It's been nearly 5 years since I wrote the first line of code for Bruno.
Today, over a million developers use it every month. We’re a team of 50+ people, and the company is doing well. I feel proud of what we’ve built, and grateful that I got to lead it and continue to.
But there’s something I’ve been carrying for a while.
Background
Two years ago, when Bruno started getting traction, I wrote a post on GitHub. In that post, I made some very strong claims: no company, no hires, no funding, no subscriptions. Solo, forever.
At the time, I meant every word.
Bruno started as a frustration. Tools were getting bloated. Sharing API collections meant uploading them to someone else’s cloud. It didn’t sit right with me. I wanted something simpler, more local, more developer-first.
I’ve always been a tinkerer — electronic circuits, side projects, small companies I built while working full-time. I didn’t come from money, and entrepreneurship felt like the one path where I could build what I wanted, on my own terms, with the possibility of financial upside.
When Bruno got that early traction, I thought I'd found my shot. I imagined doing it solo. I love open source, believe in what it stands for, and had a real fear of what VC money can do to good products — the slow drift toward bloat, the lock-in, the bait-and-switch. Postman was sitting right there as the cautionary tale.
What changed
As Bruno grew, the work grew with it. I brought in one person, then another, then more. We tried a one-time payment model and learned quickly that it didn’t hold. We switched to subscriptions. For a long time, we operated with barely a couple of months of runway, held together by belief and by people like Ryan (who is today a co-founder of the company), who took zero salary for a long stretch.
Over ~18 months we built a stable, profitable company. And then we made another decision I once said I wouldn’t: we raised funding.
Why we raised
Two reasons:
- Capital to hire and build the things we want to build — improve the CLI and developer workflows, expand the OpenCollection ecosystem, invest in performance and extensibility, build deeper integrations across the dev stack, etc.
- Enough financial stability to stop stressing every quarter about whether we’d make payroll.
People usually celebrate this part of the journey. For me, it created a different feeling — the weight of having said one thing, and then building something that required different choices.
That brings me to the essence of this post.
Owning it
Looking back, I am sorry. It was naive of me to make those claims from a limited perspective without factoring in the trade-offs of building something at scale. I own that, and I’m putting it behind me.
To the people who’ve been along for the ride and understood the journey, thank you. To those who disagreed or expected something else, I understand that too.
I continue to lead and build Bruno with the same core intent: make something developers genuinely love, and keep pushing it forward.
The path looks different than I thought it would. The goal doesn’t.
Best,
Anoop