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> Developers love building developer tools, often for free. So while there is massive demand, the supply vastly outstrips it.

This is key, and plays out over and over again in different forms. There are no points for difficulty, only supply and demand. PG puts this well [1]:

> That's the essence of a startup: having brilliant people do work that's beneath them. Big companies try to hire the right person for the job. Startups win because they don't—because they take people so smart that they would in a big company be doing "research," and set them to work instead on problems of the most immediate and mundane sort. Think Einstein designing refrigerators.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html

discuss

fastball|5 years ago

We're experiencing this a bit with our startup, except we're not building developer tools, we've built a (semi-personal) knowledge management platform.

In the era of COVID, it seems like every developer with some extra free time has decided that they want to build their own PKM/note-taking/etc app, so competition has scaled up massively in the last year.

Can_Not|5 years ago

> it seems like every developer with some extra free time has decided that they want to build their own PKM/note-taking/etc app, so competition has scaled up massively in the last year.

Still none with dark mode, native apps, markdown.

austincheney|5 years ago

So what happens then when a polished open source solution solves for a problem that developer tools cannot solve for? That speaks nothing of demand and only signals that there is no alternative supply. It also speaks nothing to the boringness of the hypothetical solution.

I suspect by asking that question any reader starts immediately scratching their head thinking up what problem/solution that could possibly be. Don’t. That confuses product for business.

brandmeyer|5 years ago

Just because people want a super-wham-o-dyne tool doesn't mean that they are willing to pay for one. The cases of awesome well-polished open-source tools are frequently cases where the market wasn't willing to pay for them. One or few developers wanted it enough to build and release it for free, so they did it anyway.

So yeah, that is speaking of demand. Economically-relevant demand.