It has been close to a year now that I've incorporated my new company, Mergify. I've been busy, and I barely wrote anything about it so far. Now is an excellent time to take a break and reflect a bit on what happened during those last 12 months.

What problem does Mergify solve?

Mergify is a powerful automation engine for GitHub pull requests. It allows you to automate everything — and especially merging. You write rules, and it handles the rest.

For example, let's say you want your pull request to be merged, e.g., once your CI passes and the pull request has been approved. You just write such a rule, and our engine merges the pull request as soon as it's ready.

We also deal with more advanced use cases. For instance, we provide a merge queue so your pull requests are merged serially and tested by your CI one after another — avoiding any regression in your code.

Our goal is to make pull request management and automation easy. You can use your bot to trigger a rebase of your pull requests, or a backport to a different branch, just with a single comment.

A New Adventure

Mergify is the first company that I ever started. I did run some personal businesses before, created non-profit organizations, built FOSS projects — but I never created a company from scratch, even less with an associate.

Indeed, I've chosen to build the company with my old friend Mehdi. We've known each others for 7 years now, and have worked together all that time on different open-source projects. Having worked with each other for so long has probably been a critical factor in the success of our venture so far.

I had little experience sharing the founding seats with someone, and tons of reading seemed to indicate that it would be a tough ride. Picking the right business partner(s) can be a hard task. Luckily, after working so much time together, Mehdi and I both know our strengths and weaknesses well enough to be able to circumvent them. 😅

On the other hand, we both have similar backgrounds as software engineers. That does not help to cover all the hats you need to wear when building a company. Over time, we found arrangements to cover most of those equally between us.

We don't have any magical advice to give on this. As in every relationship, communication is the key and the #1 factor of success.

Getting Users

I don't know if we got lucky, but we got users and customers pretty early. We used a few cooperative projects as guinea pigs first, and they were brave enough to try our service and give us feedback. No repository has been harmed during this first phase!

Then, as soon as we managed to get our application on the GitHub Marketplace, we saw a steady number of users coming to us.

This has been fantastic as it allowed us to get feedback rapidly. We set up a form asking users for feedback after they used Mergify for a couple of weeks. What we hear is that users were happy, that the documentation was confusing and that some features were buggy or missing. We planned all of those ideas as our future work in our roadmap, using the principles we described a few months ago.

We tried various strategies to get new users, but so far, organic growth has been our #1 way of onboarding new users. Like many small startups out there, we're not that good at marketing and executing strategies.

We provide our service for free for open-source projects We are now powering many organizations, such as Mozilla, Amazon Web Services, Ceph and Fedora.

Working with GitHub

Working with GitHub has been… complicated. When you build an application for a marketplace, your business is entirely dependent on the platform you develop for — both in terms of features and quality of service.

In our case, we hit quite many bugs with GitHub. Their support has mostly been fast to answer, but some significant issues are still opened months later. The truth is that the GitHub API could deserve more love and care from GitHub. For example, their GraphQL API is a work in progress for years and miss out many essential features.

We dealt and still deal with all those issues. It obviously impacts our operations and decreases our overall velocity. We regularly have to find new ways to sidestep GitHub limitations.

You have no idea how we wished for GitHub to be open-source. The idea of not having access to their code and understand how it works is so frustrating that we publish our engine as an open-source project. That allows all of our users to see how it works and even propose enhancements.

Automate all the way

We're a tiny startup, and we decided to bootstrap our company. We never took any funding. From the beginning, it has been clear to us that we had to think and act like we had no resources. We're built around a scarcity mindset. Every decision we make is based on the assumption that we basically are very limited in terms of money and time.

We basically act like any wrong choice we do could (virtually) kill the company. We only do what is essential, we ship fast, and we automate everything.

For example, we have built our whole operation about CI/CD systems, and pushing any new fix or feature in production is done in a matter of minutes. It's not uncommon for us to push a fix from our phone, just by reviewing some code or editing a file.

Growth

We're extremely happy with our steady growth and more users using our service. We now manage close to 30k repositories and merge 15k pull requests per month for our users.

That's a lot of mouse clicks saved!

If you want to try Mergify yourself, it's a single click log-in using your GitHub account. Check it out!