Amanda Sabreah has experienced the pain points surrounding product and engineering management while working with large corporations and while building startups.
After jumping into the entrepreneurial space in 2017 with her first venture, Sabreah told Hypepotamus that “one of the biggest problems that we felt while building that company was that managing the engineering process always felt a lot more challenging than it should be.”
Engineering teams typically use Jira, Github, or other tracking software, but the experience can be clunky for managers who are trying to gain insight into the status of a product rollout or the launch of a new project.
“I started saying to myself, I wish I had some sort of copilot or analytics tool or additional management tool that helped me see the whole process as we’re going. That way I could make more decisions on the fly. And we can get products to market a lot more efficiently with a happier engineering team,” said Sabreah.
The result has been the initial version of Staat, a software designed to “put the right data in front of managers in real-time.” Managers are able to receive automated alerts from Github and Jira to help make decisions that will help a development team move forward.
The platform is designed to give a more holistic understanding of potential blockers and problems that are occurring over the course of a project.
Though the team has embraced a remote-first culture, the three co-founders have ties and met in Atlanta. David Choe worked at Atlanta-based Goods & Services, Chemistry, and North Highland prior to joining Staat. Paul Mun joins the Staat team after working as a senior software engineer at Honeywell. The founders are currently between Atlanta and the Pacific Northwest.
The team is bootstrapped to now, and Sabreah said she is thinking about growth in an “organic and purposeful way” now that she is a second-time founder. The team has about 260 companies signed up for the beta version, which will officially launch next week. Sabreah said they have grown mostly through word of mouth to date.
Their key customer demographic, Sabreah said, is a team “between 11 and 200 people. They’re growing fast, trying to establish processes, so Staat can come in and really help them establish their process overall.”
And another good sign for the team: Sabreah said that the team is on track to hire engineers as early as the end of April.