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To answer your first question, very big. From a qualitative standpoint, think of this way ... all companies are now tech companies and developer jobs are alway

To answer your first question, very big. From a qualitative standpoint, think of this way ... all companies are now tech companies and developer jobs are always in any recent "hottest job" list you can find. So, it stands to reason that tools for those companies and jobs will be a big market. If you want real numbers, here's 2 examples: (1) Atlassian is now a public company and pretty much only makes developer tools. They started with one product (Jira) in 2002. They now have a market cap of $11B and annual revenues of $620M [0]. (2) If you read Indie Hackers, you'll find people like Mike Perham who makes Sidekiq. Sidekiq is an open-source tool for background processing in Ruby on Rails apps. Mike makes $80K/month on premium licenses/support. Think about that, it does just one thing for just one developer framework and he makes close to $1M per year with no employees.[1] So, yes, I think there's a big market (in the billions) and plenty of room for small companies. Off the top of my head I can probably think of a dozen developer tool ideas that I'd consider paying for. [0] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TEAM https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TEAM [1] https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq

BjoernKW 9y ago
> Off the top of my head I can probably think of a dozen developer tool ideas that I'd consider paying for. Would you care to share and discuss those? There are quite a few categories of developer tools, a non-comprehensive list of which could include: - generic, one-size-fits-all tools that reach a very wide audience: IDEs, issue trackers, CI and code quality tools - frameworks and libraries, which also are fairly generic - one-off / niche tools and scripts for very specific purpose: Those are usually developed in-house to solve a specific problem and out-of-the-box they often don't have a lot of reproducible value outside of a particular organization. Most of those don't real lend themselves to being realised as commercial products, in part because of existing tools, particularly open source ones and also because the target audience is more likely to implement a tool they need than any other audience (http://threevirtues.com http://threevirtues.com ...).
- callmeed 9y ago
  I'd be happy to discuss in an email (too lazy to list them out here right now). Regarding open source, I agree that's tricky. But its been proven it can be done one way or another. I think ansible and docker have shown that in the ops space. Regarding one-off/niche tools, that's where glue tools like zapier become commercially viable.

BjoernKW 9y ago

> Off the top of my head I can probably think of a dozen developer tool ideas that I'd consider paying for. Would you care to share and discuss those? There are quite a few categories of developer tools, a non-comprehensive list of which could include: - generic, one-size-fits-all tools that reach a very wide audience: IDEs, issue trackers, CI and code quality tools - frameworks and libraries, which also are fairly generic - one-off / niche tools and scripts for very specific purpose: Those are usually developed in-house to solve a specific problem and out-of-the-box they often don't have a lot of reproducible value outside of a particular organization. Most of those don't real lend themselves to being realised as commercial products, in part because of existing tools, particularly open source ones and also because the target audience is more likely to implement a tool they need than any other audience (http://threevirtues.com http://threevirtues.com ...).

callmeed 9y ago
I'd be happy to discuss in an email (too lazy to list them out here right now). Regarding open source, I agree that's tricky. But its been proven it can be done one way or another. I think ansible and docker have shown that in the ops space. Regarding one-off/niche tools, that's where glue tools like zapier become commercially viable.