Opinion
No developer tool company is happy with a traditional marketing CMO
“To be honest, even at later stage, I don't know a single DevTool company that is happy with their CMO when they have a traditional marketing background.”
Insight
Charging for support incentivizes open-source startups to build overly complex products
“And finally, some open source companies charge for support and services, but I would actually discourage you to follow that monetization path because your incentive becomes to build the most complex product possible so you can charge for support and services. …”
Insight
Dev tool founders should reach $1M ARR before hiring their first salesperson
“As a rule of thumb, I would wait to get to about one million AR before hiring your first salesperson.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Algolia scaled to $10M ARR without ever using a sales deck
“At Algolia, we didn't have a sales deck before we got to ten million ARR.”
Insight
Extreme technical difficulty makes startup ideas better by deterring competitors
“If something is really hard,
On the technical side, I mean, I think that's an even better idea.
Like nobody else is going to try, right?
If it's hard, like the bar is so high, nobody tries, and nobody does it.
If you have the courage to actually do it, if you …”
Insight
Dessaigne: Do Not Hire Sales or Marketing Before Product-Market Fit
“Don't have a hire for sales or marketing until product market fit.”
Opinion
Offering cloud hosting is the only way to monetize open-source libraries
“The one way you can monetize these ideas is by offering a hosting service. Think about Next.js and Verso, for example.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
74% of YC dev tool startups have exclusively technical co-founders
“74% of YC DevTool companies had only tech co-founders, and that's compared to 45% for all of the other companies.”
Insight
Open source startups should not count on community contributions for code
“In the case of Airbyte, they got a lot of connectors contributed from the community, but I would be careful on that one. Most cases, you shouldn't count on them, because the quality of the contribution may not be up to your standards, and then you have to deal…”
Insight
Developer tools companies should have their software engineers directly handle customer support
“Developers hate speaking to these level one support people who don't know anything about the product they are supporting. Engineers should do support, and that's going to lead to two great things. One, your users are developers, and when they interact with dev…”
Insight
Dessaigne: Dev tool founders should lead marketing for a long time
“Well, similarly to sales, I think founders should lead marketing for a long time, maybe forever, actually.”
Insight
Dev tool startups should delay hiring dedicated developer advocates until Series A
“And probably at series A or later, it starts to make sense to hire dedicated dev advocates.”
Insight
Learning to sell is much easier than learning to communicate with developers
“Learning to sell is way easier than learning how to speak with a developer.”
Insight
Early B2B startups should target the smallest companies with their problem
“And probably You want to go after the smallest company that has the problem you try to solve.”
Insight
AI SDR startups targeting non-selling founders will face massive churn
“If they go after the people who are not able to sell their own product, there is a little chance that they can do better, and this Customers are going to churn. A lot of revenue fast, but mostly churn.”
Insight
Building startups solely to patch temporary AI model deficiencies is doomed
“If you are just building something that's solving for the pains that GPT-V is not yet solving, it's probably a bad idea.”
Insight
Investing ahead of future AI models justifies the temporary overspend
“If you do invest in it, if you do, you're going to learn a lot from the process, and once the models are going to be ready, you plug them, and your product is going to be much better day one. So indeed, you have maybe wasted, I don't think that's the right wor…”
Insight
Open source models build enterprise trust and shorten regulated sales cycles
“I have that company in mind, Medplum, who is building an open source EHR, and I think for them, being open source was not about the go-to-market in the sense of, like, selling to developers. It was really about creating the trust at their customers, like, in t…”
Insight
Dessaigne: No One Can Sell an Early Product Better Than the Founder
“No one can sell the product better than the founder.”
Insight
Dessaigne: Hiring more people before PMF slows startups down
“The more people, the slower you get to product market fit. Because you become slow, there's a lot of inertia that you have to fight against. Like if you have a big team, then comes the problem of like, hey, and you want to pivot for whatever reason, then you h…”
Insight
Dessaigne: Early B2B startups waste money spending $50k on branding agencies
“Founders waste some money, and the first things they are going to do is to hire a branding agency, like, 50 K, or whatever crazy amount of money, just to rebrand their company. Like new website, new fancy stuff, just such a waste of money, and often it's just …”
Insight
Dessaigne: Dev tool founders must be developers themselves
“And the key aspect of DevTool is that you are going to build a technical product for developers. Obviously, you need to be a developer yourself.”
Insight
LLMs can turn previously bad developer tool ideas into successful ones
“The bad ideas, the target ideas of yesterday could actually be possible to make successful now thanks to LLMs.”
Insight
Runtime developer tools are critical must-haves; build-time tools are nice-to-haves
“Doug, QA, testing, all of these ideas are build time ideas. Things, tools you are going to use when you are building the software. It happens that these ideas are mostly nice to have. You could build your product without them. What's more interesting are runti…”
