Kansas City-based tech firm Stackify is posting a solid year of growth that’s leading it to hop the state line for more office space.
Stackify CEO Matt Watson
Led by CEO Matt Watson, Stackify is moving its headquarters and 15 staff members from Kansas City’s Waldo neighborhood to Leawood, Kan., for larger and swankier offices. Watson said that Stackify has grown revenue 20 to 30 percent each month in 2015, and that now he’s looking to hire three more IT employees.
“We feel like we’re in a great spot,” Watson said. “We’ve been in research and development mode for a while now, and it’s nice to start to see the sales side of it grow, talk with customers and get feedback. … We’re at the point where we’re really starting to get that machine moving.”
Stackify created a suite of tools that helps software developers diagnose and fix application problems within a single platform. Watson said that Stackify helps techies monitor key metrics and performance of one’s application, aggregate errors and receive alerts when a new error or high error rate occurs.
Stackify now has clients in more than 20 countries around the world in a range of different industries. Its clients include Lufthansa Airlines, CBRE Real Estate and Carbonite Cloud Backup Services.
Founded in 2012, Stackify recently released a new product — APM+ — that allows developers to better monitor an app’s performance.
“There are a lot of tools on the market now, but they’re really targeted toward enterprise clients and they’re very expensive,” Watson said. “We’ve created a product that’s much less expensive and cloud-based. … The combination of it with our other products makes it really powerful and puts us way ahead of our competitors.”
Previously a co-founder of Kansas City-based VinSolutions, which sold for nearly $150 million in 2011 to AutoTrader.com, Watson said that his new venture is still a challenge. While he learned much from his time at VinSolutions, operating any new company will be a difficult endeavor, he said.
“It’s an exciting time, but it’s hard,” Watson said. “Startups and new companies are hard no matter what and even if you’ve done it before it’s hard. Anyone who says it’s not has no idea what the hell they’re talking about. … We’ve just got to keep grinding away.”
