Gear5.Me Interview: How an In-house Tool Became a Great Product

Editor’s note: Since writing this article, Gear5.ME has ceased to operate. This post remains as part of their legacy. However, you can read our story about a similar .MEr here.

 

This time, let’s get straight to the point. Gear5.Me is an easy-to-use website-performance monitoring system that will give you a comprehensive and understandable performance information to help you speed up your websites. It is an internal startup project of Infostud and the idea for the project was conceived at the beginning of 2013. Founders Nebojša Kamber (pictured left) and Robert Gombaš (pictured in the middle) are both working at Infostud, Nebojša being a senior programmer with 10 years of experience in programming and software development, while Robert, with whom we had this interview, is IT manager with 20 years of experience in software development and systems administration. They released the Beta version of Gear5.me on 25th of march.

What gave you the idea for Gear5.me?

Gear5 started as an internal project of Infostud, a leading Serbian .com company providing services in various fields, such as employment, the automotive industry, education and tourism. With more than 120 million page views per month, performance optimization and effective bottleneck detection became one of our goals. After surveying and testing various 3rd party tools available on the Internet, we found that they were either expensive, lacking some features or just too complex for our needs, so we decided to write our own tool. After some initial testing and experimentation, we created a simple working tool that provided us the information that we needed for performance optimization and bottleneck detection. We had a tool that was working for us, so logically, the question was raised: why shouldn’t it work for others? Thus, Gear5 was born.

From the perspective of Infostud this is also an interesting project because it addresses international audience in comparison to our core businesses that has main focus on Serbian market. We utilized  bunch of new technologies on Gear5 project, such as node.js, mongodb, boomerang, soa etc. In regular Infostud production we do not have time to try out some of these technologies, so secondary benefit of the project is knowledge transfer back to core businesses.

How did you gather the team for Gear5.me? 

As an internal startup, the team was formed from the existing Infostud team members that were working on different projects. Somewhere on start of 2013. Nebojša and I had a discussion about logging real-time metrics from users. At a time he was experimenting with MongoDB, so simple script was made that was shooting simple timing data from users to MongoDB. Later on Boris Santrač (pictured right) joined the team as he already had some expertise on performance tuning and optimization. Basically this is the core of the team. We also have colleges from Infostud that contribute to projects as consultants in domains of Internet marketing, PR, and business decisions.

What makes Gear5.Me different form the competition?

It is really simple to implement, use and understand the data presented. We are focusing on performance metrics and we do not want to over-pack Gear5 with bunch of features that will be hard to use and understand. Some of them are: 5 minute time resolution on a daily level, full sampling (analyzing all of the traffic not only a sample) and easy implementation, no need for servers side setup. Implementation is similar to GA, small .js tracker code snippet is inserted into websites code.Currently gear5 is completely free tool and every user is welcome to try it out.

Performance metrics were a hot topic last year and some strong companies are present in this filed. We do not want to compete with big players in this domain. Instead we are targeting low to mid end of performance market, encouraging small to mid size website owners to start measuring performance metrics since the optimization in this area can make a huge difference in a log run. In the world of performance metrics, every second counts. Some research points out that 1 second of extra loading time could result in a reduction in conversions of as much as 7%.

So far, how are the users responding?

It’s relay early phase of project, but so far we are satisfied with a response considering the marketing channels that we use currently. We have plans for our presence both online and offline so effects of that should be visible in coming months.

Are there any plans for expanding or upgrading Gear5.me?

We are in beta now, so new features are added and tweaked as we go. Currently we are testing a new feature, an integration with Google Analytics that will allow users to overlay performance data with GA metrics on daily and monthly level. It should be visible online in few days. We are also planing an alerting system that will send you notifications if there is some notable performance degradation on your website. So there you have it! If you are a proud owner of a website, think about using Gear5.me. Until the next interview!