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Lukas Fittl
Scaling PostgreSQL Databases
Lukas Fittl is the founder and CEO of pganalyze, a company that provides tools for optimizing PostgreSQL databases.12 Here's a brief overview of Lukas Fittl and his journey with pganalyze:
Background and Career
Lukas Fittl has been working in the PostgreSQL ecosystem for over 15 years as a software engineer.6 His experience includes:
- Co-founding a company called soup.io, where he first encountered challenges with PostgreSQL optimization1
- Working at Citus Data, a company in the PostgreSQL space
- Spending some time at Microsoft before fully dedicating himself to pganalyze1
Founding pganalyze
Fittl founded pganalyze in 2012 as a side project, working on it during evenings and weekends while maintaining a full-time job.1 Key points about the company's development include:
- The idea stemmed from Fittl's own struggles with database optimization
- For the first seven years, pganalyze was a part-time venture for Fittl
- In 2014, he added a payment system, marking the transition to a real business
- It took about a year to acquire the first 10 customers
- Fittl went full-time with pganalyze in 2019, approximately seven years after founding the company
Current Status
Today, pganalyze is a successful SaaS company:
- It generates multiple 7-figure Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)
- The company is entirely bootstrapped, without external funding
- pganalyze serves over 500 customers, including industry leaders like Atlassian and DoorDash1
Online Presence
Lukas Fittl maintains an active online presence:
- His LinkedIn profile can be found under the username "lfittl"3
- He is active on Twitter (now X) with the handle @LukasFittl4
- Fittl regularly participates in webinars and creates content about PostgreSQL performance optimization25
Lukas Fittl's journey with pganalyze showcases an unconventional path to building a successful SaaS company, emphasizing patience, bootstrapping, and solving specific technical challenges in the database optimization space.