The important point here is that he got funding first, and it sounds like at least half a million because he didn't talk about begging angels for money or running out of runway. He was able to hire someone fast. You won't be this good/lucky. In the traditional non-traditional startup you need a salesperson and engineering to be free, because money. I suppose with dev tools you can get rid of the salesperson because y…
FYI, people believe that dev tools don't make money, but atlassian, pagerduty, zendesk, etc show that there is a market. And most tools kind of suck.
But that market size overall is small, and the number of players is large.
The entire dev tools market is consistently estimated at around 5 billion right now, and only 11-12 billion 5 years from now. The CAGR is about 13-14%.
ML, which appeared out of nowhere, is estimated at ~15-20 billion right now, and 100-200 billion in 5 years. The CAGR is ~40% right now.
(The estimates vary on whether they think CAGR slows down or not, etc, hence the variation 5 years from now).
In one of these markets, you need to be a big fish in a small pond, but you'd have to take out established players to do it.
In the other, you at least might stand a chance of building something new that takes over as the market grows 10x.
In the o