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Building a Developer Tools Business

manifold.co

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Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#61

Post by ryeguy_24 »

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…

Really having trouble garnishing interest in a tool I built (deltatrail.io) so naturally I was intrigued with this article. Seems like the "I can build this myself" response is common even though I know many would rather not (even if they could). What I think I'm gathering is that, a solution needs to be immediately useful. My tool which is a "this may help you down the line" (it actually will) but doesn't provide immediate benefit. They say it's easier to sell Advil than Vitamins, right?

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#62

Post by shantly »

enlyth wrote: post #36
jon-wood wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 curr…

Auth0 quoted us 25 - 50k a year for 7K MAU, we found this insanely high as we don't handle any sensitive data. It seems we might use Amazon Cognito, which seems a bit rough / neglected when it comes to aws products but the difference is basically free up to 50K MAU. Couldn't find a nice middle ground, Okta and the others were all prohibitively expensive as well.

If you don't mind sharing, what was it from Auth0's "call us" column for pricing that bumped you up to that tier? Middle one is still high, but under $25k, let alone $50k, for 7k MAU.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#63

Post by exolymph »

JamesBarney wrote: post #53
bachmeier wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> if you hire twice as many devs you don't get twice as much code written.

or if you do, that could be a bad thing ;P

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#64

Post by exolymph »

pxtail wrote: post #46
_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.

SaaS businesses succeed based on the service part, not the software part.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#65

Post by scarejunba »

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…

Huh, I'm not in the market so I'm afraid I don't know. Maybe someone else here who needs this will know.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#66

Post by scarejunba »

pmjordan wrote: post #18
scarejunba wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Google does this by giving you credits that expire in six months. I think that works well.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#67

Post by bachmeier »

zbentley wrote: post #51
bachmeier wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 surmo…

Just to be clear, I'm not necessarily arguing that it's optimal to create your own tools. I will, however, object to claims that creating tools is all about saving money. Having the right tool and having control over your tools is a big deal.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#68

Post by mjwhansen »

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…

Co-founder of Geocodio here :) Glad to hear our free tier model worked for you all. Would love to send some swag your way -- send me your address! mhansen (at) geocod (dot) io

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#69

Post by nailer »

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.

> 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.

DigitalOcean's SEO articles are also for self-promotion and improving search result position. IIRC they pay some of the volunteer authors in DO credits.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#70

Post by ahaferburg »

Most importantly, polish the tool.

I'm not going to get my boss to pay for something that is made out of duct tape. If you want to sell something to people who probably know how to build it themselves, you need to impress them with something shiny. While it should work perfectly most of the time, it should also come with helpful error messages when it doesn't like the input. If I come across some cryptic, ungooglable internal error or access violation or assertion where I'd have to contact support to even understand what's wrong, I'd rather delete your tool immediately.

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