With Baseshift, development teams get masked, writable clones of the database they already run, one for every coding agent and every pull request. The company started as DubHub, a bootstrapped tool for pulling real data into a local development environment.
The artifact
The website copy I wrote for DubHub. The product was in beta and the audience was small and mid-sized businesses. There was no marketing team and no similar company whose website I could look at, so the founder and I did the positioning and the writing together on a fractional engagement.
As of September 2026 the Baseshift homepage still leads on the idea in this document, an isolated, writable, masked copy of an existing database, now across Postgres, MySQL and MariaDB.
The thinking
The product had to be explained before it could be sold. Developers knew shift-left from security and from testing, but nobody was using that concept for database work. Developers were writing code against fake data or small samples, only testing against anything like the real database near the end of the development cycle, because copying production data was slow and the copy held real customer information that should never be on any laptop.
So the copy explains the change to the way developers work first, setting up the problem in anticipation of this breakthrough product. The benefits are disk space, time, cost, and whether someone else can break your code while working with DubHub. At the same time, you can also see the copy treats security seriously, as naturally this question would also be raised by this audience of buyers.
