4 ms·

Nope, I totally disagree. Developers hate paying for things and love to build things themselves. There are a few successes, like GitHub, but they are outliers

by ericflo 14y ago

Nope, I totally disagree. Developers hate paying for things and love to build things themselves. There are a few successes, like GitHub, but they are outliers and on the whole developers are a terrible group to try to sell into. Your best bet at getting a developer product to succeed is to sell the tool to someone in another role (product, marketing, sales, etc) and have them convince the developer to use it.

pbiggar 14y ago
Developers do hate paying for things, but that doesn't mean you cant make a business selling to them. You just need to make a much more compelling offering than they could reasonably create themselves. For example, my company (https://circleci.com https://circleci.com) makes Continuous-integration-as-a-service, marketed directly to developers. We have a lot of companies using us with incredible engineers (Stripe and Zencoder are 2 obvious examples who have agreed to be listed on our homepage, we have many more). Why - when they can build it themselves? Because we have built a compelling product that is much better than they could do themselves (and in many cases they tried)! To give you one example, one customer has a test suite that takes 60 minutes on his laptop. He just pushes to Circle when he wants to test, and he gets a result in 13 minutes (blazing fast build servers, plus automatic parallelization)! That would overload a single build server, so they'd have to get a cluster set up. That sounds like fun , but only for the first hour.
- carterschonwald 14y ago
  What is the pricing for CirclCI, I can't find any on your site, and that makes me less intersted in trying it out :-) (and is there support for not github based hosting?) [edit] And I see that you dont support ghc (haskell). Oh well, I guess I still need to wait for Travis CI to roll out there paid version :)
  - pbiggar 14y ago
    Pricing is $19/$49/$149 for 1/10/40 private repos. That includes unlimited builds, unlimited test time, etc. We don't support non-GitHub sorry. We do support ghc, and have a few customers using it. I should write a doc for that.
    - carterschonwald 14y ago
      cool, what versions of ghc? (or is it haskell platform only?) (I am doing some 7.6.* heavy work, and thats ignoring occasionally playing with just patching GHC itself! :) )
      - pbiggar 14y ago
        Haskell platform at the moment, but we can add things relatively easily, especially if they have debs available (in ubuntu 12.04 or elsewhere).
        carterschonwald 14y ago
        Interesting. 1) does that give a path towards users providing their own *.deb bundles and thus being able to use their own choice in compiler versions? 2) part 1 is a bit important, I may be doing a lot of dev work against ghc head (or patched versions thereof) in the coming months (though not for another 2-4 months realistically), and unless i can a la carte plug in the ghc version I want, i may a well roll my own thing on top of jenkins and the like :)
    - carterschonwald 14y ago
      why isn't the pricing listed on the site? That seems a bit odd! :-)
      - pbiggar 14y ago
        It is silly, yes. You see it when you log in. We're in the process of reworking the front page, and part of that will be getting the pricing onto it.
        MartinCron 14y ago
        Please do. Whenever I don't see transparent pricing, I assume it's prohibitively expensive. Also, frictionless CI as a service? You are doing God's work. I hope you succeed.
  - jefffoster 14y ago
    I tried it out and the CircleCI team installed the latest Haskell platform, so I was up and running with cabal tests in five minutes.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- eze 14y ago
  "CircleCI" makes more sense than "CircleCi", though both can be found on your website. Congratulations on such a compelling service.
yonasb 14y ago
Telling a developer to use something sounds like a bad strategy, we hate being told what to use. My cofounder and I are developers, and we've talked to a handful of other developers, and we've found that SaaS is appropriate for a lot of things. Others you definitely want to build yourself. But a lot of it depends on what stage your company is currently at. There's a reason all the big companies like SaaS, it's less resources they have to devote to something that is not core to their business. Looking at your profile, it seems like you're speaking from experience. Have you found that selling to marketing and sales folks was more effective for your own business?
georgemcbay 14y ago
As a developer (who has worked with many other developers) I agree with your disagreement. Developers are just about the worst market I can think of when it comes to not wanting to pay for software even when the value is there. In my experience, there is money to be made in that market, I've worked for companies that paid big money for crap like ClearCase, after all. But in these cases the product was basically forced on the developers from IT/management/other departments. So, yeah, there is money to be made in this market, but in most cases you'll have to be prepared to go through the old fashioned good ol' boy sales model. Trying to sell directly to developers is a very, very difficult road.
zaidf 14y ago
Developers are stingy until: (a) they raise funding (b) or they have some revenue or profitability (c) or they work for BigCo or at funded start-up In situations (a), (b), (c), my observation is that developers are not afraid to fork out $10-$100 per SaaS service. Your point to sell to marketing/product etc. hold holds true and I would agree 100% from experience. At the last start-up I worked at, it was the Product people that would regularly find cute little SaaS tools to fill holes. It goes without saying that most SaaS tools should not be made with the stereotypical hardcore dev in mind but rather with product/marketing/sales in mind just as much.
- caseysoftware 14y ago
  Or (d) they try to build it themselves, realize how horribly painful/complicated/problemsome/etc it is, and decide to find another approach. Of course, all of those are more likely to drive adoption of the SaaS tool if it helps drive revenue or increase costs. aka If someone can pay $1 to avoid $100 of work or earn an extra $100, then the odds are in the SaaS tool's favor. (Granted, I am biased as I work for Twilio but I also built SMS systems long before I joined last year.)
- arohner 14y ago
  Channeling patio11 here: $10-100 is really cheap, unless you're talking about per developer, per month, and then it's just cheap. Well, $10/dev/mo is cheap, $100/dev/mo is reasonable. If your service is only $10/dev/mo, figure out a way to make it worth more, or raise prices, or figure out a way to never have a support call. Support on that will kill several months worth of profit, per response.
  - zaidf 14y ago
    Generally agree. What we are learning about our own product is that customers will either pay us really nice amount OR not pay us at all. We started out thinking we'd charge $29/mo. Now we are up to $99/mo and so far, we haven't had a single rejection as a result of pricing. Plenty of guys just don't get the need for our tool - but it isn't the price. Guys who get it just gloss over the $99/mo price. That said, I can tell you that at least for a start-up, crossing a certain threshold can mean the difference between just being able to purchase the tool or needing your boss' approval. For the last start-up I worked at, the treshold was closer to $50 or so. We wouldn't think twice about tools in that vicinity. Soon as it crossed the $100 mark, we'd need the CEO's okay. My feeling is the upper limit on that shifts greatly depending on the different segments within enterprise but that is my one data point.
larsberg 14y ago
Having spent a long time targeting the market for developer tools, I think you're underestimating that market based on your own experiences and social circle. It was a multi-billion dollar market in ~2006, only including IDEs, SCC, static analysis tools, architecture, and process-related infrastructure, and seems to only have grown since then.
PaulHoule 14y ago
After three decades of trying to code myself out of impossible situations I'm starting to depend on other people. I'm very concious of what it costs to develop and maintain software and the risk that is entailed, never mind the operational costs of running production systems. I aim for commercial success by having systems that, in some respect, are at least an order of magnitude (if not two, three or four) better than the status quo, but I've got a lot of respect for companies that can serve my everyday operational needs at a fraction of the cost of doing things myself.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
seats 14y ago
When there is no free alternative to what you are doing, they'll still buy (in my case that was hosting). Otherwise, your best bet for getting developers to buy things is to try and sell them stuff that would be boring for them to build. Most developers I know would find it very interesting to build something with machine learning or to re-architect a system several times over for scale. Not many of them would like to spend time building something better than textmate. The problem with being a developer building for developers is that if you are interested in working on a problem your customer probably is too. People would prefer to pay you to take out the garbage.
jeffreymcmanus 14y ago
Demonstrably wrong. Developers (like anyone) are happy to pay for things if they can identify value. The problem is with the seller, not the buyer: people keep trying to sell things to developers that they can more easily build themselves. But today's platform as a service companies (like Twilio and others named in the piece) are providing a stack that can't easily be replicated by nerds working in isolation.
krichman 14y ago
I don't know if we hate paying for things, but it's certainly going to be hard for a single company to outperform any given popular GPL tool. I think you are right about selling to the company instead, but services (I don't want the hassle of running a Git server) are probably a better bet than a local tool (Not an improvement over vim/I could write my own that does it (IMO) better) if you are going for developers.
dirtyaura 14y ago
I think this is changing slowly but surely. First, there are more pure technology companies nowadays, who have developer mindset in their DNA. Second, companies from all sectors understand importance of technology more and more, because they have to. Developers in good companies are increasingly able to affect technology decisions and purchases. Senior developers in team leading roles have (small) budgets and can quite easily approve $x00 a month subscription. And there are more and more people in management roles who started as developers. Of course, the old world of direct sales to top management is still going on strong, but if there are macrotrends to jump into, the one that predicts that developers have bigger budgets and even more decision more power in the future is a pretty sure bet.
henrikschroder 14y ago
> Your best bet at getting a developer product to succeed is to sell the tool to someone in another role Our experiences have been the total opposite, we've had developers discover our tools, test them out, and then championing them inside their company, resulting in sales for us. The difference in our case is that we're doing a lot of the boring must-have plumbing for online games such as registration and authentication, integration with payment providers, cloud storage, multiplayer messaging, etc, and we leave all the fun parts of game development to the developers we are selling to. Check it out: http://player.io http://player.io (Shameless plug, sorry. :) )
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
bdunn 14y ago
There are two types of developers: those who make money writing code, and those who are tinkering around (think: college students toying around with Bash scripting) The former, like most other professionals, will gladly pay for services and products that make their business lives better. And yes, while there will always be a small (and vocal) subset of professional developers who absolutely must write their own time tracking software, the overwhelming majority will just pay for something like Freckle. It just doesn't make any economic sense to write their own. As someone who sells three products (a SaaS, a book, and a workshop) for consultants - mainly web developers - I can tell you first hand that the biggest win for targeting this audience is that they're easier to find and sell to. Getting, say, general contractors to find your product seems complicated and pricey. Developers, on the other hand, can be an inexpensive traffic source if you're doing the right things (like writing targeted content that gets indexed and shared.)

by ericflo 14y ago

pbiggar 14y ago

Developers do hate paying for things, but that doesn't mean you cant make a business selling to them. You just need to make a much more compelling offering than they could reasonably create themselves. For example, my company (https://circleci.com https://circleci.com) makes Continuous-integration-as-a-service, marketed directly to developers. We have a lot of companies using us with incredible engineers (Stripe and Zencoder are 2 obvious examples who have agreed to be listed on our homepage, we have many more). Why - when they can build it themselves? Because we have built a compelling product that is much better than they could do themselves (and in many cases they tried)! To give you one example, one customer has a test suite that takes 60 minutes on his laptop. He just pushes to Circle when he wants to test, and he gets a result in 13 minutes (blazing fast build servers, plus automatic parallelization)! That would overload a single build server, so they'd have to get a cluster set up. That sounds like fun , but only for the first hour.

carterschonwald 14y ago
What is the pricing for CirclCI, I can't find any on your site, and that makes me less intersted in trying it out :-) (and is there support for not github based hosting?) [edit] And I see that you dont support ghc (haskell). Oh well, I guess I still need to wait for Travis CI to roll out there paid version :)
- pbiggar 14y ago
  Pricing is $19/$49/$149 for 1/10/40 private repos. That includes unlimited builds, unlimited test time, etc. We don't support non-GitHub sorry. We do support ghc, and have a few customers using it. I should write a doc for that.
  - carterschonwald 14y ago
    cool, what versions of ghc? (or is it haskell platform only?) (I am doing some 7.6.* heavy work, and thats ignoring occasionally playing with just patching GHC itself! :) )
    - pbiggar 14y ago
      Haskell platform at the moment, but we can add things relatively easily, especially if they have debs available (in ubuntu 12.04 or elsewhere).
      - carterschonwald 14y ago
        Interesting. 1) does that give a path towards users providing their own *.deb bundles and thus being able to use their own choice in compiler versions? 2) part 1 is a bit important, I may be doing a lot of dev work against ghc head (or patched versions thereof) in the coming months (though not for another 2-4 months realistically), and unless i can a la carte plug in the ghc version I want, i may a well roll my own thing on top of jenkins and the like :)
  - carterschonwald 14y ago
    why isn't the pricing listed on the site? That seems a bit odd! :-)
    - pbiggar 14y ago
      It is silly, yes. You see it when you log in. We're in the process of reworking the front page, and part of that will be getting the pricing onto it.
      - MartinCron 14y ago
        Please do. Whenever I don't see transparent pricing, I assume it's prohibitively expensive. Also, frictionless CI as a service? You are doing God's work. I hope you succeed.
- jefffoster 14y ago
  I tried it out and the CircleCI team installed the latest Haskell platform, so I was up and running with cabal tests in five minutes.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
eze 14y ago
"CircleCI" makes more sense than "CircleCi", though both can be found on your website. Congratulations on such a compelling service.

yonasb 14y ago

Telling a developer to use something sounds like a bad strategy, we hate being told what to use. My cofounder and I are developers, and we've talked to a handful of other developers, and we've found that SaaS is appropriate for a lot of things. Others you definitely want to build yourself. But a lot of it depends on what stage your company is currently at. There's a reason all the big companies like SaaS, it's less resources they have to devote to something that is not core to their business. Looking at your profile, it seems like you're speaking from experience. Have you found that selling to marketing and sales folks was more effective for your own business?

georgemcbay 14y ago

As a developer (who has worked with many other developers) I agree with your disagreement. Developers are just about the worst market I can think of when it comes to not wanting to pay for software even when the value is there. In my experience, there is money to be made in that market, I've worked for companies that paid big money for crap like ClearCase, after all. But in these cases the product was basically forced on the developers from IT/management/other departments. So, yeah, there is money to be made in this market, but in most cases you'll have to be prepared to go through the old fashioned good ol' boy sales model. Trying to sell directly to developers is a very, very difficult road.

zaidf 14y ago

Developers are stingy until: (a) they raise funding (b) or they have some revenue or profitability (c) or they work for BigCo or at funded start-up In situations (a), (b), (c), my observation is that developers are not afraid to fork out $10-$100 per SaaS service. Your point to sell to marketing/product etc. hold holds true and I would agree 100% from experience. At the last start-up I worked at, it was the Product people that would regularly find cute little SaaS tools to fill holes. It goes without saying that most SaaS tools should not be made with the stereotypical hardcore dev in mind but rather with product/marketing/sales in mind just as much.

caseysoftware 14y ago
Or (d) they try to build it themselves, realize how horribly painful/complicated/problemsome/etc it is, and decide to find another approach. Of course, all of those are more likely to drive adoption of the SaaS tool if it helps drive revenue or increase costs. aka If someone can pay $1 to avoid $100 of work or earn an extra $100, then the odds are in the SaaS tool's favor. (Granted, I am biased as I work for Twilio but I also built SMS systems long before I joined last year.)
arohner 14y ago
Channeling patio11 here: $10-100 is really cheap, unless you're talking about per developer, per month, and then it's just cheap. Well, $10/dev/mo is cheap, $100/dev/mo is reasonable. If your service is only $10/dev/mo, figure out a way to make it worth more, or raise prices, or figure out a way to never have a support call. Support on that will kill several months worth of profit, per response.
- zaidf 14y ago
  Generally agree. What we are learning about our own product is that customers will either pay us really nice amount OR not pay us at all. We started out thinking we'd charge $29/mo. Now we are up to $99/mo and so far, we haven't had a single rejection as a result of pricing. Plenty of guys just don't get the need for our tool - but it isn't the price. Guys who get it just gloss over the $99/mo price. That said, I can tell you that at least for a start-up, crossing a certain threshold can mean the difference between just being able to purchase the tool or needing your boss' approval. For the last start-up I worked at, the treshold was closer to $50 or so. We wouldn't think twice about tools in that vicinity. Soon as it crossed the $100 mark, we'd need the CEO's okay. My feeling is the upper limit on that shifts greatly depending on the different segments within enterprise but that is my one data point.

larsberg 14y ago

Having spent a long time targeting the market for developer tools, I think you're underestimating that market based on your own experiences and social circle. It was a multi-billion dollar market in ~2006, only including IDEs, SCC, static analysis tools, architecture, and process-related infrastructure, and seems to only have grown since then.

PaulHoule 14y ago

After three decades of trying to code myself out of impossible situations I'm starting to depend on other people. I'm very concious of what it costs to develop and maintain software and the risk that is entailed, never mind the operational costs of running production systems. I aim for commercial success by having systems that, in some respect, are at least an order of magnitude (if not two, three or four) better than the status quo, but I've got a lot of respect for companies that can serve my everyday operational needs at a fraction of the cost of doing things myself.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

seats 14y ago

When there is no free alternative to what you are doing, they'll still buy (in my case that was hosting). Otherwise, your best bet for getting developers to buy things is to try and sell them stuff that would be boring for them to build. Most developers I know would find it very interesting to build something with machine learning or to re-architect a system several times over for scale. Not many of them would like to spend time building something better than textmate. The problem with being a developer building for developers is that if you are interested in working on a problem your customer probably is too. People would prefer to pay you to take out the garbage.

jeffreymcmanus 14y ago

Demonstrably wrong. Developers (like anyone) are happy to pay for things if they can identify value. The problem is with the seller, not the buyer: people keep trying to sell things to developers that they can more easily build themselves. But today's platform as a service companies (like Twilio and others named in the piece) are providing a stack that can't easily be replicated by nerds working in isolation.

krichman 14y ago

I don't know if we hate paying for things, but it's certainly going to be hard for a single company to outperform any given popular GPL tool. I think you are right about selling to the company instead, but services (I don't want the hassle of running a Git server) are probably a better bet than a local tool (Not an improvement over vim/I could write my own that does it (IMO) better) if you are going for developers.

dirtyaura 14y ago

I think this is changing slowly but surely. First, there are more pure technology companies nowadays, who have developer mindset in their DNA. Second, companies from all sectors understand importance of technology more and more, because they have to. Developers in good companies are increasingly able to affect technology decisions and purchases. Senior developers in team leading roles have (small) budgets and can quite easily approve $x00 a month subscription. And there are more and more people in management roles who started as developers. Of course, the old world of direct sales to top management is still going on strong, but if there are macrotrends to jump into, the one that predicts that developers have bigger budgets and even more decision more power in the future is a pretty sure bet.

henrikschroder 14y ago

> Your best bet at getting a developer product to succeed is to sell the tool to someone in another role Our experiences have been the total opposite, we've had developers discover our tools, test them out, and then championing them inside their company, resulting in sales for us. The difference in our case is that we're doing a lot of the boring must-have plumbing for online games such as registration and authentication, integration with payment providers, cloud storage, multiplayer messaging, etc, and we leave all the fun parts of game development to the developers we are selling to. Check it out: http://player.io http://player.io (Shameless plug, sorry. :) )

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

bdunn 14y ago

There are two types of developers: those who make money writing code, and those who are tinkering around (think: college students toying around with Bash scripting) The former, like most other professionals, will gladly pay for services and products that make their business lives better. And yes, while there will always be a small (and vocal) subset of professional developers who absolutely must write their own time tracking software, the overwhelming majority will just pay for something like Freckle. It just doesn't make any economic sense to write their own. As someone who sells three products (a SaaS, a book, and a workshop) for consultants - mainly web developers - I can tell you first hand that the biggest win for targeting this audience is that they're easier to find and sell to. Getting, say, general contractors to find your product seems complicated and pricey. Developers, on the other hand, can be an inexpensive traffic source if you're doing the right things (like writing targeted content that gets indexed and shared.)