Four tips for early stage DevTools

By far the most important thing that is so easy to get wrong, I've got it wrong, I see so many of my friends get it wrong, is to really understand the problem that you're solving and to spend a lot of time talking to people that have that problem. The best person in the world to learn about this from is definitely Adam Frankel.

Where in this formula are you talking to the developers? Now the developer is talking to you. Right? It's not gonna happen naturally unless you make it happen. And so after decades of working at it, right, I finally put together the pieces and figured out, okay, how can I create a system that is gonna give me feedback in a way that's actually valuable to the people that I'm working with?

And then you wanna talk to them about the problem. And that's hard. Why is that hard? Because you're a developer. Okay? You've you've thought about the problem. You've thought about a solution to it, and then you spent years thinking about your solution. You think about different approaches. You think about why you're selecting the one you're selecting. You think about the obstacles.

You think about how you overcame the obstacles. You you think about all the different aspects of your solution. You think about the different trade offs you made, the different design decisions you made. Right? What you learned across the way. Your mind is full of how it works. Okay? But that's not what developers want to talk about. It's what you want to talk about. But it's not what they want to talk about.

What developers want to talk about is the problem. Okay? And that's what you need to talk about. Yeah. You need to talk about the problem with them. And most developers, believe it or not, are eager to talk about the problem. They're not so eager to talk about how your product works. Okay? Because they have problems. They have severe problems.

All developers have problems. And guess what? They've tried to talk about it with people, and no one else cares, okay? Their partner doesn't care. Their boss doesn't care. Their kids don't care. Right? And you get them on Zoom, and you're a startup founder, which immediately you have some level of credibility. Right? And you care about their problems, they won't shut up.

Right? So it's a matter of the startup founder needing to understand the problem deeply and developers needing to talk about the problem deeply. Just get together and do this. But it's so hard because it's not natural for anyone.

So when you execute a technical advisory board, you're in the idea harvesting business. Right? You wanna listen and capture everyone's ideas, which means that you need to interview people 1 at a time. Because if you interview them 2 at a time, you'll lose half the ideas. Mhmm. Not all the ideas are gonna be great, but in order to find the great ideas, you have to listen to them all. Okay. So there's no assembly. All tab interviews are done 1 on 1. Okay?

And then how do you find people? Well, to be honest, LinkedIn is great. Yeah. Right? Everyone you ever wanna meet is there, and their resume is on LinkedIn. Right? So you need to come up with some hypotheses. I mean, when I say you, I'm I'm assuming you're a founder of a developer facing startup. Right? So Yeah.

These come with some hypotheses about who's influencing the adoption of your technology. Right? A wide range of of job titles. And then and companies and types of companies and countries, and then go look for them.

What are the different styles of tweets? What are other people successful with? You know, like a little bit of memes, a little bit of, like, developer centric questions, a little bit of pushing the product. I'm finding that blend over time. I'm equally going to Reddit and, you know, testing out the strategy for different subreddits.

It's all about and we've tried all kinds. We've tried, you know, Instagram, TikTok, in person meetups and just learning the, you know, the efficiency basically of each channel. We just kind of discovered what what worked and what didn't.

And they're doing really well. They've got a lot of customers, but he has this inclination to code. He loves coding still, even though he has a cofounder that also codes. And so if he's coding and his cofounder's coding, no one is actually doing this uncomfortable go to market stuff. And so we spoke yesterday about it, and he's like, yes.

Crap. Like, I actually just need to spend all my time doing this stuff I don't really wanna do, which is, like, actually promoting notification API. Another lesson which was just a complete moment for me was when I spoke to Zeno from resend. And he talks about the importance of that last mile, that packaging. So spending an insane amount of time on the read me and how it's presented and all the descriptions and all this stuff that is so easy to just, like, leave till the last minute and throw it out there after you did the hard, like, core logic of your dev tool.

Like just like my name in in this repo. And a lot of people were asking like, oh, how did you get so many stars in such a short amount of time and, like all this attention? And what what happened with that specific open source library was I spent 2 weeks building that before it launched. And only, like, 3 days were in the actual source code of the library, and the rest was all in the documentation page and on the website. So I really wanted, like, a very nice read me and a very nice website.

And when you go to the website, and you can go now if you want, you'll see that it's extremely simple. There's there's enough like, it's no big deal. Like, you go there, it's, like, super simple. But I wanted to make sure that it's, like, the flow was good, that the tagline was impactful. That the first intro was, like, it explained the why, and I wanted to make sure we started with the why.

And then the first demo is very, like, familiar. So we do, like, the GitHub input with the copy, which, you know, like, you would you do that for copying the GitHub, Git URL to clone the repo. So, like, various, like, things that are are very simple, but I I I feel like most developers, they spend most of their time doing the source code and not thinking about how they're gonna distribute and market and and teach people how to do it. Whereas, like, you should maybe do, like, 5050, you know, like or maybe 80 to any even. That's how how insane insanely important it is if you wanna stand out.

Nowadays, it's so hard to stand out. So if you just do the bare minimum, like, oh, I pushed to GitHub. Yeah. Anyone can do that, but who can do like a read me that really flows well, that makes sense, that it's exciting you wanna share with your friends, wanna start using your company, at your open source, at your side project on a Saturday afternoon. So, like, many people missed that.

So the idea of it's better to be different than better is this idea that if I do the same as the rest but slightly better, nobody will notice. If I do something scrappy and colors. But very unique and very different, I think people will notice and will make a huge, huge difference. And I think that's something that I think is important. I also hear a lot of, companies talk about that for growth and for marketing, what's the most important thing is data.

I agree that data is important because it helps you iterate and become better. But data doesn't give you creative ideas. Data doesn't tell you exactly where to focus on. That's where I think having tastes, good gut feeling, and creativity, I think is a must for any marketing and growth team where you actually can do some research. I believe more in qualitative research that's a that rather than qualitative at first because you understand more specifics, more details you hear.

And then once you have that, you can come up with more, I think, creative strategies. Like, I'll give you a few examples, but one creative strategy, for example, that, Clerk, for example, that is a customer worked on is this van. They built a van that I love. They bought it. They put basically Clerk all around the images and everything.

And now every time there's a meetup in San Francisco or something, they just park the van in front. Sometimes they make cookies, so people smell the the smell it basically and like it. Otherwise, they just have the van. But having something that goes every night to meetups where developers are, where they show up is a thing that doesn't scale, but it's creative. It's like, wow.

That one is really cool. Another one, for example, that GitLab did that I loved was, GitHub did an event where they had very bad food, very bad food on GitHub universe. So what GitLab did was they rented the best taco truck in the Bay or where they were doing the event. They put some stickers on top of it just to make it scrappy, and then they sent a message like, if you're at gift card universe and the food sucks, we got the best tacos in town for you to try it out. And there was, like, a queue of people there who then went back with their cap that says GitLab with a sticker and the napkins and stuff like that.

And that's are the things that then people remember, that people notice, and that I think are are unique.

Don't trust the books. Don't even trust getting DevTools. And then spend a ridiculous amount of time on the last mile, that packaging, do what Zeno did, and spend all the time on the read me. Make it really great. And be different.

Follow Gonzo's advice, and try and bring something new to the table, and not just do what everyone else is doing. And the one that none of them say, but I can say for me is every time I have done the thing I don't wanna do, post on Reddit, create an article. It's really helped. And Streampart, the dev tool that I'm working on is is very early stage, have some users, have a very small amount of paying customers. But the things that have worked have been when I've, kind of, swallowed that uncomfortable feeling and put it out there and really put a lot of time into the, kind of, packaging and actually trying to distribute it.

So I hope this is helpful. We'll be back to regular scheduling next week. We have some really, really exciting guests coming up soon.