Webapper's Origin Story

What better time to start a new business than when the economy is cratering? And what better industry to start one in than the hardest-hit industry in the downturn? That's what was going on at the time of Webapper's birth in 2001, but my co-founder and I just didn't care. We wanted to do the work we loved, but just as importantly, we wanted to do it the WAY we loved to work. In other words, we wanted to control our working conditions, as much as you can in a small business.

As I described in the post about how I got into software development, I moved pretty quickly through a variety of software jobs early in my career, all of which were pretty demanding. It was a classic situation where work you love doesn’t feel like work. After the first 2-3 years, I was ready to go out on my own. (I’d been pretty entrepreneurial all along. Remind me to tell you about Renaissance Window Cleaning some day.)

As is often the case when starting a business, serendipity was at play. A colleague of mine from working at Allaire/Macromedia—a Brit named Mike Brunt—also lived in Southern California at the time. We’d both been laid off around the same time, and he helped me secure a Lead Architect role at Sempra Energy where he’d landed a contract—the perfect “day job” foundation from which to take the leap and break out on our own.

So Webapper was born. The name reflected the niche we wanted to focus on—web application software and systems. (It also meant “Web App ER,” as in emergency room, although that meaning only came into being later, as we began specializing in emergency troubleshooting services for large, complex Internet systems and software.)

That first year, we got a sizable contract with Ernst & Young, continuing to do the same work we'd been doing for Allaire/Macromedia. That was enough evidence for us—the market still needed these web application engineering services. We developed a full suite of offerings focused on large-scale, Java-based web application systems. It took a few years, but by 2004, Mike and I had put ourselves on a salary, and quit our "real" jobs.

As we grew, I wanted to make sure we were builders, and not just stereotypical consultants, so we also worked to bring in application developments projects. Sigmund did a lot of programming in those early days! By 2006, I was ready to hire a Lead Architect to take over that role from me. I remember feeling surprised, at the time, that we were big enough to need to hire a Lead Architect, to run a development practice area within our company. And we had practice areas, just like law firms! It was exhilarating.

Backing up a bit in the timeline of the story, one of the most important developments in the history of Webapper happened in 2004. The very best software engineer I’d met up to that point in my career (still easily one of the top 3 I’ve ever worked with), named Daryl, came to me with a product idea. It was brilliant, but like most early product ideas, it needed some noodling. We originally thought it was a JDBC connection monitor (sorry, can’t avoid using nerd language entirely). As we vibed about it, the idea morphed into a full-blown application server monitoring tool.

This was a nascent niche in the market at that time. At a tech conference one year, I gave a talk entitled "Application Server Analytics," which was the name I'd given to this new product category, which was a nerdier cousin to Web analytics tools like Webtrends, Urchin, and all the rest. We created a tool called SeeFusion, which allowed you to "See" inside your servers (ColdFusion servers, specifically; thus the hybrid name). This was an important-enough development in our company history that I want to write about it separately, but for now suffice it to say it was a big deal for us. We were selling thousands of copies of this product to the biggest companies in the world.

Back to 2006 now. Another great developer whom I knew of, but didn’t actually know personally, purchased our SeeFusion tool, and was using it on a project, and needed some support. Back then, I provided almost 100% of the tech support for that tool, which is to say I replied to tech support emails all day and night, helping developers and systems administrators solve their server performance problems. Nat had written a great software book or two that I’d read, and he ran a really great little software shop of his own that I’d also heard of. He sent in a tech support email really late at night and says something like, “Wow, I can’t believe I’m getting tech support from YOU!” I replied almost immediately, but I was sitting there thinking “I can’t believe Nat is using our product, and I’m talking to HIM!” Your basic professional bromance.

Since we were both developer-owners, we had that in common, but as our conversations continued, we quickly realized we really thought alike about a lot of things. Within just a few months, it was pretty obvious we wanted to work together. So Webapper bought Nat’s firm, which was really an acqui-hire of Nat, and a merging of his customers with ours. (We later hired his former business partner, too, a very talented, and very tall, developer named Erik, who had a great run with us as a Senior Architect.)

Nat took charge of our sitting development team, and built and staffed an agile software practice that cranked out dozens and dozens of really excellent (and complicated!) systems.

We had all the pieces of the puzzle, in my view. A team that could build software, and also tune it/fix it/scale it/host it. We had high-demand, targeted consulting offerings that delivered unmatched results quickly (our sales calls for these were often around 30 minutes before closing the deals). Or, we could be hired long-term to build great software and systems. And even though the term SaaS wasn’t widely used yet, we had a software product that helped avoid downtime, which over time would introduce us to over 800 customers, some of which were among the biggest companies on the planet.

So that’s how it all started. Reflecting on all of this as I write about it, it seems more like 30 or 40 years ago, given how much has happened since then, and how much is happening still, as I write this in 2026. Heck, by the time I share the rest, we might not even be named Webapper any longer!

Thanks for listening. I am Sigmund.