Before Gleap, there was BugBattle.
BugBattle was our first attempt at solving a problem we knew painfully well from agency work: bug reports that were too vague to act on. A client would write “the app is broken,” and our team would spend the next hour asking for browser details, screenshots, steps to reproduce, account state, and anything else that could explain what actually happened.
That frustration became the starting point for what is now Gleap’s in-app bug reporting workflow.
The problem was already in front of us
The first advantage we had was not a clever go-to-market strategy. It was proximity.
We were building software for clients, and the same issue appeared again and again. Reports arrived without context. Developers could not reproduce them. Clients felt ignored because fixes took too long. Everyone lost time.
So we built BugBattle to capture the missing context automatically. A user could report a bug from inside the app, and the report included the details a developer needed to start investigating.
It was not a broad platform yet. It was a focused tool for a problem we understood personally.
Why the first customers said yes
When we showed BugBattle to agencies around us, the pitch did not require much education. They had the same problem.
That mattered. Our first customers did not buy because our website was polished or our sales process was mature. They bought because the pain was obvious, and the product showed a practical way out of it.
The first 10 customers came mostly through word of mouth. People in our network saw us using BugBattle, heard about it from nearby teams, or recognized the workflow from their own client projects.
Early customer acquisition felt almost natural, which was exciting and slightly misleading.
What early word of mouth taught us
Word of mouth is powerful, but it is not magic.
It worked early because the market around us was small, connected, and familiar with the problem. Agencies talk to other agencies. Developers recognize a workflow improvement quickly when it saves them from repetitive detective work.
But that kind of traction can hide the next challenge. Getting customers who already know you is different from reaching people who have never heard of you, do not know your story, and need to trust the product from the outside.
That became one of the lessons we carried into the next stage, which we wrote about in our post on reaching $10K MRR.
The lessons from our first 10 customers
The first lesson was to solve something real. If the pain is specific, the first conversations are much easier because customers can finish your sentences.
The second lesson was to build from a workflow, not an abstract idea. BugBattle was useful because it fit into the moment where a user encountered a bug and a developer needed context.
The third lesson was that passion helps, but it does not replace distribution. We cared deeply about the problem, and that helped us keep going. But caring did not automatically create a repeatable growth engine.
The fourth lesson was to keep listening after the first yes. Early customers gave us ideas that later influenced broader feedback and communication features, including live chat and feature request management.
The part that was harder than expected
Getting the first 10 customers felt like validation. It was.
But it was not proof that the company would scale. We still had to learn marketing, onboarding, positioning, pricing, and how to explain the product to people outside our immediate circle.
That was the real beginning of the journey. The first 10 customers told us we were solving a real problem. The next challenge was learning how to reach the people who had that problem but did not know us yet.