Netflix, Priceline, and Williams-Sonoma were early customers of AppDynamics.
Bhaskar S. · He launched a free product for enterprise customers—then grew to $12M ARR in 2 years. | Bhaskar S... · PMF Show · Mar 30, 2026 · at 20:04
Bhaskar Sunkara, co-founder of AppDynamics, explains how the enterprise monitoring startup found early design partners and customers to test its MVP.
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“Netflix actually was one of the, you know, early ones. Priceline actually was one of the early ones. You know, Williams-Sonoma was one of the early ones.”
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More from Bhaskar S.
Offering proof-of-concept trials in production grabbed enterprise buyers' attention.
“And the third thing we said, which was, I think, surprising to a lot of people is that why don't we do a POC in production, right? That was the biggest thing that I would say got people to take notice because they're like, they're this sure of what they built.”
Monitoring must anchor on constant business transactions, not changing technical architectures.
“You need a unit of monitoring. You need to approach monitoring in a little bit of a different way where it represents something that is constant. So take Amazon, right? Like, let's just say take Amazon to a 15 year journey. And, you know, when they started off…”
AppDynamics brought deep-dive transaction profiling into production environments safely.
“And typically something like that would only happen in dev or test scenarios. We brought that into production saying, if you do it safely, if you do it with the right heuristics, you can actually go down to that type of level. And that's really what gave us th…”
AppDynamics launched exclusively for Java to win early enterprise customers.
“Second, we only wanted to build this for Java. Right. So there's obviously multiple languages, things like Ruby on Rails and all of that type of stuff was also very popular back then. But we saw that the core of the enterprise, you know, we wanted to really go…”
AppDynamics sold exclusively for production environments at a single price point.
“What we said was, let's only do production. Let's not even bother to have a dev version. Let's not even bother to have like a test version, et cetera. Let's only do production, and there's only one cost. So if you want to run it in development, we can give you…”
AppDynamics grew revenue from $2M to $12M in its second year.
“I think in the first year we started in oh eight, as you know, and it's been a while, but like just from my memory, the first year we did about a couple million, and then in the second year we did about 12. And the following year we doubled, the following year…”