so dialed in, so launch fearlessly. 80% of your tests are probably pointless. How early on, or how long did it take for you to have messaging so crisp and clear and powerful? I’m guessing that wasn’t day one.
Harpreet Singh
That wasn’t day one. We got there pretty early. But I’ll sound like one of those gurus where I’ll say, like, we knew this well all along, and it’s just been phenomenal. It’s not quite. You’re always sort of playing with words and trying things out and then putting that on your sales copy and pitching that and seeing how that’s evolving. So I feel like it seems very dialed in. But as we look at the broader swath of problems, we have long ways to go, candidly.
Brett
Right.
Harpreet Singh
So that’s how I feel about it.
Brett
As I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised over $12 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout that journey?
Harpreet Singh
Few things. So we happened to be fairly fortunate because were well known in the industry that when we decided, we are going to build something here, we got tons of interest from people that we had worked with in the past. So that’s how we raised our seed. Right? But somewhere, post seed, I started getting so many inbound requests and I started entertaining all of them. And at some point it distracted me away from building the company. And that’s one of the lessons that I took away, is like, just focus on building the product, and don’t worry about the inbound requests or what other vcs are thinking about. You just focus on building the company.
Harpreet Singh
The other thing that I learned, and I’ve given this to a few Founder friends of mine, is like, some founders just view investors as a necessary evil, that they want to just take the money and say, shoe to the guy and say, like, don’t disturb me, right? I know it all. And my experience has been, in contrast, the journey to building a company is not easy. And these investors have seen a number of people kind of go through that, and they do have really good words of wisdom. And so when you’re down and you’re not feeling all that great, they come up with suggestions that are useful and you can bring that in. So that’s something that I brought in as well. But ultimately, it’s your plan.
Harpreet Singh
You execute on them, and unless you’re doing something atrocious, they don’t really come in and tell you what to do or what not to do. At least a good investors. So those are some of my learnings from investors.
Brett
Now, let’s imagine that you were starting the company again today from scratch, based on everything they’ve learned so far. And outside of fundraising, what would be the number one piece of advice that you’d give to yourself?
Harpreet Singh
I would start demand generation much earlier, way earlier than I did. What I did was, as were finding these product advisors, me, and we hired an early salesperson on the team, a fantastic guy. We both were making these LinkedIn outreaches and kind of going through the messaging and reaching out and so on, so forth. We could have scaled this up way better if we had, like, a demand gen person helping us reach out through various channels and build that for us. So that’s my big takeaway. It’s always a challenge. It’s like, oh, my product isn’t quite ready. Should I be putting money in generating demand? And my answer is yes.
Brett
Final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision that you’re building?
Harpreet Singh
So the big picture vision is really this notion of helping people manage test failures. Every software team out there is dealing with this fire hose of test failures, and for some reason, nobody is paying attention to actually helping people deal with that. There’s this massive workflow that happens between devs, qas, engineering managers, QA managers, and all of that is manual. And I feel like with our predictive test selection, we just took like one baby step towards it. And there’s just a bunch of other problems that we can solve to improve the software delivery cycle. That’s our big picture vision for the next three to five years.
Brett
Amazing. Well, we are up on time here, so we will have to wrap before we do. If there’s any founders that are listening in and just want to follow along with your journey as you build and execute on this vision, where should they go?
Harpreet Singh
They can come on to launchableinc.com. That’s the best place to follow us.
Brett
Amazing. I thank you so much for taking the time to chat, talk about what you’re building, and share some of those lessons that you’ve learned along the way. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation, and I know it’s going to be a hit with the audience as well. So thanks so much for taking the time.
Harpreet Singh
Thank you very much.
Brett
All right, keep it dense.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought.
Brett
To you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast cast. And for the latest episode, search for.
Brett
Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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