Building a Developer Tools Business • Hacker News Board

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#71

Post by znq » Fri, Nov 15, 2019, 11:13 AM UTC

andrethegiant wrote: post #55

znq wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We tried ads, but that didn't work. Whether developers just block or ignore them, or we didn't figure out the right message, I don't know.

So all of our traffic is now organic.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#72

Post by camhart » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 12:06 AM UTC

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…

Auth0 has done some dirty pricing changes as well. They dropped pricing for a while then raised it a ton. Basically pinching everyone who started using their service.

Re: Building a Developer Tools Business

#73

Post by scarejunba » Tue, Nov 26, 2019, 10:02 AM UTC

mjwhansen wrote: post #68

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…

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

Love your stuff, but I'm semi-anonymous here so I don't want to undo that. I do appreciate the offer, though :)