The Side Project That Wouldn’t Die: How Sleuth Evolved from Internal Tool to Venture-Backed Startup
Sometimes the most compelling startup ideas are the ones you can’t shake. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Sleuth CEO Dylan Etkin shared the persistent journey of how an internal tool at Atlassian grew into a venture-backed company reshaping engineering efficiency.
The Birth of an Idea
The seed for Sleuth was planted during Dylan’s time leading BitBucket at Atlassian. “When I started running that team, I think there was like seven of us. By the time I finished, there was something like 40,” he recalls. This rapid growth exposed a critical gap in their tooling.
“It kind of struck me like a lightning bolt that deploy, which is this thing that at the time, we treated almost like as a second class citizen, was the most important thing,” Dylan explains. “That was when all of this hard work that a developer had done and even, like, design had done, product had done to bring into life hit customers, which is the moment when it actually matters.”
The First Attempt
This insight led Dylan to start building a solution, initially called Deploy Hub, around 2015. “I work at the Jira company, and we’re building BitBucket, which is a premier source code hosting tool. Certainly I should be able to get access to some of this information,” he recalls thinking at the time.
The Idea That Wouldn’t Go Away
Even after leaving and returning to Atlassian through an acquisition, the idea persisted. “I gave the idea and the opportunity, a lot of opportunity, to just die on the vine and it refused,” Dylan shares. “Every time I would talk to somebody about it, I’d get super animated and interested.”
This persistence proved crucial. “The market grew into the idea more,” Dylan notes. “And so as I sort of started thinking about what I would do next, I just couldn’t, in good faith, not do Sleuth, bring it into life.”
From Internal Tool to Market Product
When Sleuth officially launched, they faced the classic challenge of turning an internal tool into a market-ready product. “We started with this thing that we’re calling deployment tracking, and it’s still at the core of what we do. But it was not the value that organizations are looking for,” Dylan reveals.
The breakthrough came when they aligned with emerging industry standards. “The Dora metrics have really allowed us to take the real information and glean some sense of usefulness out of them,” Dylan explains. “And so a market has grown up around that.”
Building for Scale
Today, Sleuth has evolved far beyond its origins as a deployment tracking tool. “We help teams understand how efficient their engineering organizations are, and we’re providing them the tools in order to get better,” Dylan explains. The company now envisions becoming “Salesforce for engineering,” aiming to democratize engineering efficiency practices.
Key Lessons for Founders
- Pay attention to persistent problems that won’t go away
- Look for signs that the market is evolving toward your solution
- Be willing to evolve beyond your initial internal use case
- Align with emerging industry standards
- Build toward a larger vision that can scale
For technical founders considering whether to turn their internal tools into products, Sleuth’s journey offers valuable guidance. The key isn’t just solving an internal problem well – it’s recognizing when that solution could serve a broader market need, and being willing to evolve the product beyond its original scope.
Sometimes the best startup ideas are the ones that refuse to die, no matter how many times you try to shelve them. The trick is recognizing when your internal solution could be the foundation for something much bigger.