Hannes Lenke
Appearances
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
Another thing that we're continuing to do is I'm interviewing every candidate still, really try to understand, okay, is that candidate a culture fit? Is he hungry? Does he want to win, et cetera? Is there enough valuation? And in the end, to summarize that, will that person up-level us? Will that help us? Will that help the existing team, et cetera?
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
So we're spending a lot of time in really finding the right people there. And I think we have done a really great job so far.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
To be honest with you, we're constantly fighting scalability, right? And the more we grow, we are fighting scalability. Obviously, we're trying to think about how to scale our architecture moving forward. But then in the end, customers are surprising us, right? So customers coming with hundreds of users are then surprising us about certain edge cases.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
So I think about it in a way that we make it work, make it right, make it fast, make it scalable in the end. Checkly is built to scale right now, but the truth is that we're constantly working on scaling these services and helping our customers pretty much to use Checkly with a larger workload and rethinking certain features constantly.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
Because in the end, starting a startup, you can never really plan for the scale that will hit you. You might need to optimize for a certain amount of workload. You might need to optimize for hundreds of users, etc. And it's really hard to implement any product in a scalable way from the start. There's always time set aside to help services scale even better.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
First of all, the team. Really building a company with such a great team, seeing the individuals in our team grow is really amazing, right? Seeing them over years constantly growing because the company is constantly changing. But also having lots of customers, having a thousand customers that are paying you is a great milestone to achieve, to be honest.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
And as a European founder, I also have to say that us being able to open an office in New York, which we did this summer, is a great achievement as well. Last but not least, and maybe even more important here, is we call it what we are doing, monitoring as code. I said that earlier. And this is a category now. So our competition is talking about monitoring as code as well.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
Even Gartner and customers are coming to us because they want to adopt monitoring as code. That's really an achievement I'm very proud of.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
We had this vision of monitoring as code in mind from the start, right? And we knew that this is how we enable developers in the end at scale to monitor their products. But Tracty got early traction, right? So we had paying customers that came to us without even supporting monitoring as code. We started to solve their problems for four months without even investing time into our vision.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
After almost two years, actually, We took a step back thinking about, okay, that's cool that we're having customers, that we're having paying customers, but what is the bigger problem that we actually want to solve? So we want to bring monitoring to developers. How can we do that? And we took that step back and really thought about, okay, we need to invest time into monitoring this code.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
So we need to set time aside really to work on our vision. And that's what we did. The first iteration wasn't great, to be honest. No one started using it. We kept iterating and it took us a whole year to get a monitoring as code version out to the market, a command line interface that enables you to do all these things.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
In the end, I think our mistake was to not pushing the vision hard enough, not implementing fast enough, kind of what we had in mind to implement because lots of customers came to us without even supporting that vision.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
So what's our mission, right? So in the end, we help the developers to detect and resolve issues 10x faster. I'm waking you up in the middle of the night, tell you that your service is down, and that's pretty much it, right? I wake you up and then you have a look.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
What we want to achieve is we want to wake you up, but also right at that split second, tell you where the problem actually comes from, help you to remediate the issue faster. And that's pretty much the next checklist product evolution that we're working on right now. Helping you to understand, okay, there's a problem that's coming from my slow database.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
We had this vision of Monitoring as Code in mind from the start, but Tracti got early traction, right? So we had paying customers that came to us without even supporting Monitoring as Code. We started to solve their problems for four months without even investing time into our vision.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
I have to look at this in the middle of the night to actually resolve the incident faster. The other piece is we have customers around the world, lots of customers coming from the U.S. right now, and we're expanding the team there. So we're investing lots of energy there to help the customers on the ground.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
I don't have an ideal, to be honest, right? So there's not that one famous person that I look up to, but I'm influenced by my parents who were incredible, hardworking, and I'm influenced by their values, I would say, right? So I still have that in mind.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
And then I really admire people that are showing up consistently, that are putting the hard work in, you know, trying to get better every day, right? Maybe just a tiny bit and grow with the journey. And that's what I look up for, up to. Could be a team member, but this could also be another founder. That influences me on a daily basis.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
There's a saying that startups are a marathon, and I truly believe that. What else influences me is pretty much athletes putting their hard work in to succeed over time. I really enjoy watching world-class runners and athletes, and it really inspires me how much work they put in to, in the end, win a certain race.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
So first of all, it's all about getting started, right? So I'm talking to lots of potential founders, et cetera, and lots of people always have ideas. I think you gotta get started in the end. This is the most important step, building a startup. Second piece is, and I just mentioned it, it's a marathon. Everything takes time and it takes sometimes longer than you or I would think, right?
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
That's true for lots of businesses. And we always hear these success stories of a startup achieving 100 million ARR in two years, etc. That's the exception to the rule, right? So it really takes time. It takes a lot of effort. And the third piece is, especially early, if you want to do something remarkable, then most people will not believe in your vision. They will just not believe in it.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
And this is normal. You have to keep executing and maybe convince some early adopters, really forward-thinking people. 99% of your potential future users might not even believe that this is a problem that they need to solve. In the end, maybe I could summarize it as it's hard work, right? And then it's all about consistency and staying committed to the mission.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
After almost two years, actually, we took a step back thinking about, okay, that's cool that we're having customers, that we're having paying customers, but what is the bigger problem that we actually want to solve? And really thought about, okay, we need to invest time into monitoring this code. And that's what we did. The first iteration wasn't great, to be honest. My name is Hannes Lenke.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
We are checking we help companies to keep their websites, services, APIs reliable and fast and actually also error-free, right? So we ensure that a website works from an end-user perspective. We believe that developers should understand how the services that they're building are doing on production and they should get paged about issues quickly.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
We're applying pretty much testing in production, so we're helping our customers to develop automated test scripts and run them against their production system continuously. And there's a word for it, which is synthetic monitoring. That's what we do.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
We call it even more monitoring as code because essentially we allow our customers to use real code from within their code repositories and upload them to our monitoring platform where our CLI or other mechanisms like Terraform, et cetera, and then run these tests from 20 different data centers worldwide to really ensure that their applications APIs and services are running like a charm.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
I founded one startup in 2010 in testing, mobile testing, and back then we helped test automation people and test automation engineers to ensure that their mobile apps are working on production and on staging. We sold that business to Source Labs end of 2016.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
And what we've seen there, what I've seen there is lots of companies that are developing end-to-end tests are using these tests to really understand how their applications are doing from production, right? So really making sure that they capture problems there. Realizing that in 2019, I thought, okay, the world is changing towards cross-functional teams, DevOps teams, et cetera.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
On the other side, you already have companies realizing what we do in production monitoring doesn't fit our processes. We need to use end-to-end tests to really understand if our website, APIs, etc. are up or down. I figured, okay, we need a new tool that is really made for developers, made for that use case, because there wasn't a tool back then.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
I tried to find solutions on the internet that are really solving that kind of problem. I recognized that there was a Dutch guy living in Berlin, like two kilometers away from me, creating a side project called Checkly back then. Tim became a co-founder in 2020.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
Long story short, we took that side project, made it a real company beginning of 2020, and since then grew to thousands of users, thousand paying customers, etc.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
Tim, my co-founder, he started to write the first code in 2018, end of 2018, and really built Checkly in public. He built it as an indie hacker project or project aimed to help indie hackers to really to understand how their applications are doing and then started to talk about it, right? He started to talk about numbers, so revenue numbers, etc.,
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
but also about the technology that he applied to develop Checkneon, right? And the first version was a very simple version posted on Heroku, right? So it was a Postgres DB. It was a very simple UI and enabled you to monitor APIs. and later on also UIs, so websites, with a framework back then called Puppeteer.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
Tim was very vocal on Twitter about what he did and that attracted the first users really. And then we started beginning of 2020 to iterate very quickly on the user feedback that we got. and adding more features, adding a framework that is called Playwright for test automation, which is now our prime framework that we're using to enable our users really to create tests.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
Building an MVP never stops, right? So you're building new features, etc. And what we try to achieve is always speed. Release features to customers fast and get their feedback really fast, right? So we always try to identify who's a potential early adopter of these features. What is the actual core problem that they want to solve? And can we make trade-offs there?
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
Are there a set of users that want to solve one problem with a subset of the whole feature set that we could potentially build? And once we understand that, we're going to release a minimal version of this feature set to users in an RFR with a feature flag. Then we're interviewing these users, trying to understand, okay, is that a potential fit for what they really need? Or is it maybe not?
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
Do we need to go back to the drawing board? And this iteration can happen, actually, and should happen in four weeks, sometimes eight weeks. So that we really fast try to understand, okay, is that what we're building here solving actual customer problems or maybe not.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
Building out your roadmap is really hard because you constantly have to make trade-offs. Essentially, there are four lists or voices that are influencing the roadmap. First of all, what are customers asking for? We have a public roadmap for this where you can upvote and hand in special feature requests.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
So we're constantly asking our customers to look at their public roadmap and if they require a certain feature, please submit it there. The second piece here is since we grew a lot and have quite some customers and have responsible salespeople for it, so what are our salespeople asking for? What are they hearing from customers, listening to customers?
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
I also try to be part of the customer conversations like daily to really understand, okay, what are my existing customers that are maybe using us on a larger volume really asking for, right? So that's the second piece of influence on our roadmap. There's another piece, which is what are our engineers asking for? Is there technical depth that we need to address?
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
Are there things that we really should improve that our customers are not even not recognizing yet, but we might need to work on some scaling, etc. ? Last but not least, a very important piece here is, what is our vision? Where do we want to go? And we have a list of things that we want to accomplish, and we will talk about that later in the future. So how do we carve out time for that?
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
So essentially, we have these four items. Again, customers, then what are our salespeople telling us? What are our engineers telling us? And then what is our vision? We try to assign 25% of our teams to these four lists.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
As a startup, we want to have the best people in the world working for us. Checkly is a remote-first company, so we have right now 45 people in 14 countries worldwide. The early team members, mostly people that we knew from before. We were lucky enough so that they joined an early stage company even though they were very senior.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
And now it's all about finding people that are having a similar mindset, that are hungry for success, that want to win. They have the motivation pretty much to help us move Checkly forward and bring Checkly to even more users worldwide. First of all, we are very transparent, also in hiring. So we have a hiring playbook, which is public. It's a Notion page.
Code Story
S10 E15: Hannes Lenke, Checkly
We're publicly talking about our salary ranges. So you can look that up. Actually, we have a salary calculator. But we are also internally very transparent, right? So we're sharing KPIs, company KPIs, transparently, talk about problems very transparently. Want to find people that are picking this up and solving the problems for us, right?