Today’s post will cover Replit, one of the most exciting software companies out there.
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Software Spotlight: Replit
Company Snapshot
Founded: 2016
Employees: 50
Funding: $100M
Valuation: $800M
Stage: Series B
Location: San Francisco
Company Overview
Replit is the easiest place to start coding, build, deploy, and host apps, collaboratively.
Tell Me More
Replit is the first fully online multiplayer coding environment that enables anyone to begin programming with minimal preparation and no downloads. It’s sort of like Google Docs, Figma, and Roblox, but for coding. Currently, the product supports more than 50+ programming languages and can be used to build apps and websites through a web browser with the added ability to share projects, create communal workspaces, and grant access to containers for executing code.
When it comes to building apps or websites, there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work that has to get done to actually get an app deployed. A software engineer will have to use an IDE or a text editor to actually code, host the source code in Github, host the site on Heroku, set up their database, and much more.
Replit removes the friction from the coding process by putting everything in the browser, with bundled features such as live chat for anyone working on the same codebase to communicate in real-time.
Market Opportunity
Even though only .5% of the world knows how to code, the world relies heavily on software. There are countless examples of coding schools whose mission is to increase the number of software engineers in the world, but Replit is not one of those companies. Instead, Replit is building the operating system and tools for anyone to build, collaborate, and deploy code regardless of skill level. The “picks and shovels” strategy that made people fortunes during the California Gold Rush in the mid 1800’s matured to 21st century standards, shifting from mining equipment for gold to developer tools for software engineering.
Providing a bundled and collaborative web-based IDE might seem obvious in hindsight, but historically, the software engineering process and associated developer tools have been siloed and spread across a variety of disparate products. Depending on the goals of your product, the IDE and associated tools will vary. While Replit is great for hackers and novice engineers learning how to code, an enterprise tech company will require a stronger IDE solution (for now) to build more custom flows and integrations.
Despite Replit’s unique product, it’s still a small fish compared to large whales in space. Github has 70M users and AWS’ suite of developer tools makes up 33% of the cloud computing market. However, Replit has seen insane growth over the past few years, reaching 10M active users who have built 20M apps on the platform.
Why I like the company
Replit is attacking a large and growing market that underpins all of software. It is the epitome of what was once dubbed “prosumer”. The company is executing the same product-led growth strategies that led to the consumerization of the enterprise and enabled products like Superhuman, Slack, Loom, Figma, and more to start with individual users and grow rapidly within the guarded walls of the Big Co procurement.
Today, none of Replit’s components are as powerful as its best-in-class counterpart. Simplicity is the name of the game for Replit’s product strategy. Currently, 80% of the company’s 10M users are located outside of the US and 50% are under 18. However, these demographics make for exciting growth and retention prospects as most are novice programmers or kids just learning how to code. Thinking about the compounding effect sticky products can have (e.g., snapchat, Roblox, Slack, etc.) Replit’s growth is untapped. Over time, retaining novice programmers and allowing them to grow their skills on the Replit IDE will enable unmitigated hockey-stick growth as users mature with the product.
By allowing engineers to focus less on re-building the same backend infrastructure and databases over and over again, Replit will enable more creative and faster product deployment.
The most exciting part about Replit is that despite its growth, Repkit is still early. Replit could allow coders to build tools for other users, launch its own hosting infrastructure, allow for “code royalties” to be paid for other users leveraging your code, create a cloud marketplace for discovering new code-bases, and much more. The possibilities really are endless.
Outside of impressive metrics, the company has a strong growth outlook and inspiring leadership team. Cofounder and CEO, Amjad Masad has a storied background building Replit across multiple continents and has cut his teeth at Facebook and Yahoo. Other key team members include Haya Odeh, Cofounder and VP Design.