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Building a Developer Tools Business

manifold.co

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Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#51

Post by zbentley »

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…

> 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.

Far more likely you will prove to have underestimated part of it or overestimated yourself, and will make something less capable and even farther from your personal ideal than the off-the-shelf version. And that's to say nothing of the bugs and maintenance burden. And even if you surmount those obstacles, you'll probably have to make huge sacrifices in functionality or reliability because, unlike the vendors of the off-the-shelf version, you have other things to do as well (or your boss has other things for you to do).

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#52

Post by Fiahil »

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…

As a developer, I would be happy to pay you instead of having to develop and maintain a close cousin of your product for an obscene amount of time investment.

However, I often encounter these roadblocks :

1) The product is not opensource and I can't tweak the 2 line of code I need to make it work with - for example - a different OIDC provider without opening a feature request that will take forever to ship.

2) The product is a SAAS one. Company policies, network security and common sense prohibit me from sending any data to an external provider that is not vetted. Sorry.

3) It's difficult to ship (enterprise) software that would require acquisition of a commercial license from a dependency in order to work as expected. It's doable for a critical piece that you can't replace, but it's really cumbersome when every single piece start asking for a license in order to work. As someone setting up some infrastructure, I don't like to depend on batches of commercial software either because renewals are a pain.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#53

Post by JamesBarney »

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…

> - The "developer cost" is tricky. Salespeople like to pretend that you can calculate that using someone's salary. If you have an $80/hour developer spending five hours on something like this, you don't literally write a check for $400. Instead, that developer might have been doing something useful, but might also have been in a meeting or responding to email or just sitting around. One argument for 20% time is that the 20% spent on that work wouldn't have been used productively anyway.

This is actually a lower bound on the opportunity cost of having your developer work on purchasable items.

- If the dev is making $80/hr they should be adding more value to the organization than $80/hr.

- If 20% of your devs are working on purchasable items you'll need to hire another ~20% to replace them, but then you'll need 20% more managers, QA, etc..

- Developer productivity isn't linear, if you hire twice as many devs you don't get twice as much code written.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#54

Post by deedubaya »

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…

I built a developer tool for a niche as a side project, and it became cash flow positive quickly. I'm shutting it down tho.

All the points you made ring true, making every sale a slog, even if its a relatively low LTV.

Additionally, support was relatively not fun -- mostly "I didn't even attempt to read the docs, and it is your fault".

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#55

Post by andrethegiant »

znq wrote: post #40
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. A thousand times. We are developers ourself. 4 years ago we built a great tool (a remote logger for mobile apps)[1] internally for ourselves. We had such a huge benefit from it when developing mobile apps, we thought this tool must be very useful to other developers as well. It was a no brainer to turn it into a SaaS product. But we had no clue about how to market it to people. So we started reading every book…

Did you put any ad spend behind those blog posts, or did traffic come organically?

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#56

Post by rstupek »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #45
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!

I think op is saying developers hate spending money on development tools. Free tools beats for pay tools even when the for pay tool is better by an order of magnitude

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#57

Post by shantly »

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…

Developers do this. On the flip side, "product owners" or clients or "stakeholders" or whatever will, not infrequently, propose a little feature that is someone else's entire product.

I always try to point this out when it happens, and advise them to just pay for it, unless they want to create a competing product.

Bonus points for such requests when that feature/other-person's-product is probably more lucrative than the entire actual product they're trying to build. Which does happen, and never fails to be funny.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#58

Post by shantly »

arvinsim wrote: post #38
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…

> 3.) Developers undervalue their time. I must admit that this made me pause and contemplate my relationship with time at work.

I think there's a lot of inefficiency, actually, in a lot of orgs, because devs are highly paid but can't (for whatever reason) be permitted much status at all, which includes other employees whose job it is to do data entry & bureaucratic communication and such that doesn't require a developer's direct input (as having such people to delegate tasks to is a major status thing, nevermind whether it'd make a ton of business sense).

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#59

Post by shantly »

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…

Bingo. Risk is what keeps me off anything without a cap on billing. If I spend $25/mo on Digital Ocean, that number's not gonna change unless I tell it to. My site may go down, but I won't accidentally run up a five-figure bill on a just-getting-started side project that's not guaranteed to ever generate revenue.

That and having to keep up with a bunch of different bills.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#60

Post by _bxg1 »

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 a similar vein it usually sounds much more appealing to do ten weeks of fun work, instead of one week of annoying and banal work (fiddling with configuration, writing glue, navigating customer support/pricing). Even if this is an irrational use of resources.

So setting up and using the thing needs to be not just easier than doing it yourself, but significantly easier than doing it yourself.

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