Lean Design Founder Talks – Episode 1: Ben Curtis of Honeybadger.io

Summary

Ben Curtis is Co-founder of Honeybadger.io, a lean team of four building an exception monitoring service for web developers, and taking on entities like Sentry and Bugsnag with teams that are 20-50x larger than they are. In this episode, we talk about the unique things they’ve done to set their brand apart while having fun in the process.

Links

• Ben on Bluesky
• LinkedIn
• RailsConf 2025

Website: honeybadger.io
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/honeybadger-i
Honeybadger on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/honeybadger.io
Honeybadger’s Podcast: Founder Quest Podcast
RailsConf 2025: https://railsconf.org/speakers/

Transcript

Kari: Ben. Thank you for meeting with me today. Wanted to hear a little bit about you, what you’re working on, and we’ll dive into a few [00:01:00] questions.

Ben: I’m Ben, I’m one of the co-founders of Honey badger.io. We are a service for web developers who want to monitor their applications and production, so we provide exception monitoring and uptime and cron monitoring as well.

Um, recently released some performance monitoring features. Allow our developers to, you know, capture structured logs and to see what events are happening in their apps as well. Basically, honey Badger is a platform to, you know, get all the health information about your app when it’s in production. We want, uh, developers to have happy customers and help ’em do that.

Kari: Awesome. So you’ve been in business since 2012, is that right? It’s about 13 years.

Ben: Yeah. Launched in the summer of 2012. Yeah.

Kari: Yeah. Something’s been working really well for you. What is the main thing that you’ve attributed your success to?

Ben: We started as a response to a tool that we were using that wasn’t quite meeting our expectations.

Uh, and we felt like, you know, we could build a product that did the same thing but, you know, make it work better. And not just the product, but also the customer [00:02:00] service. Like we felt like for developers who were having a bad day, you know, with, uh, errors happening, the application. If they’re having problems with the arrow tracking application too, that’s, that’s not a good thing for them.

We felt like, you know, we can make developers have a happier life if we provided an awesome tool and awesome service. And so I think that’s why I’ve been around to stick around that long, uh, that we, you know, not only is a great product, but it’s also a great service that our customers love us, love us for, and they, they keep coming back for more.

Kari: Definitely some, some big pillars that you called out there, so customer support, how you’re thinking about the product and that you can relate to your users. Those, those three components seem to be pieces that are not just your product itself, but also how you think about your company and, and how that shaped what you build.

Ben: mm-hmm.

Kari: So it’s the relational side of things that, that have really helped you there. When we first met, you mentioned that you were trying to create a brand that really felt like you as a company. Can you describe that a little bit more? At what point did you sens the need to focus on that as you were [00:03:00] entering this market?

Ben: Yeah, it definitely wasn’t something that I set out to do initially. Uh, you know, I think when I started out, uh, down, down the road of learning about brand and what it means to a company, I really thought about brand as I. You know, the pictures or the colors or the design, uh, or, you know, the marketing materials, those kinds of things, to me is what a brand was.

And over time kind of learned that those are like the artifacts of what your brand is. They aren’t your brand, but they do reflect what your brand is. And it really came about accidentally because of the way we, we named the business. So, you know, honey Badger was named after Honey Badger because, uh, it was just a lark actually.

Uh, one day we, when Starr and I, who co-founded the business, we were casting about for what the, what name we could use as the, the secret project name. ’cause we did Honey Badger, we built it on the side while we were employed. And, uh, our, our boss at the time had just recently been introduced to the Honey Badger video with, uh, Randall, who narrates it, uh, talking about the [00:04:00] honey badger and how he takes on all of his nemesis, like the Cobra and so on.

And it’s a funny YouTube video and we thought, uh, that’s a good code name for our project while we’re working on it. And, uh, then eventually we got to a point where we were ready to launch and we decided we couldn’t come up with a better name. We went through a bunch of iterations, but nothing just felt, uh, as good as Honey Badger did.

And so we, we basically decided to go all in on that and just kind of make it an irreverent, kind of an, you know, a funny and, hopefully not flippant because it is kind of a serious problem when you do with exceptions. But we did want to be lighthearted about it and we took all of that from how we got our name, you know, and what that was ’cause it really was just kind of a lighthearted take on the honey badger and. That eventually kind of transitioned, transformed into our brand became like that’s who we wanted to be. I remember at a conference, I was talking to someone about Honeybadger, and they’re like, yeah, but, but Honeybadger doesn’t give a damn.

So like, aren’t you gonna like fall down and not take care of my stuff? And I just on the spot made up this story about, oh, that was actually a. [00:05:00] Smear campaign against the honey badger. He really does care. You know? Uh, and I just, I kind of just fell into that, like personalizing who we are and, and how we do really care about our customers and, uh, we do wanna have them have a better day.

And that just kind of snowballed from there. And we, everything that we did since then is really about, okay, how can we have fun with what we’re doing? At the same time, providing awesome service and, uh, helping communicate to our customers that we really do care about them and about their problems. And that informs like.

You know, the design that we took and the colors that we chose, and again, all those things that I thought were brand, uh, that that decision did actually lead into how did we do our advertising and what kind of spots did we do on podcasts and, and that sort of thing. So, again, it wasn’t really a, a master plan, but, uh, once, once we realized that that was something that we could latch onto, we, we definitely did because we enjoyed having a good time and, you know, having the humor in our business.

And, we thought, Hey, why not double down on that?

Kari: That’s, that’s amazing. I love that story. You said that it just kind of, [00:06:00] materialized in front of you, but there was this learning curve that you had around what is a brand and what are just artifacts, as you put it? What was it that helped you pinpoint that fact? Was it something you read or just the experience that you were just describing of seeing how it kind of transformed it from just being a name and something fun to something that you could actually tell a whole story around.

Ben: Yeah, it really was, uh, the experience, like I’m still not a trained marketer per se. I’m no expert in branding. But having talked to people again and again, we love going to conferences where developers are hanging out and talking with them. And repeatedly we would get people who learned about us and would be surprised that we were just a three person company. That we weren’t like a 10 or a 30 person company ’cause they, they felt like, well you, you have such a presence. It was a surprise to them that we were much smaller than we appeared to be. And that wasn’t intentional. Like, we weren’t trying to project a size, but [00:07:00] that kind of taught us having that connection with people when they learned what we were about then that that really helped them resonate with what we were trying to do and what we’re trying to provide.

Because we have plenty of competitors in the space. Some that have a lot of funding, some that are similar to us and that either are bootstrapped or not so well funded. And that helped them in their mind, see where we fit, help position us in their, and not, not necessarily about what the product is, ’cause the, the products are very similar, but really about what their, what the approach is and what, again, our service to our customer trying to treat them, you know, like, like our best friend and try and treat ’em like something we really care about.

Yeah. So it wasn’t really a learned thing. It was more of the, the experience of connecting with people and seeing what mattered to them.

Kari: Yeah. And that’s something that I think a lot of founders do tend to sort of stumble into, especially if it’s more of a tech led company where your background is in building, not necessarily in promoting and wearing those multiple hats simultaneously, [00:08:00] uh, can be really challenging.

So the way that you’ve handled it is really fantastic. You’ve been able to see the path forward and execute on that while also managing the product side. That’s not an easy thing to do.

So you mentioned that your team is or was three people. Is that still the case?

Ben: Yeah, we’re currently four people full-time and one part-time.

Kari: I know from other podcasts I’ve listened to from you that you have a mentality about keeping your team lean, and that’s totally intentional. You’re not trying to scale into this big behemoth, but you’re, you’re still taking on these really large companies.

What was that like when you first entered the space with, with established brands, and can you talk a little bit about who they are?

Ben: Yeah, when, when we started, a number of our competitors were in a very similar spot, like Sentry, I believe, started around the same time, maybe a year before. They are the kind of the biggest in the space with the amount of funding they have and the, the revenue they had [00:09:00] Rollbar was in a similar position.

They had started roughly about the same time within the same year or so. They also had funding, but not as much as Sentry. And then there were others like Air Break, which is one that existed before we did. And Bugsnag and others. When we got into the market, it was a little different than it’s today.

Sentry didn’t have as much funding in aggregate as they now have. They’ve done a few rounds. But, uh, so we didn’t feel like it was a big—well, I think some of it was naivete. Like we didn’t really realize what we’re getting to. We just knew that this was a problem that we felt needed a better solution.

And we weren’t too concerned about exactly who the competitors were ’cause we felt like, Hey, we could all play in this space. You know, we didn’t think it was gonna be a, you know, one, a one solution only kind of thing. And that’s not to be true. Like we, we definitely aren’t the scale that Sentry is. But then again, we haven’t really tried to be, our business has been more about, you know, keeping small and enjoying what we’re doing and just providing a valuable product people like.

Kari: Yeah, having that real focus [00:10:00] that that super specific clarity about what you’re building is something that can be really hard to maintain. Is it something where you got together with your co-founders and were intentional about saying, Hey, we need to figure this out because we have competitors.

How was that discussion?

Ben: We were very intentional about the kind of company we wanted to create. It wasn’t though in response to competitive, it was more based on the backgrounds that we had. Uh, you know, we were, we’re all similar in age and similar in situation. Although I had at the time two kids and neither Josh nor Starr had kids.

But those came along not too long after, but we knew based on how we had worked together for years already. That we had kinda similar mindsets about the kind of business we wanted to run. We knew that we didn’t want to be in the, the VC Backrock ship. We didn’t wanna spend 80 hours a week, you know, writing code.

We wanted to be out there enjoying our life and that we were very intentional about our, that we, we worked to live. Not that we live to work and so we, we did not want to be the high growth [00:11:00] all in kind of company. We wanted to be what some people, you know, was called a lifestyle business. It’s like, yes, we were very intentional about the lifestyle that we wanted to have and that we wanted a business to support that.

Luckily we found over time that we had a similar goal and, but we were very specific that that was our goal as we started the business.

Kari: When you were getting the word out about what you were building, can you describe that process? So not just what you said, but where you distributed the message to, how you actually started talking about what you do.

Ben: Yeah, in the early days we got a lot of our traction from Twitter. Uh, just sharing the things that we were working on and sharing things that we thought were interesting as well to our community. We were all, you know, Ruby on Rails developers, and at the time it was a relatively small community of Ruby developers who were building Rails applications.

So we were, we were known quantities. I had. Built other products in the space and we were able to just, you know, go out to our friends basically and say, Hey, we’re working on this new thing and we’d love for you to join us on the ride. [00:12:00] Enough people knew who we were and knew that we were probably building something great that they’re willing to, to check us out.

That went along for several years where we just spent time on Twitter just talking about what we’re doing and, and what we thought was interesting and people joined for that ride over time. You know, that that tends to dissipate as you exhaust that community, you know, as you want to grow beyond your initial.

The, the initial reach that you have. And then we found that the, the word of mouth spread was the best thing for us for developer tools in particular. What happens is a developer will use a tool and if they like it, they’ll take it to their next job or to their next project or the next contract. The reverse is also true.

If a company likes the product and they bring in a new developer, then introduce that developer to that tool and then, you know, that just kind of snowballs and that was. For a, for a long time, like our primary growth driver. So in the early days it was really just reaching out to people we knew and, you know, being who we were just in the community, being a known entity.

And then, uh, people taking us, uh, with them when they, when they went job to jump. Wow. [00:13:00] I’ve seen the same thing in, in my experience with dev focus tools.

Kari: Have you been investing a lot in developer relations, that side of marketing? Can you describe that a little bit more?

Ben: Sure. Uh, since we’re all developers, it’s easy for us to put on the developer hat and go ahead and talk to developers.

Uh, so we do that a lot. Right. 14 was a particularly big year for us where we just tried to speak at every conference we could. And, uh, we had some, some months where we were speaking at two different conferences in the same month. So, you know, all three of us were on the road basically all that year, and that was, that was great for us.

And we still do that. I’ll, I’ll be speaking at Rails Comp in July. That’s something that I, I enjoy doing. But it’s also, you know, a way again, to connect with developers who are out there, who are learning you, who may not know about us. Yep. That’s, we enjoy doing. So, you know, engineering is, marketing is just kind of comes naturally to us.

In fact, we have to stop ourselves sometimes. Like, okay, that’s the easy thing to do. Maybe you actually need to focus on, you know, paid ads or something you don’t like to do. Right. Yeah. Um. So, yeah, it’s kind of just natural being developer founders. That’s, that’s who we are and what we do.

Kari: Mm-hmm. For those things that you, you [00:14:00] don’t like to do as you put it, do you find that you use little hacks for that?

Or do you just avoid it as long as possible and you say, okay, we’re just gonna hunker down and, and deal with this. We gotta get some, some sort of campaign out there. How do you, how do you manage that?

Ben: Yeah, it’s a bit of both. Uh, definitely there’s some avoidance going on. Uh. But I, one, one trick I found for my, for myself that works is, uh, just blocking time on the calendar, making an appointment with myself.

So I’ll put like a two hour block down and say, okay, you’re going to do X, you know, where X is the thing I really don’t wanna do. And, uh, when the alert pops up on my calendar, it’s like, okay, well I guess I better stop doing what I’m doing and go do this bad thing, you know? Uh, and that works out pretty well for me.

Uh, uh. If I schedule out a week or so in advance, uh, so I can forget about it for now and just do the things I’m curious and then, and then when it rolls around, it’s like, oh, yeah, now I gotta do that thing. You know? And just having that, that discipline to, to pick up that task, uh, that’s working pretty well for me.

Kari: Mm-hmm.

Ben: Um, but also, you know, having a co-founder [00:15:00] helps a whole lot there because. You know, Josh will ask me to do A, B, and C. And if I say, okay, I will do A, B, and C, and you, then two weeks go by and I haven’t done any of those, then, uh, you know, he can hold me accountable and say, Hey, you know, you, you probably do this, go do this.

So that, that helps too.

Kari: It is helpful to have that accountability built in or is it mostly you in the, on the marketing side of things?

Ben: Josh is the one that spends most of his time on the marketing. I’m helping him out, uh, as he asked me to do. I spend more of my time on. Oh, the product and, you know, managing the day-to-day, you know, the administrative stuff that no one wants to deal with, uh, and customer stuff that I really love to do.

I spend, you know, maybe 20%, 10% of my time on the marketing efforts. Uh, but, but Josh is really in there a hundred percent of the time on that.

Kari: How did you go about building the brand that currently exists for Honey Badger? In terms of the, the artifact side of it, the voice and tone, the visuals. I know there’s a meme video that you kind of like spun off from. So can you talk a little bit about how, how that was first [00:16:00] shaped?

Ben: After, you know, we decided that we wanted to have this, this kind of irreverent, this, um, down to earth informal approach. Uh, we, we looked for, you know, what kind of design and assets can reinforce that. And so Josh is down in near Portland, which is, uh, a great source of artists and, you know, others who are really into, you know, keep it weird and keep it fun. And so, uh, in the early days he knew this, this great artist who had done a bunch of work for local breweries, so doing some artwork for them and, and illustrations. So we, we commissioned a set of artwork from, from him to help us like develop, like, who the persona of Honey Badger is. It never got to the point where we, we gave this character a name. Maybe we, maybe we should have now that I think about it. But, but we definitely had this like house style I guess, that we developed as, as a part of working with this illustrator. And, you know, we built shirts around that, which people just love, like people love the t-shirts that we created.

We just used that as our starting point and just riffed off of that. So everything was, [00:17:00] you know, kind of. He was kind of metal. Uh, our, our original illustration, he was the one throw and goat and that sort of thing. And so we just kind of leaned into that and, and had fun with it. We, we’ve backed away from that a little bit over time where it’s like, well, okay, maybe it doesn’t appeal to everybody, you know?

And so, uh, lately I. Our most recent one is, uh, is, uh, Josh reached out to, uh, a popular skateboard graphic artist. He, he just loved that style and he wanted to, Hey, let’s, let’s do a throwback to the nineties to skateboard culture Santa Cruz. You know, anyone who was living in southern California in the eighties or nineties would recognize, or seventies would recognize this style.

So we reached out to, uh, Jimbo Phillips, his son, who is basically inherited this kind of style, uh, who worked with Santa Cruz back in the day. Uh, got him to give us a set of illustrations that have the new honey badger kind of look. And it’s, it’s fun. The t-shirt is completely different from the old style, so we know we, we like to mix it up from time to time.

It’s always like, let’s, let’s find someone who can really just get, get a vibe on with what we’re trying to do [00:18:00] and, you know, take it, take it and, and have some fun with it.

Kari: Gotcha. Okay. So it’s, it sounds a little bit like the Liquid Death sort of approach. That’s fun. When you’re creating the, the other pieces for your campaigns and that sort of thing, are the illustrations making into that or is it just for the t-shirt? Just for that kind of like in the know crowd that would, would be going for your swag.

Ben: Primarily it’s been about the T-shirts, uh, about, about the stickers, you know, ’cause that’s what really resonates at conferences. You know, you can hand those out and, and people really connect with that.

Uh, we have snuck them in from time to time in some of our other materials, but, uh, we haven’t been as good about that as we, as we want to be. So we’re trying to get better at that.

Kari: Uh, what do you feel is holding you back from not being as good as you wanna be?

Ben: Oh, it’s really about time. There’s, there’s so much, there’s so many projects we wanna do.

Uh, it’s. It’s really gotta be a concerted effort if you wanna take that same visual, you know, to a whole thing of assets. We just, yeah, it’s been a matter of having too, too much on our hands and, and, uh, not enough, [00:19:00] not enough time to do everything.

Kari: I mean, that sounds really ambitious for a team of, of four.

Ben: Right?

Kari: It’s impressive that you have, you have that in the, in your mind to do. Do you use templates? Do you go into Canva and lay stuff out? Like how in the weeds do you get on marketing your business?

Ben: Yeah. We don’t today. No. We don’t have a A system for that. Yeah.

Kari: Is that something that you think would be helpful, or does that seem like more of a distraction from working on things that are more important?

Ben: No, I think it would be, I think, you know, having that, being able to communicate that throughout the stack, you know, having that part of our collateral, but also showing up, you know, intermix, we have, we had done that a little bit with like some of our onboarding emails, for example. So we, we reached out to Buzz Films, there was a fun, fun crew to work with and they helped us come up with some, you know, animations.

That then got translated into instructional videos and that sort of stuff. So yeah, I think it would be, be good for us to do more of that.

Kari: When you’re working on your product, do you, do you try to weave it into that as well? Are [00:20:00] there things about the graphics or just the tone of voice that you’re using and the UX copywriting that that work their way in?

Ben: Well that’s, that’s been a bit more tricky. We’ve, we have from time to time tried to work that in there into the product. Most recently we had a redesign that we just launched earlier this year. Where we, you know, brought in some new fonts and a new layout to the actual application that people are using every day.

And, uh, we thought it looked great. But one of the pieces of feedback that we got is that the, the font choices that we made made the read readability a little more difficult as we sat, sat with that and we thought, you know what? We really don’t wanna be distracting people from using the application.

Typically when someone is using our app, they’re having a bad day already. Like something has blown up, something has gone bad. What they don’t wanna be is they don’t wanna be distracted by extra graphics or, you know, questionable choices of font or font sizes, you know? Right. So what we ended up doing is we backed a little bit up from that.

We went back to like [00:21:00] system fonts for most of the body texts, but kept our, our fonts that we really like for headings. Right. So, it’s not gonna be a big distraction throughout the page, but we can still enjoy a little bit of that flare, right? So. We, we have had times where we’ve stepped a little too far and bringing some, some kinda playfulness into, and we’ve realized, oh, we gotta, we gotta step back a little bit when it’s dealing with, you know, things that people are looking at and they’re having a bad day and they got just needed to, needed to work.

Right. And to be clear.

Kari: Yeah, definitely. And I think with your website too, I’ve noticed that you’ve been a lot more nuanced in where you insert things with humor.

Ben: Right.

Kari: I think that’s really important when you’re trying to get a message across that is clear cut, especially when you’re trying to also be known as the simpler solution, the more direct solution to a problem. It is important to, to do as you’ve done, where you prioritize: “where does this need to be fun?” And how do we have a personality without it overtaking the more, uh, substantial parts of, of what you’re doing as a company? [00:22:00] What advice would you have, as we’re wrapping up for other founders who are trying to inject more of their brand personality into their company and helping guide some of their decisions?

Ben: I would, I would say, you know, don’t be afraid to dive in and go with the voice that you want to have. Right? I think a lot of times we, we think we have to put up this persona of this particular businessy face, or we have to feel like we’re bigger than we are, or, you know, whatever it is for you are particular demographic you feel you have to be a certain way to be accepted or to, to fit in with your competitors.

And I say, you know, don’t, don’t be afraid to just dive in and do something you want to do, right. If you want to have fun with it, then. Try it, right? Uh, if you want to be a certain way, go for it. And if it doesn’t work, you can always back that up a little bit, right? You can always say, okay, well maybe, maybe it doesn’t quite land as I want it to land.

Maybe I need to make some tweaks. But don’t be afraid to have fun if you wanna have fun or to, to really buttoned up if you’re really even buttoned up and just do what, what feels right to you.

Kari: [00:23:00] That’s solid advice. Great to talk to you!