The Story of Steadybit: How Developer Paranoia Sparked a Chaos Engineering Revolution

Sometimes the best startups begin with healthy skepticism rather than grand ambition. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Benjamin Wilms shared how his “paranoid” approach to software development led to founding Steadybit, a company that’s reshaping how enterprises test system reliability.

The Spark of Paranoia

Twenty years into his software development career, Benjamin found himself in a situation familiar to many developers – joining a project just before its first release. But unlike many who might have gone along with the status quo, his inherent skepticism kicked in. “I’m a paranoid guy. I don’t trust normally everything at the first look,” Benjamin explains, recalling his initial assessment of the project’s readiness for production.

What he saw concerned him: a focus on happy-path testing that didn’t reflect real-world conditions. “Production hates you. Production would like to kill you,” Benjamin notes, capturing the harsh reality that many developers learn the hard way. This observation would become the foundation for Steadybit’s approach to chaos engineering.

From Skepticism to Solution

Rather than simply raising concerns, Benjamin took advantage of his employer’s innovation policy – similar to Google’s famous 20% time – to explore solutions. “I was able to spend one day a week… to train yourself, teach yourself, get more experience and specific development skills,” he recalls. This time became crucial for exploring chaos engineering principles and developing practical solutions.

The turning point came when he convinced his team to let him inject failure scenarios during their load testing. The results validated his concerns – the system couldn’t handle the load under realistic conditions. This practical demonstration of chaos engineering’s value led to opportunities to share his approach through conference talks and training sessions at major companies.

The Unexpected Push to Entrepreneurship

The path from developer to founder wasn’t planned. Benjamin’s work caught the attention of his employer, Merko Novakovich, 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 unexpected push into entrepreneurship came with both opportunity and pressure – six months of runway to prove the concept. The team took a product-first approach, focusing on delivering value rather than perfect market positioning.

Early Validation and Growth

The strategy paid off when their first customer came from the United States, providing crucial validation of their international market potential. This early success attracted investor attention in an equally unexpected way: “On a Tuesday my phone ringed and there was a number from New York and I don’t have any friends in New York,” Benjamin shares, describing the call that led to their seed funding.

Today, Steadybit serves major enterprises like Salesforce, helping them ensure their systems remain reliable under real-world conditions. Their customer base includes companies where system reliability directly impacts revenue and customer satisfaction, particularly those operating e-commerce platforms and critical business services.

The Future of Reliability Testing

Looking ahead, Steadybit’s vision extends beyond being a specialized tool for experts. “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 democratization of chaos engineering reflects a broader trend in enterprise software – making powerful technical solutions accessible to wider audiences while maintaining their sophisticated capabilities. By focusing on usability and integration with existing tools and workflows, Steadybit aims to make system reliability testing a standard practice rather than a specialized discipline.

For Benjamin, this journey from paranoid developer to founder represents more than just building a successful company – it’s about fundamentally changing how organizations approach system reliability in an increasingly complex technical landscape.