Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q out there that are making millions of dollars. Cursor, cloud code, that's like the big examples, but there's tons, tons of stuff out there doing well. For developers who are watching this right now, my question to you is how did you come up with this idea? How did you come across something that had the potential to have hundreds of thousands of downloads by developers? How did it start?
A In the beginning, Charlie B, we started, like, uh, with a different idea, and we thought about, like, trying, like, to build the database clients that incubate AI into them. So we started that direction, and we had, like, Big stop, because people don't really adopt that. That product needed to provide, like, access, they needed credentials to connect to your database, to run all those queries, and you need to install something on your machine. And without any credibility and trust from the engineers, we said, like, alright, it's too tough. So that way, we thought about, like, alright, I think let's start ChartDB. It's gonna take your database and make it into a chart. Uh, simple as that. The two things that I think made it work is, one, the product It's much more visual and easy to people to see the value right away, and it's giving like a better wow effect. And the second thing is reduction of the friction. So let's say you don't need to provide any access and you don't need to install and your software on your machine. So reducing that friction really helped to provide engagement from developers.
AI assessment note: “we started, like, uh, with a different idea... let's start ChartDB.”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.60
Q thousands of stars within a week. This is what's possible with building developer tools. I just think it's an amazing space. So I'm curious if you were to start over, you obviously have a business that you're going to run now and you were going to start a new developer tool. What would be your like playbook for finding an idea, building it, getting validation and turning into a business?
A Yeah. So start with like, be the user or ideally it's for yourself. So if it's for yourself, something that you see the value right away, you really understand how to do it. And because you got experience around what you do. For example, in CharDB, we find out that you want to visualize something very simple. Like I want an ERD and I want to look good that I can interact with that. That's something that just like very specific thing about that specific value that I can start from and get something super cool out of it. So step two, I think design for constraint, not for ideal. Every persona have their constraints. Uh, for example, developers, they're really prefer self-hosted tools that they can test and check on their local environment instead of, uh, going through any kind of, uh, signup wall. So I think like reducing that friction, as we talked before, that's why Charlie B had no signup, no sales calls. You don't need to provide any credentials. Step three, I would say start with a wedge and not from the full vision. Starting from something that like people will appreciate and see the value out of it right away, and then evolve that based on their feedback. That's the, like the right path, like how to go and continue to build, uh, in small iterations. Okay. So the next step is going to be let usage to lead you what to monetize. So in the beginning, we didn't monetize at all.…
AI assessment note: “start with like, be the user... Step two... Step three... let usage to lead”
