8 ms·
Building a Developer Tools Business
- gdsdfe 7y agoOr sell by telling how to sell ... Not bad
- DGCA 7y agoI've noticed that a lot of paid dev tools are just priced too high or that I run the risk of blowing my budget depending on scale. I wish more paid dev tools were aware that I don't actually know my usage up-front, and that I'm scared of potentially ending up with a ridiculous bill if I overlook something. I totally get that it's on me, but things [like this](https://hackernoon.com/how-we-spent-30k-usd-in-firebase-in-less-than-72-hours-307490bd24d https://hackernoon.com/how-we-spent-30k-usd-in-firebase-in-l...) happen, and I'm way more apprehensive of services that make that a possibility. E.g. I'd love to use Auth0 for everything, but the risk of spending way too much on something I can roll myself is always on my mind.
- james_impliu 7y agoMixpanel was really frustrating in this regard
- jon-wood 7y agoThis is something I'm hitting up against a lot at work currently. Our application is high volume, with a significant proportion of users who don't bring in any recurring revenue, which makes us very cautious about picking up new SaaS services which are billed on a per-user basis. We went through the same process around Auth0, and eventually built our own solution for handling authentication because even with our current user volume all Auth0 would tell us on pricing was "contact sales", which tends to be the case with every product we look at these days.
- enlyth 7y agoAuth0 quoted us 25 - 50k a year for 7K MAU, we found this insanely high as we don't handle any sensitive data. It seems we might use Amazon Cognito, which seems a bit rough / neglected when it comes to aws products but the difference is basically free up to 50K MAU. Couldn't find a nice middle ground, Okta and the others were all prohibitively expensive as well.
- shantly 7y agoIf you don't mind sharing, what was it from Auth0's "call us" column for pricing that bumped you up to that tier? Middle one is still high, but under $25k, let alone $50k, for 7k MAU.
- shantly 7y agoBingo. Risk is what keeps me off anything without a cap on billing. If I spend $25/mo on Digital Ocean, that number's not gonna change unless I tell it to. My site may go down, but I won't accidentally run up a five-figure bill on a just-getting-started side project that's not guaranteed to ever generate revenue. That and having to keep up with a bunch of different bills.
- camhart 7y agoAuth0 has done some dirty pricing changes as well. They dropped pricing for a while then raised it a ton. Basically pinching everyone who started using their service.
- sqs 7y agoI would also recommend dev tools founders (really any founder) read GitLab’s company handbook at https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/, especially the sales and marketing sections. It’s awesome how public they are about how they operate. You’ll learn a lot. We (Sourcegraph) have started our own company handbook (https://about.sourcegraph.com/handbook https://about.sourcegraph.com/handbook), inspired by GitLab. So far it has helped new teammates onboard more quickly and (along with other efforts to diligently document internal practices) helped us work efficiently on a growing team spanning many timezones.
- fanylad 7y agoThanks for sharing https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/. Definitely a must-read for development tools founders.
- jangid 7y agoThis is a promotion of manifold itself. Put it under "Show HN".
- FBISurveillance 7y agoCall me cynical, but this article looks like one of those ghost-written SEO articles for self-promotion and improving search result position. Take a look at DigitalOcean's articles and compare to this one: night and day.
- thomasmarcelis 7y agoSure looks like it. Part one, two and three are written by three different "Guest authors", who are freelance technical writers.
- fanylad 7y agoLooks like you're right
- nailer 7y ago> one of those ghost-written SEO articles for self-promotion and improving search result position. > Take a look at DigitalOcean's articles and compare to this one: night and day. DigitalOcean's SEO articles are also for self-promotion and improving search result position. IIRC they pay some of the volunteer authors in DO credits.
- scarejunba 7y agoHere's my opinion without any credentials attached: * Free tier - essential * Documentation - essential * Stack overflow tag - desirable
- nathan_f77 7y agoI would love to hear your thoughts about adding a free tier for my PDF filling service [1]. What's your first impression about the current pricing? I experimented with a "pay as you go" plan that starts at $0 and includes some free PDFs, but so far I've earned close $0 from all of these customers. But this might just be because the people who asked about alternative pricing are much more price-sensitive and early-stage, while bigger companies don't think twice about $49/mo. [1] http://docspring.com http://docspring.com
- felixnavid 7y agoI wasn't able to find the free tier plan on your site. Free tier would mean: 2 PDF templates, 100 API requests/month or something similar. All I could find was a 2 weeks trial. Maybe consider adding a true "pay as you go" tier with a small amount of money/PDF template and, something perfect for startups and don't start with a $49 tier.
- nathan_f77 7y agoSorry yes I meant I don't have a free tier now, and have been thinking about adding one. Thanks for the suggestions! I've also been thinking about adding a "pay as you go" credit system similar to Twilio, but I'm not 100% sure if it would be a good business model.
- scarejunba 7y agoHuh, I'm not in the market so I'm afraid I don't know. Maybe someone else here who needs this will know.
- cvs268 7y agoThe feeling when you find your problem asked and answered on StackOverflow.com Some things, Money can't buy. For everything else there's... :P
- laserpistus 7y agoA Founders guide to generalising your customers. «If you want to sell something make features the customer wants to buy and tell them about it»
- foreign-inc 7y agoThere are a few rules: - Don't be a solo founder, no body is going to fund you. Your idea may be crappy, you can pivot. But solo founder is a big no no, unless you are successful founder with a new venture. - Either you or your co-founder is "the" person in your product area or you are able to hire someone who is. Developer tools companies always try to do this to become #1 (at least in twitter). - You probably should make a new database or a security tool if you are in the B2B space. Otherwise you will have a very hard time making money.
- corentin88 7y agoCould you explain why do you think db or security tools are profitable only?
- faeyanpiraat 7y agoThe security market is predicted to grow substantially. This gives space to new entrants.
- davidjgraph 7y agoAs someone who first sold to devs and then switched, many years ago, to the largest end user market that we originally served (indirectly), if I did it all again I wouldn't bother with the first part. It slightly depends where your price point is, but the issue is there are plenty of good devs and plenty of really bad devs. The bad ones pay you the annual maintenance and transform into help vampires. The problem is the issues are technical and complex and it sucks up developer time supporting them. It happens in the end user market, sure, but it's easier to find non-technical first line support to clear out the noise.
- romanovcode 7y agoDoes the free-tier/trial really worth it? I've read that from business perspective those are a waste of time.
- jasonkester 7y agoI find that the key thing to overcome when selling to developers is the extreme reluctance to spend money buying something that they can build themselves. You see, 1.) Developers love to build things. 2.) Developers hate spending money. 3.) Developers undervalue their time. If your product looks like it would have been fun to build, you'll lose the entire "insufficiently supervised developer" demographic. Those guys will happily spend tens of thousands of dollars of billable hours implementing an in-house version of your thing to avoid the possibility of outgrowing your Free Tier. I've seen this play out with S3stat customers (which costs $10/month, or three minutes twenty seconds of fully loaded engineer cost), where somebody will spend a week building an in-house version of the service and standing up a server to run it. Nicely done. You'll break even on your investment in 21 years. I've had moderate success with my latest API product pointing to a "Boss Page" that outlines things like build-vs-buy costs, and why you really would be better off paying us for this thing rather than dedicating an in-house guy to building and maintaining it. It's a tough one.
- bartread 7y agoWhilst I've seen this, I think it's more about company and leadership culture than software developer preferences. Our developers are far from profligate but they'll certainly kick and scream at me if we can't spend money on a tool or service that's going to make their jobs easier and allow them to deliver value more quickly. To be coarsely mercantile about it, I want our teams to invest the vast majority of their time building systems and services we can sell. In turn, they've mostly come from backgrounds where the software they've built is widely used outside of the business they've been employed by, so again that pushes in the direction of doing things that add maximum value for customers, rather than NIH.
- TAForObvReasons 7y agoKeep in mind your s3stat product costs $10/month _today_. Plenty of developers and teams have been burned by SaaS solutions that either shut down or blindsided users with a 10x or 100x price increase, so they will naturally price your service under the assumption that the costs will skyrocket in the near future.
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- imvetri 7y agoDevelopers hate to buy stuffs. thats why they build stuffs. Few weeks your tool is out in market, some outraged developer is going to release a free version.
- pxtail 7y agoThis is very true, that's what always puts me off when "new exciting idea" about developers-related tool or service comes to my mind. Additionally developers themselves are in their own niche so even if at first sight your brand new product seems to be innovative and non-existing on the market then it's very likely that it already exists in some form.
- exolymph 7y agoSaaS businesses succeed based on the service part, not the software part.
- znq 7y agoThere also seem to be a 2nd and 3rd part to this blog post. - Part 2: https://manifold.co/blog/founders-guide-developer-tools-marketing https://manifold.co/blog/founders-guide-developer-tools-mark... - Part 3: https://manifold.co/blog/founders-guide-developer-tools-go-to-market https://manifold.co/blog/founders-guide-developer-tools-go-t...
- golergka 7y ago> Docs should be detailed, easy to read, and packed with examples. But aside from all the examples and tutorials, please don't forget about a proper manual and full API docs. I've seen too many different tools and tech that have spent a lot of money on writing up the happy path, but then completely left me on my own when I encountered some weird error code. Just follow the structure of the whole API you have, and make sure that each member, each function argument and each possible return value is documented. It's not as glamorous as "one button integration" - but that one button integration usually turns into nightmare when you want to wire it up to your automatic builds anyway.
- ahaferburg 7y agoMost importantly, polish the tool. I'm not going to get my boss to pay for something that is made out of duct tape. If you want to sell something to people who probably know how to build it themselves, you need to impress them with something shiny. While it should work perfectly most of the time, it should also come with helpful error messages when it doesn't like the input. If I come across some cryptic, ungooglable internal error or access violation or assertion where I'd have to contact support to even understand what's wrong, I'd rather delete your tool immediately.