A founder’s perspective on 4 years with Haskell
In 2012 I co-founded Better … The name Better is a story in itself. The reasoning behind it was that our users would get better by using our platform – our slogan was Better than yesterday. It has caused some confusion though and it makes some sentences sound odd. One of our developers spoke to Jony Ive at a convention and when he heard the name he apparently said that “it could be worse”. , a startup building a new type of enterprise e-learning platform. Our goal was to make it faster and cheaper for large companies to develop, deliver, and analyse adaptive, cross-platform, multi-language, online courses.
From day one we decided to use Haskell as our main language and it remained the only language we used on the backend as our team grew to 10 developers.
After a period of experimentation and development, Better grew from $0 to $500,000+ in annual recurring revenue in the space of a few months, with companies including American Express and Swissport as customers. However, the distribution model proved challenging to grow beyond that and we sold to GRC Solutions, an Australian compliance company.
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