Hello everyone, we are the Blar team.
Hello everyone, and Happy New Year from the Blar team!
Sales
Celebrating Our First Sales 🚀
This month, we reached a significant milestone for Blar by closing our first two sales with startups from Chile. These partnerships mark the start of our journey to reduce the world’s technical debt and enhance development workflows with Blar’s capabilities.
These partnerships not only validate the value of our product but also provide us with critical feedback to continue refining our offering. Both companies have expressed enthusiasm for how Blar is already helping streamline their pull request reviews and identify opportunities for optimization and improvement.
Feedback-Driven Growth
In addition to closing sales, we’ve remained focused on gathering feedback from prospective users and clients. Every conversation is an opportunity to refine our product and strengthen our market fit. By listening closely to the needs and pain points of developers and managers, we continue to shape Blar into a tool that truly empowers teams.
Market: A $1.52 Trillion Opportunity
The market for technical debt is growing fast. In 2022, the cost of fixing technical debt was estimated at $1.52T—a ~16% increase from the $1.31T reported in 2020. This trend shows no signs of slowing, with expectations that it will maintain or even accelerate through 2024 as companies grapple with increasingly complex systems and faster innovation cycles.
Gen AI: The Double-Edged Sword
Generative AI has emerged as a transformative force in the tech world, driving unprecedented productivity and innovation. However, it comes with a hidden cost—technical debt. AI-generated code is often not the ideal solution, and developers frequently incorporate these outputs without fully understanding them. This lack of clarity and alignment with best practices can significantly increase technical debt, creating challenges that compound over time.
“Generative AI and AI are now the highest contributors to a company’s tech debt along with enterprise applications, our research shows. This trend will likely exacerbate ...” —Accenture
Additionally, it’s estimated that developers spend an average of 13.5 hours each week addressing technical debt. That’s nearly two full workdays lost to managing code issues, refactoring, and addressing legacy system challenges—time that could otherwise be spent innovating and creating value.
While generative AI promises to revolutionize industries, it underscores the urgent need for tools like Blar. Companies must not only adopt AI but also ensure they can manage the debt it creates, maintaining agility and innovation without sacrificing long-term stability.
Product
Pull Request Agent: Smarter and More Actionable
This month, we made significant changes to our Pull Request agent to deliver even more precise and actionable insights. By reducing noise and minimizing irrelevant feedback, we addressed one of the primary pain points identified by our users.
A key advancement was redefining the agent’s flow to include multiple specialized agents working together. The first agent generates hypotheses or potential issues, which then trigger additional agents to traverse the graph, validate findings, or dismiss false positives. This modular approach ensures a deeper, more accurate analysis of pull requests, improving reliability and user trust.
In-Line Comments for Developer Clarity
To make the agent’s feedback more intuitive and developer-friendly, we introduced in-line comments directly within the Pull Request. This mirrors the way human reviewers pinpoint issues, providing context and clarity about exactly where problems lie.
Enhanced Comments
To make our agent even more accessible and user-friendly, we introduced new commands:
-blar --review: Allows users to execute the agent when they’re ready to review a Pull Request, giving them full control over the timing and context of the analysis.-blar --fix: Automatically generates fixes for the issues identified by the agent, saving users valuable time.
Speed and Efficiency Improvements
We also significantly sped up the analysis process by parallelizing the generation of comments and the identification of issues. This optimization reduces latency, ensuring developers receive feedback faster without sacrificing quality.
These updates are part of our ongoing mission to make Blar an indispensable tool for developers, combining powerful insights with actionable solutions.
Styleguides and Documentation Chat
To empower teams and improve the consistency of their development processes, we introduced a chat feature on our platform that helps developers collaboratively write style guides and documentation. These resources not only standardize coding practices but also serve as guidance for our Pull Request agent, helping it focus on the most relevant areas during reviews. By aligning the agent’s insights with team-defined standards, we’re bridging the gap between automation and team-specific best practices.
Security & Trust
Kicking Off SOC 2 Compliance
This month, we began our journey toward SOC 2 compliance with Vanta, reflecting our commitment to maintaining the highest standards of security and data protection. We expect to start the formal audit on January 15 and aim to achieve full compliance by March.
As we scale, trust and security are key to ensuring our users can rely on Blar not only for its capabilities but also for safeguarding their data. This milestone underscores our dedication to building a robust foundation for long-term growth.
Next Steps
Sales
Before scaling widely, our immediate goal is to onboard ~10 beta companies. These early partners will allow us to work closely with their teams, gather invaluable feedback, and ensure they genuinely love our product.By refining our offering with these beta companies, we’ll build a strong foundation of success stories and champions. This groundwork will maximize the impact of our broader outreach efforts, helping us close more deals and establish lasting relationships with companies that align with our mission to reduce technical debt and streamline development workflows.
Enhance Pull Request Agent
We plan to further improve the Pull Request agent through an iterative process driven by user feedback and real-world usage.Validate a Vanta-Like Platform for Technical Debt Reduction
We want to validate the potential of building a Vanta-like platform tailored to help developers identify the steps they need to take to reduce technical debt. This platform would provide actionable insights and data-driven guidance on where to focus their efforts, enabling teams to prioritize the most impactful areas for improvement. Beyond insights, our vision is to have Blar automate some of these steps, making the process more seamless and efficient for development teams.
How You Can Help
Introduce Us to Scaleups and Enterprises
We’re actively seeking introductions to scaleups and enterprises looking to tackle technical debt and streamline their development workflows. If you know of any companies with teams of 30+ developers that could benefit from Blar, we’d greatly appreciate an introduction.
Share Sales Tips and Strategies
We’re refining our sales outreach and would love to hear what’s worked. Whether it’s effective prospecting strategies, meeting templates, or pitching advice, any guidance you can share will help us build on our early momentum.
Spread the Word
Help us expand our reach by sharing our vision with your network. A quick mention in a conversation or an introduction to a potential design partner could make a huge difference.
Your support is invaluable as we continue to grow and bring Blar to more teams worldwide.
Thanks for reading.
Feel free to reach us at: jose@blar.io or benjamin@blar.io
Follow us on X and LinkedIn for more!
The Blar Team.