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Building a Developer Tools Business

manifold.co

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Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#11

Post by scarejunba »

neom wrote: post #10
scarejunba wrote: post #7

Here's my opinion without any credentials attached: * Free tier - essential * Documentation - essential * Stack overflow tag - desirable

How do you feel about a free tier vs a reasonable try before you buy?

Trial period? Hmm, I think they're both equivalent to me. I just want to give the platform a shot before I commit.

Geocod.io has a free tier and we used it at work until we bought the full thing. Google Cloud has a trial and I activated it and then didn't use it so I didn't actually get to try it.

So not quite equivalent, I suppose, since the lock-in is tighter with free tier. You never put anything critical on trial but you do on free tier.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#12

Post by foreign-inc »

There are a few rules:

- Don't be a solo founder, no body is going to fund you. Your idea may be crappy, you can pivot. But solo founder is a big no no, unless you are successful founder with a new venture.

- Either you or your co-founder is "the" person in your product area or you are able to hire someone who is. Developer tools companies always try to do this to become #1 (at least in twitter).

- You probably should make a new database or a security tool if you are in the B2B space. Otherwise you will have a very hard time making money.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#13

Post by corentin88 »

foreign-inc wrote: post #12

There are a few rules: - Don't be a solo founder, no body is going to fund you. Your idea may be crappy, you can pivot. But solo founder is a big no no, unless you are successful founder with a new venture. - Either you or your co-founder is "the" person in your product area or you are able to hire someone who is. Developer tools companies always try to do this to become #1 (at least in twitter). - You probably shoul…

Could you explain why do you think db or security tools are profitable only?

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#14

Post by teddyuk »

scarejunba wrote: post #7

Here's my opinion without any credentials attached: * Free tier - essential * Documentation - essential * Stack overflow tag - desirable

Stack overflow encourages people to create their own questions and answers.

For a new product would you think it odd if there was a load of questions and answers by the company - faqs sort of thing?

It would be a monitored tag so questions would get answered

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#15

Post by james_impliu »

DGCA wrote: post #3

I've noticed that a lot of paid dev tools are just priced too high or that I run the risk of blowing my budget depending on scale. I wish more paid dev tools were aware that I don't actually know my usage up-front, and that I'm scared of potentially ending up with a ridiculous bill if I overlook something. I totally get that it's on me, but things [like this]( https://hackernoon.com/how-we-spent-30k-usd-in-firebase-i…

Mixpanel was really frustrating in this regard

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#16

Post by scarejunba »

teddyuk wrote: post #14
scarejunba wrote: post #7

Here's my opinion without any credentials attached: * Free tier - essential * Documentation - essential * Stack overflow tag - desirable

Stack overflow encourages people to create their own questions and answers. For a new product would you think it odd if there was a load of questions and answers by the company - faqs sort of thing? It would be a monitored tag so questions would get answered

This wouldn't bother me as a user. I'm just going for questions and answers and if they're pre-asked and answered that's preferable. It's more of whether StackOverflow allows for that use.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#17

Post by davidjgraph »

As someone who first sold to devs and then switched, many years ago, to the largest end user market that we originally served (indirectly), if I did it all again I wouldn't bother with the first part.

It slightly depends where your price point is, but the issue is there are plenty of good devs and plenty of really bad devs. The bad ones pay you the annual maintenance and transform into help vampires. The problem is the issues are technical and complex and it sucks up developer time supporting them.

It happens in the end user market, sure, but it's easier to find non-technical first line support to clear out the noise.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#18

Post by pmjordan »

scarejunba wrote: post #11
neom wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you feel about a free tier vs a reasonable try before you buy?

Trial period? Hmm, I think they're both equivalent to me. I just want to give the platform a shot before I commit. Geocod.io has a free tier and we used it at work until we bought the full thing. Google Cloud has a trial and I activated it and then didn't use it so I didn't actually get to try it. So not quite equivalent, I suppose, since the lock-in is tighter with free tier. You never put anything critical on trial…

I don't necessarily need a free tier, but I find short trial periods to be unhelpful for something that needs a considerable time investments to truly try. Often I'll end up getting pulled away after starting a trial on something to do some critical bug fixing and other stuff, and then the 14 days are up without my having much of an idea if the product solves my problem.

I much prefer when the trial counts down some other finite resource that I have some control over, rather than wall time. For desktop software, number of days of actual use are a good option, for SaaS that's often difficult to measure sensibly. (Was the app open in a background tab somewhere? Oops, time's up.) So I'm much more likely to give a trial period with a fixed number of events/tickets/jobs/whatever a go.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#19

Post by nathan_f77 »

scarejunba wrote: post #7

Here's my opinion without any credentials attached: * Free tier - essential * Documentation - essential * Stack overflow tag - desirable

I would love to hear your thoughts about adding a free tier for my PDF filling service [1]. What's your first impression about the current pricing?

I experimented with a "pay as you go" plan that starts at $0 and includes some free PDFs, but so far I've earned close $0 from all of these customers. But this might just be because the people who asked about alternative pricing are much more price-sensitive and early-stage, while bigger companies don't think twice about $49/mo.

[1] http://docspring.com

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