We are Robbie Cargill and Markus Wilson, the co-founders of Buildstash 👋👋
We met over a decade ago, at a studio making apps for clients.
At this studio we churned out a lot of apps, for a lot of different clients, for just about every platform you can imagine. Often we'd be working, to varying degrees, on 5 or so projects at a time, and in a given year our team might easily deliver more than 30 apps.
And on each of those projects, we were making a lot of builds. Whether from Unity, or Xcode, we'd make builds to test internally, to demo, to send to a client for review and sign-off, for our sales team to take to events and secure us more clients to deliver more apps, and so make still more builds.
And where did all these builds go? Well usually they'd just be dumped on a network drive somewhere, if someone remembered to do it. Or maybe a particular build sent to a client via a WeTransfer link.
And 6 months, or even 2 years later, when the team were asked for a particular build of a particular app almost faded from memory? Well inevitably no one could find it. WeTransfer links had long expired. Any project builds which had been archived, if they were, were named and organised poorly and no one was sure what was what, or where to find it.
The source project would have to be pulled down again, devs praying it still ran as expected, and rebuilt, with it only occasionally being that easy. This wasted a ton of time, and seemed blatantly a poor experience for the developers, for the client, and everyone else involved. If a client came back with an issue, it wasn't always clearly documented what build they were using, and what git commit it had been built from.
It was obvious there could be something better.
A good other chunk of our careers have been spent working at games studios. Working on games is different in many ways. It's a nice change of pace to work on one, big project at a time, for a long time. But of course, the pressures to meet deadlines and deliver work on schedule remain the same.
Game devs produce a lot of builds too! Impromptu builds a developer makes to quickly test something out on their machine, QA builds, builds for the publisher to review, nightly builds to test the project does indeed still build. On larger projects or generally where a good workflow is in place, a CI pipeline will be setup (typically using something like Jenkins) to make these builds on dedicated machines.
But where do all these builds go? Well, some are perhaps made locally then forgotten about, assuming they won't be needed later. The CI pipeline might be setup to store them somewhere... maybe on a network drive again, or maybe somewhere in the cloud like AWS S3 (with poor accessibility across the team). What builds were important, where they came from, any other organisation around them at all, is absent.
We started speaking to other developers we knew, and realised many teams worked like this.
Clearly, we could do better.
We weren't surprised it was a common problem, when we had looked for the product to solve it, we were shocked and frustrated it didn't exist.
So we had to build it.
We're making Buildstash to automate the process of archiving all of your past builds. Whether they're made locally on a team member's machine, or using CI, regardless - they'll be uploaded and available via Buildstash.
You can easily keep all those past builds organised too. Builds are sorted into streams - like nightlies, experimental, stable. Setup custom labels, and platforms, as needed.
And since all your builds are already available in Buildstash, it's then a breeze to share them with whoever you like. Whether setting up a quick, secure, share link; with your team members in a shared workspace; or even publicly on your website.
This is why we set out to make Buildstash, but it's just the beginning.
We realised there's an entire chunk of many developers workflows which aren't well supported by present tools - the build-to-release phases. There's countless tools to assist with developing your apps, and version control for storing the code, and CI to help with building it. But once it's built...
We passionately believe that if we get Buildstash right, it'll transform many developers workflows from building their apps, through to publishing them. It'll one day seem as crazy to think there was a time you worked without a build-to-release manager, as it would be to work without version control.
We hope you'll join us on this journey by signing up for our waitlist!
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