We want to help folks improve the quality of their software by making bug and issue tracking approachable for even the least technical people. We believe that by enabling more team members to be involved sooner, your software will be better both in terms of fewer problems and a better fit for the people that will ultimately use it.

So what’s our deal?

• We’re obsessive about helping you improve the quality of your software. We don’t want to just sell you an issue tracker. Our goal is to help you learn and adopt the tools and techniques that will help you ship higher quality software even if Sifter isn’t right for your team.

• We’ve always been profitable with zero outside investment. We’re customer funded and profitable so we only ever answer to our customers—nobody else.

Our Story

In the early 2000s, Garrett Dimon was frustrated with the bug trackers on the market. He tried bug tracker after bug tracker. They were all powerful, but they were missing one big feature: participation.

Developers are almost always happy with the power and flexibility of the various bug trackers they try. Unfortunately, due to the complexity of most tools, non-technical clients and team members avoid them like the plague and just email their bugs and issues. As a result, things slip through the cracks. On top of that, most of the tools charge per user even though some might only use it for a couple of weeks.

At every turn, the tools were preventing collaboration rather than fostering it. Thus began Garrett’s quest to find an issue tracking solution that put an emphasis on participation and being user-friendly. Because, if people won’t use it, the amount of features didn’t really matter.

At the end of 2007, after years of sketching and toying with issue tracking ideas, Garrett began sharing some mockups of ideas to make issue tracking more friendly and approachable. He didn’t have any specific plans, but as he shared the ideas, he discovered that he wasn’t alone. There was a whole world of people who were having the same problems.

In December of 2008, Sifter was born. Garrett ran Sifter for eight years as a successful, bootstrapped business then, in February of 2016, he passed the torch to Simple Focus. Garrett wrote about it on his blog, and we wrote about it on ours. Simple Focus is also a bootstrapped business and shares the same values as Garrett, but with a larger team.

Simple Focus runs Sifter with a small distributed team spread primarily throughout Tennessee. Not everyone is full-time, but we are regularly putting in work on Sifter in one form or fashion. In addition to Sifter, we also created a Software Quality Academy to help teams grow and improve their quality assurance processes.