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From Paranoid Developer to Platform Builder: How Technical Intuition Shaped Steadybit’s Go-to-Market Journey

Most startup origin stories begin with a founder’s grand vision. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Benjamin Wilms, founder and CEO of Steadybit, shared how healthy paranoia and technical intuition led to building a chaos engineering platform that now serves enterprise giants like Salesforce.

The journey began not with market research or pitch decks, but with Benjamin’s inherent skepticism as a developer. “I’m a paranoid guy. I don’t trust normally everything at the first look,” he explains, describing his reaction when joining a project near its first release. This engineering-first mindset would later prove crucial in shaping Steadybit’s go-to-market approach.

What’s particularly instructive about Benjamin’s story is how he leveraged his company’s innovation culture to validate his technical intuition. Using his employer’s “plus one model” – similar to Google’s 20% time – he began exploring chaos engineering principles during his allocated innovation time. This experimental phase allowed him to test his assumptions about system reliability without the pressure of immediate commercialization.

The transition from concept to company came through an unexpected channel. Rather than pursuing venture capital or accelerators, Benjamin’s work caught the attention of his then-boss, the founder of Instana (later acquired by IBM). “Benjamin, I was able to see what you have achieved in the last twelve months. You should do more. Here’s some money. I will support you with my network. You should create your own company,” Benjamin recalls being told.

This organic validation from a successful founder provided more than capital – it offered proof that his technical solution addressed a real market need. The initial funding came with a six-month runway, forcing Benjamin to take a product-first approach rather than spending time on elaborate go-to-market plans.

The strategy paid off when their first customer came from the United States, demonstrating international market potential before they’d even formalized their GTM strategy. This early traction caught the attention of investors, leading to an unexpected call: “On a Tuesday my phone ringed and there was a number from New York and I don’t have any friends in New York… it was like Elliot from Ballstudd.”

What’s particularly noteworthy about Steadybit’s early GTM decisions is their disciplined approach to customer selection. Benjamin shares a pivotal moment when they had to decide whether to pursue a large enterprise customer: “There was a big company knocking on our door… But it was like, okay, now I’m dealing an enterprise procurement process and we are just six people at this point in time.”

This decision reflects a sophisticated understanding that “revenue is not like your biggest value you can get from customers. There’s even more feedback, like working with them very closely on your product to validate new features you have in mind.” This insight – prioritizing product-market fit over immediate revenue – has shaped their approach to customer relationships.

Looking ahead, Steadybit’s GTM strategy focuses on democratizing chaos engineering. “We don’t would like to be an expert only tool. We would like to be a tool where people without any knowledge about chaos engineering or complex systems are able to start easily save and to get value out of it as fast as possible,” Benjamin explains. This vision of making complex technical solutions accessible to a broader market suggests a path to scaling beyond their current enterprise success.

The key lesson for technical founders isn’t about chaos engineering specifically, but rather about letting technical expertise drive go-to-market strategy. Benjamin’s journey demonstrates how deep domain knowledge, combined with careful customer selection and a focus on product validation, can create a more sustainable path to market than traditional top-down GTM approaches.