Antithesis for founders
In the Lobsters discussion of Alex Weisberger’s excellent roundup of Bug Bash 2025, somebody quoted me as saying we would “march relentlessly down-market.” In fact, we’ve already secretly taken the first step in that inexorable march, and now I’m here to announce the next one.
Let’s recap the story so far: Antithesis launched with a product that was high-touch and significantly mediated by our services team. We did this very deliberately: partly so we could study how our customers used the platform, partly so we could make sure our first few customers were outrageously successful, and partly because we hadn’t finished the product and were using people to fill in the gaps.1 But we are not the sort of VC-backed startup that’s interested in selling a dollar for fifty cents, so the high-touch nature of the offering meant that people had to buy quite a lot of testing in order for a deal to make economic sense for us.
That was going fine, and we found lots of people who were interested in buying a lot of testing. We also had to turn away some incredible people and companies who wanted to buy a small amount of testing. That sucked, but it was the right thing to do, because we were either going to lose money on those deals or give people a bad experience, and we didn’t want either of those things.
And then one day, a customer asked us at contract renewal time if they could strike the entire services portion of the deal because “your platform is self-serve now, we don’t use that team.” What the heck??? When did that happen????? But sure enough, the customer was correct. They were kinda just using Antithesis through the interfaces we provide: our SDKs, multiverse debugger, and webhook API. And they were succeeding, flourishing even.
Now, this customer had had the benefit of months of support from our services team before they took off on their own. But the product had actually also been getting better, the interfaces more accessible and polished… It had just crept up on us, we hadn’t noticed it the same way you don’t notice your baby getting bigger each day, until suddenly one morning you wake up and they’re playing the piano.
So we decided to do a little test…
We gave a (insanely-smart, high-agency) person access to the platform with no hand-holding at all, just our public docs and a Discord channel, to see what they could do. That guinea pig was Carl Sverre over at Graft, and you can read in his own words what the experience was like. He’s described the process of unassisted onboarding as “rough”, “brutal”, “like crawling over broken glass”, and various other flattering descriptions – but he’s also talked about how liberating it is to test with Antithesis, how much velocity and confidence it creates in his development process:
“It turned testing into a dialogue. Instead of asserting what I already knew, I was constantly learning what I didn’t. That feedback loop exposed subtle design flaws, false assumptions, and concurrency edge cases buried deep in Graft’s replication engine…
Antithesis isn’t just a bug finder – it reshapes how we think about testing. Instead of hand-crafting brittle integration tests, developers define high-level properties and let Antithesis explore the system. A passing property builds confidence. A failing one exposes gaps – missing coverage, incorrect assumptions, blind spots in your mental model.
Best of all, this process compounds. Each new property makes exploration smarter. Each new test command expands the accessible subset of the multiverse. Over time, your test suite evolves into something greater than the sum of its parts: a dynamic system that continuously pushes itself toward correctness.”
So this is an existence proof that one can use Antithesis unassisted. But we didn’t want to over-interpret the results, because Carl is an exceptional individual. That’s okay though. We don’t need this to be usable by every developer on Earth this year. We just need to find more people like Carl.
So we’re here to announce the “Founder Package”: if you’re a technical founder of an early-stage startup, and you want to buy just a small amount of testing, and you’re willing to grit your teeth a bit, then you too can benefit from Antithesis today. Founders are the perfect audience for a product that isn’t quite perfectly self-serve yet, but produces ridiculous amounts of value for those willing to put up with it. That’s because founders are used to chewing broken glass if it improves their company’s chances, and they’re the kind of people who make things work even if something’s a little (a lot) hard.
This will still cost some money – a few thousand dollars a month in most cases. If you are pre-seed and truly strapped for cash, we will ask our venture partners at Amplify and Spark to help us evaluate whether we can accept some payment in your company equity. I actually like the idea of owning stock in our customers – it makes the alignment of interests very straightforward.
We can’t do an unlimited number of these, because we still want to provide a small amount of hand-holding and to interrogate you about how it went. We think five companies is the correct number. If you’re interested, you can apply here.
Happy Testing.
