Hookdeck founders Alexandre Bouchard and Eric Tran were working on a product to help manage webhooks in 2020 when they became discouraged and decided to step away to gain some perspective.
The founders went rock climbing for a few months, and while they were away, people discovered their solution and began using it. The hiatus ended as the founders went back to work on the product with feedback from those early users.
Today, the company announced a $2.4 million seed to keep that early momentum going. Their story suggests that sometimes startup founders don’t always know when they’re on the right track with a solution that people value. In this case, they were.
“Hookdeck is building webhook infrastructure that makes it easier to develop, monitor and test them from one place,” according to the company.
The company defines webhooks in its online documentation as “an HTTP request, triggered by an event in a source system and sent to a destination system, often with a payload of data.” The key is that these are automated events with lots of utility, but the developer has no control over when and where they will occur. Having a layer to manage them has a lot of value.
One of the challenges for developers is that it requires a lot of work to manage the webhooks as the data they transmit comes into the system and interacts with applications. “There’s very much this infrastructure and proximity problem. In that infrastructure, there are multiple pieces that you need for this to function. The alternative to Hookdeck would be to build all this your own,” Bouchard said.
He said the other difficulty for developers is simply visibility into the webhook data as it comes into the system. “So what is going through my system, what is failing and why, and ultimately using that data as the input to troubleshoot my system on my environment and to help the team effectively work together to integrate those systems.”
The company offers a free tier with 100,000 events, up from 10,000 previously, and it’s increasing the retention time of that data from one day to three days with the hope of giving individual developers a better chance to test the service.
The startup currently has seven people and is looking to expand that with the new funding. Bouchard understands the challenges of building a diverse team and is thinking about it as he builds the company. He said the easiest thing to do early on is to reach out to your trusted network, but he also recognizes that approach doesn’t always produce a diverse outcome. So he and his co-founder plan to try to reach beyond that network and attend different events to reach more diverse candidates.
The company announced a $2.4 million seed round today led by Matrix Partners with participation from various industry angels.
