The importance of a fast website was not always evident; even for a website owner with a technical profile. This is how I discover the benefits of speed and how I started a business with the goal of helping every website in the world to load in less than a second.
A couple of years ago at my hosting company, we wanted to distribute and promote some of our blog posts. We chose to pay Google Ads, launched the campaign and then we started to track absolutely all the events on our website.
Even spending a lot of money on that campaign; we couldn`t reach the results we were expecting. We analyzed all the metrics, finding inconsistencies with the information provided by Google Analytics and the Adds performance reports. It was clear we needed to reduce our bounce rate.
After recording users sessions with LuckyOrange, we couldn´t see any patterns or behaviour. Most of the visitors were leaving the website before it loaded. Our website loading time was 10 seconds (on a 3G mobile network), and they were staying from 3 to 5 seconds.
The beginning
I had more than 10 years of experience in one of the most repetitive and time-consuming developing fields: Frontend optimization. So, keeping our problems in mind, we decided to perform a website performance optimization. We apply all the rules mentioned on the Google articles, as well as the opportunities identified by Google PageSpeed Insights (next-gen formats images, critical CSS, minify resources, etc….)
In order to get some important optimizations, such as “Critical CSS” we had to use automation tools. It was too complex to be done manually. Hard work, but completely worthy to speed up our website
Bringing benefits
Having our website optimized, we launched the same campaign again. The results were dramatically different. We never thought that website loading time could affect so drastically the user experience on our website!
Our customers at the hosting company started to notice the improvement in the website loading time, so we got our first requests to optimize their own websites.
At the beginning the work was done manually: some plugins, converting images to webp by hand, updating some parts of the code to accept responsive images, and so on. With such an amount of work, it could take us one week to speed up each website.
The MVP
The service to improve our customer´s websites speed was overbooked, we already had project backlogs for a couple of months. So, we started building bots to automate some of the tasks. At that moment we launched our first MVP to offer an optimization service independent from the hosting company.
I wanted to build a completely independent optimization service; able to be used on any website, without considering the hosting location, or its technology. So in 2017; I participate at “Launch Program Acceleration” promoted by Ruta N and Social Atom Group.
That program helps me to reach independence from the hosting company; spending more time on the new MVP, searching for names and allies. In addition, it gave me the opportunity to meet my co-founder partner, Julian Lamprea (CTO). He also has more than 10 years of experience on front end optimization and background creating startups. Working as a team we started to build the product by creating more automations, an API REST, a dashboard for users and other features.
The company
In 2018, we test our automated service to improve website speed with real customers. Having everything running smoothly we decided to create the company and start officially this adventure!
In August 2018, we joined 500 Startups CDMX refining our business model and value proposition. And recently we were selected from thousands of applications to attend Startup Grind 2019 in San Francisco as Exhibiting Startup.
