Bugsnag Business with James Smith

Crash monitoring emerged as a software category over the last decade.

Crash monitoring software allows developers to understand when their applications are crashing on client devices. For example, we have an app for Software Engineering Daily that people download on Android or iOS. Users download the app to their smartphone. When the user is playing an episode, and the app crashes, the details of the crash are sent to a server that collects all of these crash reports.

Crash reports allow a company to understand where their application is breaking on client devices. This is important, since there are so many client surfaces to test, from iOS to Android to browsers.

As a business, crash monitoring is a category that has some similarities to log management. There are lots of companies that offer crash monitoring. At first glance, it seems like a simple problem to solve. It seems like a market without winner-take-all or winner-take-most dynamics. But at scale, crash monitoring becomes a deeply complex engineering problem. From indexing to database choices to complex distributed systems tradeoffs, crash monitoring is not a simple business, and it promises to provide an extremely good business for the few companies who are able to out-execute the crowded market.

James Smith is the CEO of Bugsnag, a company that makes crash monitoring and application stability tools. James returns to the show to discuss the growth-stage engineering challenges of error monitoring, and the business opportunities that come with them.

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Transcript

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