Three years ago, I got up at 6 am on a Friday morning, excited to press “go” and introduce Percy to the world. 🚀

I think I expected to get some coverage and initial interest—and I made sure the infrastructure could handle a big traffic spike, just in case—but what ended up happening far exceeded my expectations.

Over the course of the day, I watched our “Show HN” post climb quickly to the top of Hacker News, and it stayed at #1 the whole day. 😲

We continued to be in the Top 10 even days later, and ended up bringing in over 35,000+ unique visitors from around the world. Developers everywhere seemed really curious to learn what “continuous visual integration” meant!

In that first post, I penned a lofty mission for Percy: make continuous visual integration so simple and fast that it becomes a mainstream engineering practice.

Since then, a lot has changed. Though we have a much deeper understanding of the problem and often use different words today (and we now have a real marketing person, instead of me!), the mission remains the same: enable teams to ship products faster with confidence in every visual change.

Although our space is still evolving, and we all still struggle a bit explaining what “visual testing” is to those outside the field, it’s growing and growing quickly.

How do we know that?

Since Percy’s launch in May 2015, we’ve rendered over 75,000,000 screenshots and visual diffs.

75M not only represents the number of times we’ve opened a browser and rendered screenshots (over 50 years in raw compute power), but we measure this in terms of confidence gained in each release, and countless hours saved doing manual visual QA. It shows a glimpse into how we’re starting to change developer and design team processes and help people gain new levels of confidence that would be impossible to reach otherwise.

In getting to this milestone, my co-founder Tim and I have committed to thoughtfully building Percy from the ground up, keeping our mission top of mind, and building out a crafty and diverse team who embodies it. Each year we’ve gotten a bit closer to that goal, and are learning more about the intricacies of the challenge and opportunity at hand. We still have a long way to go, and it’s getting more exciting each day!

Looking back, I wanted to share a few of the things that we have learned in building the product and business over the last three years.