Aptible started with a niche: healthcare tech startups scaling under HIPAA. By prioritizing customer retention and refining our platform, we've become the go-to for scaling companies. Staying in our lane made all the difference. 🛣️⬇️ #ScalingWithAptible
It’s tempting to go after everyone—from hobbyists to Fortune 500s—when you’re a new company. But the better choice is usually to do more of what works. Since the rise of Heroku, the default for dev platforms has been to start by marketing to developer hobbyists and then, over time, develop a user base that will lead to acquiring larger customers. We’ve had the opposite experience at Aptible. We started by serving a niche market: growing healthcare tech startups that needed to update their security and compliance protocols to suit HIPAA regulations. We found that we were well-positioned to provide the infrastructure they needed as they scaled. Soon, our customers’ businesses were growing. They asked for our help managing their infrastructure as they scaled, and we had a choice to make: we could go the Heroku route, expanding our market share using the product we’d already developed; or we could focus on improving our existing product to retain our current clients. We chose the latter. And as our product developed, we found that we’d built the perfect platform to serve tech clients who were already scaling. By focusing on retention, we built out our own niche. Staying narrow means we’ve been able to focus on very specific customer needs, like increased container sizes. Our customers love that they can scale up their container sizes all the way to the limits of AWS, while other providers, for various technological reasons, have smaller size limits. Our unique ability to give scaling companies the infrastructure they need—infrastructure that can handle complex requirements and works for development teams of dozens of engineers—turned into our market. Going broad sounds fun if you’re serving a niche industry. But our experience at Aptible tells me that staying in your lane can make all the difference. We are now in a position to call ourselves the best (and only!) platform for scaling companies because we focused on customer retention…in other words, we stuck with what works.
