Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Building a Developer Tools Business

manifold.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 73 posts

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#41

Post by ChefboyOG »

bachmeier wrote: post #31
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…

This simplified view misses some critical points: - The product won't do things exactly the way you want. If you build it yourself, you get it the way that you wish it had been built. - You're investing in someone else's product. Everything you invest in training and customization is wasted if you have to move to something else. You no longer have to worry about tech support either. - You're locking yourself into som…

I think I generally agree with this, but that the bigger data point in any "build vs buy" debate is around the expertise/time available on the team vs the scale of the project.

For example, I worked at a 30ish person startup that was a little less than half engineers. Our product had a ton of traffic, and our growth/sales teams had outgrown the small bundle of cheap/free marketing tools we'd cobbled together. But marketing automation is expensive—so a couple engineers spent time trying to build our own version, insisting it was doable and that it would fit our use cases much better because it was built for them.

The reality is they spent two months working on a marketing automation solution that kind of worked, but was missing the robustness of a normal product that had been built by a dedicated team of engineers over years. The other issue was that those engineers now owned their solution—bugs, feature requests, etc. they were essentially running a second product now.

Eventually, for the sake of their time and our productivity, we just bought software. We could have done it months earlier and saved everyone time and frustration.

I realize this post is specifically about dev tools, but I think the logic is more or less transferrable.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#43

Post by iamthepieman »

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…

Those items don't apply universally or only with caveats though.

1. Developers love to build things that they want to or are paid to. If you had to develop every tool you used for work and bootstrap a complete system you would learn a ton, but not get much done on whatever the original task was.

2. Developers hate using up mental space more than they hate spending money. If I subscribe to your subscription only development tool then I have this little ping in the back of my head whenever I use it or whenever I get an email from you. "Hmm, when does this renew? Is it still worth it? What does this do again?" This is the reason I don't like subscription models. If you're constantly changing and breaking things then that's even worse. The big reason I don't buy things besides the above is that I just get tired of having to justify it and possibly expense it or wait for approval so if it's not something I personally want enough to spend my own money on, I won't' buy it.

3. I mean, maybe someone right out of college or someone with no other constraints besides work on their time. But I covet my time and guard it as my most precious resource.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#44

Post by zimbatm »

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…

Purchasing is also an expensive operation. Depending on the company, this might taking a few meetings scheduled over the course of multiple weeks. Maybe fill a procurement form. All things the developer hates.

Once that's done, the service has to be integrated with their Single-sign on platform. If they are lucky. Otherwise they will have to use a shared password manager, which is likely an excel sheet in the shared drive.

Or they can develop a quick hack, spin up a few servers on AWS that cost much more per month than the service. But they can do it on their own schedule. That's the big difference once you are setup as an approved vendor in a big organization.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#45

Post by AlchemistCamp »

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…

> 2.) Developers hate spending money.

I don't think this one is true at all. In my experience, developers tend to spend far more than most on education, gadgets, health supplements, memberships, and even food than non-devs.

As a digital nomad, I've seen a lot of devs in a lot of places and it's not uncommon to see them spend more on pure consumption than the average person in their home county earns in total!

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#46

Post by pxtail »

_f9cu wrote: post #33

Developers hate to buy stuffs. thats why they build stuffs. Few weeks your tool is out in market, some outraged developer is going to release a free version.

This is very true, that's what always puts me off when "new exciting idea" about developers-related tool or service comes to my mind. Additionally developers themselves are in their own niche so even if at first sight your brand new product seems to be innovative and non-existing on the market then it's very likely that it already exists in some form.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#47

Post by brutt »

akrymski wrote: post #34
jbob2000 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument works at small scales. My company is working with a vendor who quoted us $10mil for an e-commerce solution. Our execs are now toying with the idea of upgrading our existing solution with a few in-house additions, which might total $2-3mil over a few years. When you scale up, sometimes in house is the only option.

Wow I’d love to know what the e-commerce solution is for. And happy to build it for $1m.

You can extend closed source third party system for just $1m? What you will do when authors of system will just say "No" to your proposal to change/fix/revert something in their system, which is essential for your plugin to work?

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#48

Post by an_d_rew »

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…

In addition to the other responses to this post I’ll add the following: I can easily claim a couple days of my time on a side project at work especially if I can show any kind of return for it. But put $10 on the company credit card?! Every month?! No freaking way! The layers of bureaucracy to get approval for such a monumental undertaking are just… Daunting…

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#49

Post by icebraining »

scarejunba wrote: post #16
teddyuk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm pretty sure they do. You can even sponsor a tag.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#50

Post by golergka »

> Docs should be detailed, easy to read, and packed with examples.

But aside from all the examples and tutorials, please don't forget about a proper manual and full API docs. I've seen too many different tools and tech that have spent a lot of money on writing up the happy path, but then completely left me on my own when I encountered some weird error code.

Just follow the structure of the whole API you have, and make sure that each member, each function argument and each possible return value is documented. It's not as glamorous as "one button integration" - but that one button integration usually turns into nightmare when you want to wire it up to your automatic builds anyway.

Post reply on HN