ATL-based PlayerZero Wants To Make Debugging Software Less Frustrating

At an early age, Koratana helped out the company with various testing projects, giving him an inside look into how software and product teams think about software quality. That experience would take center stage after he graduated from Stanford and launched his own startup, a developer-centric feedback tool called PlayerZero.

Koratana describes PlayerZero as a platform that “operationalizes software quality” and looks to change how software issues get reported and solved. The goal is to solve for the “core human processes that break down” during software debugging.

It is a problem those across tech companies know all too well. Communication can quickly break down when other teams or general users try to explain problems with a web application to developers.

“It’s really like you have all these different actors who don’t speak the same language. You might have a QA or support engineer who’s trying to communicate an issue that a real user had to an engineer,” Koratana explained. “That support person is thinking in a very empathetic way…but the developer is trained to think technically. And translating one to the other is very difficult.”

PlayerZero helps bridge that communication gap by contextualizing the problem with shareable, interactive reports available in a single link. Instead of recording a session, PlayerZero automatically captures all the diagnostic information associated with a specific web problem. That includes collecting snapshots, DevTools, and simulators to reproduce a bug a user experienced.

Because the platform is “private by default” and doesn’t collect data unless the user explicitly agrees to it, Koratana sees PlayerZero as a platform that could be particularly useful for product-led companies and those in highly regulated industries like finance and medicine where privacy is a focus.

The platform is launching with a freemium model to help teams quickly scale up their feedback collection efforts.

The PlayerZero team — now a group of seven people in the US — also uses the platform to collect its own feedback. That has helped the team iterate and create a system that works for engineering, QA, and product teams alike.

The concept behind the company started while Koratana was still a computer science student at Stanford. The team has grown to include engineers, data scientists, and UX designers graduates from Stanford, Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, UC Irvine, and LSU.

While Koratana told Hypepotamus he has “one foot in the Bay and one foot in Atlanta,” he officially came back to Atlanta to grow PlayerZero last year. They currently are working out of ATDC and are hyperfocused now on scaling up towards a full launch of the platform in the coming months.