Blackfire.io

A quick history

From its inception in 2014 to its acquisition and integration in 2022, I’ve had the chance to support the designing, building, shipping, and marketing of the most famous Profiler in the PHP market.

Better, after spinning off in 2018 from SensioLabs where it incubated, I supported Fabien Potencier (creator of Symfony) in rationalizing the business, capturing the essence of our vision, and setting a path to building the next generation of Observability tools. We also started penetrating new markets, including Python, Go, and Ruby.

Releasing our new Application Performance Monitoring feature in March 2021 opened tremendous new opportunities, one of which we pursued: becoming part of Platform.sh. Serving all customers, even those hosting on all hosting providers, we established a vision for the years to come, where Observability tools have a crucial role in helping companies reduce their IT carbon footprint.

The pitch

53% of users abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load, according to Google. But you can’t optimize what you can’t measure. Blackfire gives developers all the tools they need to measure, understand and optimize how their code consumes server resources. From development, to testing pipeline and production, it provides actionable insights with a deep comprehension of the underlying technology, from a Magento shop to a Drupal, Django, WordPress, or vanilla Symfony site.

Some of my contributions

• Building the product vision;
• Building the various iterations of the pricing model (self-service, direct and indirect sales);
• Building and maintaining the roadmap to maximize growth, ARR, and ARPA, and minimize churn;
• Designing the user experience;
• Writing specifications (product briefs, stories, detailed specs when needed);
• Day-to-day collaboration with engineering for the implementation and testing phase;
• Marketing (product launches, written and video content, online and in-person events, sales team training, documentation maintenance,…);
• Strategic partnerships management (marketing, business, sales, and technology);
• Business development and strategic accounts management;
• Team management and recruitment (DevRel, Product Managers, Marketers).

Special thanks to Fabien Potencier, Romain Neutron, Luc Vieillecazes, Jérôme Vielledent, and Alexandre Salomé for all that we accomplished together.

Check out Blackfire’s Youtube channel for videos I created, and Blackfire’s blog for articles I wrote.