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What I gather from the comments in this thread: you built a tool to make it easier for developers to make custom data visualizations (for other people in their
by Glench 6y ago
What I gather from the comments in this thread: you built a tool to make it easier for developers to make custom data visualizations (for other people in their company to look at probably).
The fundamental idea of building tools that radically improve developer productivity in making internal tools is sound. Logically, engineers cost a lot of money and don't like building internal tools so decreasing the time they spend on them is a win for everyone. And empirically, I know of at least one company in the internal tools market that is doing extremely well in this space: Retool (source: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/181-david-hsu-of-retool https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/181-david-hsu-of-retool).
You might take a look at their State of Internal Tools survey (https://retool.com/blog/state-of-internal-tools-2020/ https://retool.com/blog/state-of-internal-tools-2020/) to get a broad idea of the market and problems developers are facing.
If I were you, I'd try to find just a few developers in any organization that you can work with one-on-one and get them to use your product. That would easily help you validate that the problem exists and your product addresses that problem usefully in organizational contexts. Or not and you learn a bunch of things (for example, maybe you find that hosted solutions are more useful).
I don't think a broad reach is the right move at this stage. I would only focus on widely distributing your product once you've had a lot more early validation and it starts to build some momentum (the best being organic word-of-mouth — developers using the tool convince others to use the tool). If you don't have that early validation, I'd expect that distributing would just feel like throwing messages in a bottle into the ocean — kind of lonely and depressing when you never hear back. But if you do have early validation, then you have a lot better idea about who finds it valuable and where/how you should market it.