Tech startup GitPrime drives productivity with easy metrics

GitPrime

Where: Durango / Web: www.gitprime.com  / founded: 2015

Initial Lightbulb:

After meeting at coworking facility Durango Space, Travis Kimmel and Ben Thompson co-founded GitPrime to solve a problem they encountered in software development.

“It was driven by personal need,” Kimmel says. As his engineering team at a previous employer grew from five to 15 people, coordination and communication became increasingly difficult. “You hit this point where you lose the intuitive feel of what everybody’s doing. It’s hard to evaluate how much waste is going on.”

And barriers between the typical corporate silos are especially pronounced when it comes to software development. “There’s this communication gap between engineering and the rest of the world,” Kimmel adds. “We bridge that gap.”

The company spent most of 2015 developing and testing its product before ramping up sales in 2016. Kimmel is now the nine-employee company’s CEO, and Thompson manages customer experience.

The Four Corners area has proved fertile ground for the startup. “Durango is a great place to build a business,” Kimmel says. “There’s a ton of infrastructure here – more than you’d think.”

Regardless, only three of the company’s staffers are based in the area. “We are remote-friendly,” Kimmel says. “We are looking for the best people in the world.”

In a Nutshell:

Salespeople have Salesforce.com, and marketing professionals have Marketo, but managers don’t have the same tools to help streamline software engineers’ workflow.

“As an engineering manager, it’s very hard to tell what’s happening on a day-to-day basis,” Kimmel says, noting that interrupting a software developer can be expensive. “That’s the problem we’re looking to solve.”

GitPrime helps improve productivity with data-driven tools that analyze metrics from the source code to improve productivity. “You can look for a big spike in code churning. That stuff today is completely invisible,” Kimmel says.

“We make that drop-dead easy,” he continues. “With 10 to 15 minutes at the beginning of the day, you get totally on top of it.”

He points to SolarCity, a leading provider of residential solar power, improving what he calls “operational visibility” with GitPrime. The team of engineering managers uses GitPrime’s tools to make more than 25 decisions a week as its development staff continues to grow at a rapid clip.

GitPrime is priced at $25 per contributor per month.

The Market:

GitPrime clients are startups to large enterprises, and the market continues to grow. “Within four years, there will be 29 million developers,” Kimmel says.

Most any development team that’s scaling is a potential customer, he adds, noting that the solution is particularly attractive to teams spread across multiple time zones. “Remote teams really love GitPrime.”

Financing:

GitPrime has been financed to date by “industry angels” as well as California VC firm Data Collective and tech accelerator Y Combinator. Kimmel says he doesn’t plan on pursuing additional outside financing anytime soon. “We’re set for a little while. We’re like an old-school business – we’re trying to make money.”