Devver
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Devver was a Boulder, Colorado startup founded in 2008 by Ben Brinckerhoff and Dan Mayer, a graduate of TechStars' 2008 program. It turned desktop developer tools into cloud-based services, initially for Ruby on Rails: distributed cloud test runs spread across multiple servers that ran about 75% faster than local test suites, priced at $100 per month per user. Its flagship product Caliper gave Ruby on Rails developers quality metrics for their code, flagging code duplication, complex code and code smells. The company raised $620,000 in total from TechStars, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and David Cohen.
02 / Devver FAILURE REASONS
Failure factors supported by the current evidence
Co-founder Ben Brinckerhoff's 26 Apr 2010 post-mortem: Devver over-focused on engineering versus customer development/MVP; Caliper's market was too small and price point too low to sustain the company (paired with 19 Apr shutdown post: services would not generate the revenue necessary to sustain and grow).
Founders said they should have focused more on customer development and finding an MVP rather than going heads-down on engineering.
After talking to customers they realized Caliper's market was too small and the price point too low to sustain the company.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Product or service closed
Founders Ben & Dan, Devver Blog 19 Apr 2010: Devver and Caliper shutting down Friday 30 Apr 2010 because services would not generate revenue needed to sustain and grow.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
In 2008, Ben Brinckerhoff and Dan Mayer founded Devver in Boulder, Colorado, and joined TechStars' 2008 program. Devver turned developer desktop tools into cloud services, starting with distributed cloud test runs for Ruby on Rails and the Caliper code-quality tool. The company raised $620,000 from TechStars, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and David Cohen.
- 02
In early 2010, Devver announced it would shut down after nearly two years: it could not generate sufficient revenue to sustain and grow. No reliable loss figure was disclosed, so no loss amount is recorded.