Do companies care about their front end performance?

Question

I've worked as a frontend developer for a few years, and I am developing PerfBeacon.com to automatically audit the performance of sites I build. Mainly so that I don't have to do it manually any more.I've talked to a few dozen people in web development to try to figure out if other people would find this useful, though most of the feedback has been that performance is more of a "nice to have", and that their company is more worried about releasing features.Am I just talking to the wrong people HN, or do companies in general not care?

mtmail · Accepted Answer

We're a small SaaS and do a regular, usually quarterly, "speed day" where we look at various reports. Any files we could compress further (or combine in the pre-http/2 times)? Is the hardware still adequate? Do we cache enough? So it's important. But outside of most pricing ranges for automated tools since we only have one website with few pages and don't check the reports often enough.
Don't let that discourage you. $29 month is a reasonable price for the number of tests, especially for companies. Charging annual makes sense at the early bootstrap stage. (Our smallest plan is $50, we loose some customers, possibly to the competition but we target B2B primarily).
Website https://perfbeacon.com/ looks good, add more features and content, improve in small steps, marketing of course and just be patient until the customers come.
I'm following https://twitter.com/sinequanonh on Twitter and it's amazing how every small step seems to bring in more revenue. (His service that pings websites and reports latency performance)