I’ve been writing the console.dev devtools newsletter every week now for 4 years. I’ve also angel invested in >30 devtools startups.
Over this time I’ve seen a lot of launches, product releases, investment pitches, attempts at getting developers to use something new, press announcements, meetups, events…
The most important lesson I’ve learned is that most developers do not focus enough on go-to-market. Whether that is from technical startup founders or developers pushing something out to the open source community, just releasing is insufficient. Too many people still believe the cliche of “build it and they will come”.
If you just want to focus on cool technology, by all means, have fun! Create tools for yourself or make your GitHub repo public. That’s great. But don’t expect many people to use it.
You have to put in just as much time into driving demand as you do building. From Sid Sijbrandij, CEO of GitLab:
Startup CEOs are entrepreneurs. They focus on driving demand and are tasked with generating momentum and turning momentum into revenue. They talk to users and potential customers and share insights to influence product direction…To grow, there needs to be a great product and someone needs to sell that product—you can’t have one without the other…As product improvements are made, the CEO tests them with real users. They bring back real-life feedback that guides the direction of the next set of improvements.
This is something I’ve been trying to put into practice at Arcjet. After building the initial prototype, I hired capable, experienced engineers to take over and help take it to production.
Then since our first private beta users in Dec last year, I’ve been shifting my time to spend more and more on go-to-market – getting user feedback, writing blog posts, collaborating with partners, iterating on pricing, recording podcasts, organizing events…
So if anyone ever asks me for startup advice, the most important thing for technical founders is to either a) have someone on the founding team who can focus 100% on GTM; or b) be ready to do that yourself.
If that’s you, here are some useful resources for devtools startups:
- Scaling Devtools podcast
- Developer Markepear
- On developer marketing, by leerob
- The developer marketing funnel
- How to sell dev tools in 2023, by Anna Debenham