That said most developers don’t have any awareness of problems outside of those they experience… which tend to be developer tooling issues. So you get a ton of companies building dev tools startups despite an incredible amount of need elsewhere.
I feel like a lot of value could be unlocked if there were some way besides random chance and networking for skilled developers looking to start something to discover people with problems, domain expertise and entrepreneurial ambition.
> if there were some way besides random chance and networking for skilled developers looking to start something to discover people
The main problem here is that non-programmers are often so entrenched in their workflow(s) that they fail to see what can be automated and wind up proposing nice-to-haves instead of tasks critical to their mission.
Moreover, they're more likely to dismiss 80% solutions because the introduction of new unknowns/things-to-check adds enough uncertainty to make them uncomfortable. "The new thing always puts things here instead of there and it doesn't handle these cases. I miss the way we used to do things."
Selling tools to developers is just hard. You are competing with a lot of OSS tools that are constantly adapting and changing. Any good ideas quickly get picked up and replicated. So, most commercial tools have a limited shelf life in terms of utility. Which makes them mostly just nice to haves.
There's a secondary problem here that many developers are employed and don't typically have a personal tools budget. This narrows the market effectively to developers that are free lancing or the bosses of developers that are employees.
The team managers will scrutinize a lot of spending on this front and typically not have. a lot of budget for this. And there is no such thing as a personal tools budget for developers in most companies.
Freelancers mostly just use the same tools as the companies that pay them. Which is mostly free tools. Non free tools actually complicate getting freelancers because now you need to worry about getting licenses for your contractors as well. So, there's a bias towards keeping things simple here and just avoiding such tools.
What's more, developer tools are misleadingly difficult. Put simply, it's easy to think that creating developer tools is going to be a winning formula for a company/startup. After all, you're probably a developer, and you've probably identified a problem you personally had in the past.
And you know where developers hang out and what kinds of things do well there. So everything's good, right?
But as you said, many of them don't want to pay for things, and many will find open source solutions that'll do the job needed instead, even if it's a tad less convenient than your potential solution might be. Plus, you're literally selling people whose job/life involves creating software, so their answer could just as easily be "build something myself to do this" instead.
Not really true, but dealing with 50x 10 USD invoices is not something I want to waste time on.
Is there a business that can bundle different services with just one invoice? Or do I still have to use AWS, Azure, GCloud?
presentation|1 year ago
I feel like a lot of value could be unlocked if there were some way besides random chance and networking for skilled developers looking to start something to discover people with problems, domain expertise and entrepreneurial ambition.
acuozzo|1 year ago
The main problem here is that non-programmers are often so entrenched in their workflow(s) that they fail to see what can be automated and wind up proposing nice-to-haves instead of tasks critical to their mission.
Moreover, they're more likely to dismiss 80% solutions because the introduction of new unknowns/things-to-check adds enough uncertainty to make them uncomfortable. "The new thing always puts things here instead of there and it doesn't handle these cases. I miss the way we used to do things."
jillesvangurp|1 year ago
There's a secondary problem here that many developers are employed and don't typically have a personal tools budget. This narrows the market effectively to developers that are free lancing or the bosses of developers that are employees.
The team managers will scrutinize a lot of spending on this front and typically not have. a lot of budget for this. And there is no such thing as a personal tools budget for developers in most companies.
Freelancers mostly just use the same tools as the companies that pay them. Which is mostly free tools. Non free tools actually complicate getting freelancers because now you need to worry about getting licenses for your contractors as well. So, there's a bias towards keeping things simple here and just avoiding such tools.
CM30|1 year ago
And you know where developers hang out and what kinds of things do well there. So everything's good, right?
But as you said, many of them don't want to pay for things, and many will find open source solutions that'll do the job needed instead, even if it's a tad less convenient than your potential solution might be. Plus, you're literally selling people whose job/life involves creating software, so their answer could just as easily be "build something myself to do this" instead.
olavgg|1 year ago