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Building a Developer Tools Business

manifold.co

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Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#21

Post by faeyanpiraat »

corentin88 wrote: post #13
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?

The security market is predicted to grow substantially.

This gives space to new entrants.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#22

Post by jasonkester »

I find that the key thing to overcome when selling to developers is the extreme reluctance to spend money buying something that they can build themselves. You see,

1.) Developers love to build things.

2.) Developers hate spending money.

3.) Developers undervalue their time.

If your product looks like it would have been fun to build, you'll lose the entire "insufficiently supervised developer" demographic. Those guys will happily spend tens of thousands of dollars of billable hours implementing an in-house version of your thing to avoid the possibility of outgrowing your Free Tier.

I've seen this play out with S3stat customers (which costs $10/month, or three minutes twenty seconds of fully loaded engineer cost), where somebody will spend a week building an in-house version of the service and standing up a server to run it. Nicely done. You'll break even on your investment in 21 years.

I've had moderate success with my latest API product pointing to a "Boss Page" that outlines things like build-vs-buy costs, and why you really would be better off paying us for this thing rather than dedicating an in-house guy to building and maintaining it.

It's a tough one.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#23

Post by jon-wood »

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…

This is something I'm hitting up against a lot at work currently. Our application is high volume, with a significant proportion of users who don't bring in any recurring revenue, which makes us very cautious about picking up new SaaS services which are billed on a per-user basis.

We went through the same process around Auth0, and eventually built our own solution for handling authentication because even with our current user volume all Auth0 would tell us on pricing was "contact sales", which tends to be the case with every product we look at these days.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#24

Post by felixnavid »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #19
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-sta…

I wasn't able to find the free tier plan on your site. Free tier would mean: 2 PDF templates, 100 API requests/month or something similar. All I could find was a 2 weeks trial. Maybe consider adding a true "pay as you go" tier with a small amount of money/PDF template and, something perfect for startups and don't start with a $49 tier.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#25

Post by thomasmarcelis »

FBISurveillance wrote: post #6

Call me cynical, but this article looks like one of those ghost-written SEO articles for self-promotion and improving search result position. Take a look at DigitalOcean's articles and compare to this one: night and day.

Sure looks like it. Part one, two and three are written by three different "Guest authors", who are freelance technical writers.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#26

Post by nathan_f77 »

felixnavid wrote: post #24
nathan_f77 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-sta…

I wasn't able to find the free tier plan on your site. Free tier would mean: 2 PDF templates, 100 API requests/month or something similar. All I could find was a 2 weeks trial. Maybe consider adding a true "pay as you go" tier with a small amount of money/PDF template and, something perfect for startups and don't start with a $49 tier.

Sorry yes I meant I don't have a free tier now, and have been thinking about adding one. Thanks for the suggestions! I've also been thinking about adding a "pay as you go" credit system similar to Twilio, but I'm not 100% sure if it would be a good business model.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#27

Post by fanylad »

sqs wrote: post #4

I would also recommend dev tools founders (really any founder) read GitLab’s company handbook at https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ , especially the sales and marketing sections. It’s awesome how public they are about how they operate. You’ll learn a lot. We (Sourcegraph) have started our own company handbook ( https://about.sourcegraph.com/handbook ), inspired by GitLab. So far it has helped new teammates onboard mo…

Thanks for sharing https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/. Definitely a must-read for development tools founders.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#29

Post by bartread »

jasonkester wrote: post #22

I find that the key thing to overcome when selling to developers is the extreme reluctance to spend money buying something that they can build themselves. You see, 1.) Developers love to build things. 2.) Developers hate spending money. 3.) Developers undervalue their time. If your product looks like it would have been fun to build, you'll lose the entire "insufficiently supervised developer" demographic. Those guys…

Whilst I've seen this, I think it's more about company and leadership culture than software developer preferences.

Our developers are far from profligate but they'll certainly kick and scream at me if we can't spend money on a tool or service that's going to make their jobs easier and allow them to deliver value more quickly.

To be coarsely mercantile about it, I want our teams to invest the vast majority of their time building systems and services we can sell. In turn, they've mostly come from backgrounds where the software they've built is widely used outside of the business they've been employed by, so again that pushes in the direction of doing things that add maximum value for customers, rather than NIH.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#30

Post by TAForObvReasons »

jasonkester wrote: post #22

I find that the key thing to overcome when selling to developers is the extreme reluctance to spend money buying something that they can build themselves. You see, 1.) Developers love to build things. 2.) Developers hate spending money. 3.) Developers undervalue their time. If your product looks like it would have been fun to build, you'll lose the entire "insufficiently supervised developer" demographic. Those guys…

Keep in mind your s3stat product costs $10/month _today_. Plenty of developers and teams have been burned by SaaS solutions that either shut down or blindsided users with a 10x or 100x price increase, so they will naturally price your service under the assumption that the costs will skyrocket in the near future.
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