The Wisdom Wall

“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. Which is a bad incentive. And if your product doesn't need…”

“As a rule of thumb, I would wait to get to about one million AR before hiring your first salesperson.”

“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, the courage to actually do it, if you have the skills to do it, I mean, that's the…”

“Don't have a hire for sales or marketing until product market fit.”

“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 with the contributors, and that could be more, actually…”

“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 developers who speak their language, they're going to be way…”

“Well, similarly to sales, I think founders should lead marketing for a long time, maybe forever, actually.”

“And probably at series A or later, it starts to make sense to hire dedicated dev advocates.”

“Learning to sell is way easier than learning how to speak with a developer.”

“And probably You want to go after the smallest company that has the problem you try to solve.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 word, but maybe overspent a little, but the learnings are worth…”

“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 these enterprises, and shortening the sales cycle by maybe a…”

“No one can sell the product better than the founder.”

“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 have a whole team to pivot.”

“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 a B to B company, That nobody's going to find on their…”

“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.”

“The bad ideas, the target ideas of yesterday could actually be possible to make successful now thanks to LLMs.”

“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 runtime ideas. Why? Because at runtime, it becomes really…”

“Another quick category, ah, that I can touch upon is libraries and frameworks. These can be great ideas. Usually open source. But they can also be very challenging to monetize.”

“Rule of thumb, I would assume that you'll throw away 90% of all the code you write. So your goal at that stage is just to identify the 10% of what you're building that's actually valuable as fast as possible.”

“DevTool co-founders often plan to have a bottom-up adoption model where individual developers are going to come inbound, try the product, and convert. Or maybe become their champions at bigger companies. Well, I have some bad news for you. Nobody knows you yet. So to get there, first you need to get people to know…”

“Some of them are going to be haters and be rude. Well, you should engage with them too, but your goal is not to convince them. It's just to convince any other readers who are going to read how you reply to these haters.”

“Very early on, you don't even know if your product is providing value. Please don't hire anyone until you have convinced yourself you're working on the right idea.”

“Developers wouldn't implement on top of a new framework that is not open source.”

“A new database would need to be open source or an API connecting with sensitive data in a CRM or maybe an EHR needs to be open source.”

“If you as the founder cannot sell your product, Nobody else can.”

“You should show, not tell. Just do demonstrations. I think that's the best sales approach you can do for DevTool.”

“Documentation is marketing. That's how people are going to interact with your product. That's actually the first place people are going after your homepage and maybe a pricing page.”

“doing things that don't scale, I think the main goal is that how much can I learn today? Not waiting to have developed anything. Maybe what I'm going to develop is going to be the wrong thing. Like, if I can do anything like manually, uh, even going physically doing the job yourself, not the software, uh, you are going…”

“The other advantage of these runtime ideas Is usage. Because the more your customers are going to grow, usually the more they are going to use your product. So your incentives are aligned.”

“Your goal is not to sell your product just yet here. Just be helpful. Just establish yourself as the expert. And of course people are going to start knowing you and trust your brand, your company. That will help you down the line. People will think about you when they have that problem.”