Focusing on SecretOps

When we first started Doppler we encountered an issue where potential customers did not trust us. How could they? We were a brand new startup with little funding, a 2 person team, and no background in software security. Storing and serving sensitive customer data like secrets is a risky proposition for customers and especially risky when the company storing the data is one you have never heard of. We needed some way to break the ice and expedite the trust building process.

Enter Radar, a secrets scanning tool that works with GitHub. We believed at the time that Radar would help us solve this problem while also generating demand for our secrets manager product. As time accrued we learned a powerful lesson that I want to share with you. It turns out that building and supporting 2 products is incredibly difficult as a resource strapped company. You end up choosing one over the other, which for Doppler, our secrets manager always took priority as it more aligned with our north star. This paired with the market shifting, where GitHub and GitLab launched their own secret scanning service made Radar an undifferentiated cost center.

Then something surprising happened. Security became a hot topic in the software industry, making a secrets manager more appealing. We started to see organic demand rise for our secrets manager from new customers while simultaneously increasing love of the product from existing customers.

This all leads us to today. We are making a correction to Doppler's journey by discontinuing Radar so we can pour all our resources into our secrets manager. On June 1st, Radar will be deactivated and all active GitHub installations will be disconnected. Soon after the Radar product will be removed from the Doppler dashboard. The entire team at Doppler looks forward to doubling down on our secrets manager and continuously growing the offering for you and your team.