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PagerDuty S-1

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Re: PagerDuty S-1

#41

Post by jerf »

grouseway wrote: post #34
thanatos_dem wrote: post #28

I run a service that integrates with pager duty on behalf of our users, and man oh man did they make some poor design choices with their API. The most glaring one is their integration keys, which is how you trigger an alert. They’re just v4 uuids with the hyphens removed, or in other words, completely random. This is fine by itself, except they have two versions of their event API, and keys for the v1 API don’t work…

One of the nice little features that I appreciate about Twilio, and have adopted myself, is their API keys are always prefixed with a 2 character type. e.g. "account_sid": "ACXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX", "phone_number_sid": "PNXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX", "sid": "CAXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX",

Hard-won pro-tip: IDs should pretty much always have some sort of prefix when stored as strings, even if you swear you're never going to change them. You're not going to want to try to divine which id was which based on string length or what chars are where later.

I qualify "when stored as strings" because id numbers in database rows are in a sufficiently strong context on their own, for instance. But once they get serialized to strings, you really ought to stick a prefix on them. You may only change 10% of your ids, but the saving on that 10% will be well worth the cost of prefixing your ids.

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#42

Post by [deleted] »

whalesalad wrote: post #23
trimbo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're spending $30M+ on R&D, so if you feel that way as a customer, that's not good.

On principle alone I wouldn't give them my money ever again. I'd engineer my own lightweight solution before then or use an underdog competitor. I have a sour taste in my mouth for their meteoric rise to success/IPO versus their pathetic investments (or lack therof) in product improvement. It really sucks to use. Reminds me of Engineyard (also abandonware).

[deleted]

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#43

Post by rconti »

umeshunni wrote: post #6

2017: $79.6M revenue, ($38M)in losses. 9 months of 2018: $84M revenue, ($34.5M) in losses. Costs seem generally under control except the significant growth (+66%) in G&A expenses. Why the hurry to IPO?

VictorOps was acquired. I imagine this creates various pressures.

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#44

Post by funkaster »

teej wrote: post #2

> If we fail to offer high-quality support, our business and reputation could suffer. I don't know how common this is in S-1 filings but it stuck out to me. Support is often viewed as a cost center, I love that PagerDuty makes it such a high priority. Edit: After some research, it turns out this is common. Docusign, Dropbox, Okta, Zuora, and MongoDB all have this statement exactly or similar.

True... but to be fair, prob most of the companies they serve, their support depends on PageDuty to be working correctly (othewise they would not get the alerts/notifications). So I would expect PageDuty to mark this a super high priority.

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#45

Post by Twirrim »

cm2012 wrote: post #40
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jesus, do people really like company FB pages (especially B2B companies) at all these days?

For every $ spent in fb newsfeed ad spend, you'll get some folks liking your page.

Real, or fake people? Do those likes quantifiably translate in to $$s?

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#46

Post by ezekg »

eastendguy wrote: post #27
stygiansonic wrote: post #11

Interesting that they reference their Glassdoor rating: The strength of our culture is key to attracting and retaining the best talent, as demonstrated by our high employee retention rates, and, as of January 31, 2019, a Glassdoor rating of 4.5 out of 5 and 100% approval rating of our chief executive officer.

Uh, that is a big negative sign for me, because they have an an "employer active" account. In other words, they pay for the privilege to get reviews deleted. > 100% approval rating of our chief executive officer. So I am 99.99% sure that HR was tasked with removing bad reviews ;-)

That's so unfortunate. I remember back when Glassdoor prided themselves on not doing that.

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#47

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #42
whalesalad wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On principle alone I wouldn't give them my money ever again. I'd engineer my own lightweight solution before then or use an underdog competitor. I have a sour taste in my mouth for their meteoric rise to success/IPO versus their pathetic investments (or lack therof) in product improvement. It really sucks to use. Reminds me of Engineyard (also abandonware).

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#48

Post by log_n »

eastendguy wrote: post #27
stygiansonic wrote: post #11

Interesting that they reference their Glassdoor rating: The strength of our culture is key to attracting and retaining the best talent, as demonstrated by our high employee retention rates, and, as of January 31, 2019, a Glassdoor rating of 4.5 out of 5 and 100% approval rating of our chief executive officer.

Uh, that is a big negative sign for me, because they have an an "employer active" account. In other words, they pay for the privilege to get reviews deleted. > 100% approval rating of our chief executive officer. So I am 99.99% sure that HR was tasked with removing bad reviews ;-)

Potentially leaving them open to the pettiest securities fraud suit ever.

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#49

Post by ezekg »

cm2012 wrote: post #4

Professional marketer perspective: Sales and Marketing is around 60% of revenue at 47 million a year. Advertising is around 5 million a year, so the rest of the spend looks like sales costs, content production, and maybe event marketing. The media spend seems to be mostly adwords: "The effectiveness of our online advertising has varied over time and may vary in the future due to competition for key search terms, chan…

Could they really see a better ROI moving from Adwords to FB for a B2B market? I'm curious, because I run a B2B business and I never would have thought FB ads would work. I always assumed FB was for B2C. I currently use Capterra and Adwords.

Re: PagerDuty S-1

#50

Post by lozenge »

jessemillar wrote: post #20
techntoke wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, too many good open source solutions now. No one thinks of alerting as paging anymore. You can use email to text now, chat solutions like Slack/Mattermost/etc. You no longer need an SMS gateway and if you do then Prometheus supports Twilio. All PagerDuty has going for it is a sales team trying to get managers to sign up for a service before exploring alternatives.

Out of genuine curiosity, do you have a list of good alternatives or some reading material on "paging" best practices? My team uses PagerDuty but I've never really questioned if there's a better method out there because the system PagerDuty replaced for us was so terrible that PagerDuty seemed like a godsend.

Google's free SRE handbook has some info.
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