Scaling DevTools (Jack Bridger)

Chris Bell is the founder of Knock.app - flexible, reliable notifications infrastructure.

In this episode we discuss:

• Designing APIs
• The importance of champions when selling to enterprise
• How do you justify cost of a developer tool?
• Selling to platform teams

Links:

• Knock https://knock.app/
• Twitter https://twitter.com/cjbell_

This episode is sponsored by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Deepak Prabhakara is the CEO and Co-founder of BoxyHQ. BoxyHQ enables you to add plug-and-play enterprise-ready features to your SaaS product.

What we cover

• An introduction to BoxyHQ
• Getting BoxyHQ out there in the world
• The BoxyHQ Open Source model
• What developers want
• Progression and growth
• Content update
• Content distribution
• Keeping an eye out on Twitter terms

Where to hear from Deepak

• Twitter: @boxyhq
• GitHub: https://github.com/boxyhq
• https://boxyhq.com/

Sean Falconer is the Head of Developer Relations & Product Marketing at Skyflow. Skyflow is a privacy API for sensitive data that is built on a customer data vault.

What we cover

• Building a DevRel function from the ground up
• An MVP DevRel team
• A real content strategy
• Hiring the right person
• Measuring performance in the early stages
• How do DevRel and marketing interplay?

Where to hear from Sean

• @seanfalconer
• https://www.skyflow.com/
• https://www.skyflow.com/podcast

P.s. thanks so much to Harpreet Sahota for listening and suggesting we invite Sean! 

Zivit Katz is the VP of Marketing at Zigi. Zigi is an AI-powered personal assistant for developers. By managing your dev workflow and handling all your mundane, non-programming tasks across multiple apps directly from Slack.

What we cover

• Marketing at Zigi
• The market and users
• Learning the right language
• Understanding the developer
• The importance of marketing plans

Where to hear from Zivit

• Zivit's Linkedin 
• Zigi's Linkedin
• https://www.zigi.ai/

Sagar is the CEO and co-founder of Speakeasy - an API tooling platform. We talk about the journey of Speakeasy. The challenges of startup life. How they developed the product and how they work with influencers in a surprising way.

• Building relationships with influencers can significantly enhance product development.
• Importance of listening to customers
• Fine line between product and consulting
• The role of documentation in user experience
• Being responsive to customer needs builds long-term relationships.
• The startup journey requires patience and adaptability.

Links:

• Sagar Batchu 
• Speakeasy https://www.speakeasy.com/

Check out the Enterprise Ready Conf from WorkOS https://enterprise-ready.com/

This episode is with Sunil Pai. He works at Cloudflare after his startup PartyKit was acquired. Previously he was on the React core team at Meta.

He's a great guy. And obsessed with AI agents.

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Links:
- Sunil Pai on X
- Sunil Pai's site
- Building agents with Cloudflare
- PartyKit
- Durable objects 

Wesley Faulkner is a Senior Community Manager at AWS. Amazon Web Services provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis.

(00:40): Would you be able to tell us a little bit more about higher-order thinking?

(05:31): Could you share some examples of higher-order thinking versus a lower-order marketing campaign or communication that didn't work so well?

(11:06): Could you share your thoughts on developers wanting to understand how things work?

(13:38) When it comes to higher-order thinking and understanding your audience, investing long-term sometimes feels like it may have a slower payoff. How do we justify this kind of investment? Especially if we're a startup that needs users or signups really quickly.

Tweet we are discussing

Where to hear from Wesley

• Twitter: @wesley83
• https://aws.amazon.com/
• https://www.communitypulse.io/

Vlad Matsiiako is the CEO and co-founder of Infisical. Infisical is an Open Source Secret Management tool.

What we discuss:
- The story of Infisical
- How the team has made Infisical easy to adopt
- How being open source helps you with trust at the beginning stages
- How do enterprises adopt Infisical
- How do developers at enterprises discover tools like Infisical
- The different mini-games at various stages of a startup (Dalton Caldwell)
 
Links

• Vlad - https://www.linkedin.com/in/vmatsiiako/
• Infisical - https://infisical.com/

Keith Casey aka Danger Casey is a Senior Product Manager at Pangea - a Security Platform as a Service.

Before Pangea, Keith was Director of Product Marketing at ngrok and worked at Okta and Twilio in a variety of roles - including DevRel.  Keith also curates API Developer Weekly.

In this episode we discuss Keith's writings on the future of DevRel.

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Links:
- original article
- followup article
- How to kill your sdks in one easy step
- Developer productivity and selling to developers
- api developer weekly
- Pangea
- DevRel = zirp phenomenom? 

Julien Danjou is the founder of Mergify - a tool that helps merge code safer and faster. 

Summary (auto-generated):

• How do you split your time between work and marketing? 0:00
  • Julian splits 50% of his time between building the product and the other 50% doing marketing and bringing people to the product.
  • Julian talks about mergerfi.
• Where do you start with product development? 1:23
  • The goal is to solve a problem for an engineer. They co-founded Mirchi Fi with Mary and wrote their own tool.
  • The role of time is a lot of time.
  • The importance of doing demos and showing the product around to the team, and how that has changed over time.
  • How the product is simple and there are a lot of viable options around it, but it's hard to think about all the tiny details.
• How did they get started? 5:08
  • They both started with a full-time job and moved from a platform to get up. They felt naked without any of their tools. They wanted to build their own tools.
  • They found a first rate customer, pitch.com, and then found more startups willing to use a merge request tool.
  • One of the challenges of being a bootstrapped company is that they only have two hours per week to work on the tool.
  • It is easy to not get good at making decisions when you can do everything, but in air quotes, do everything.
• How long did it take to write the first dashboard? 10:07
  • Before people started using it internally, they did most of the grunt work of writing the first version. The first version was a mvp.
  • The first dashboard they wrote was like HTML and the bootstrap framework, which was pretty bad, but it was good enough.
  • The first version of the product is the only thing that is going to be out in front of users or customers.
  • The importance of being an entrepreneur-minded person.
  • When they found the first customers, they decided not to build a company right away, but to focus on building a few hours a week into bots.
  • The real trap.
• Marketing and getting the word out. 16:00
  • The root problem is that nobody knows about you because you are not doing marketing. You have to go with the event if you have a competitor or inspire something.
  • It is easy to build the things for a year or so, especially when you are a developer.
  • Not everything works, but what works well is open source projects. For example, amazon is using lodgify on their open source project.
  • One of their biggest customers was using one of the engineer's projects on github.com, and they talk to their manager about it.
• Marketing and marketing budget. 20:30
  • Marketing is a lot of different channels that they can use, and they have tried almost everything to see if it works, and if it doesn't work, they try to future-harm.
  • They try to provide value for free to open source users and projects and are happy to do that.
  • Adding value in open source is about saving time and giving time to most open source projects using a merge tool.
  • If a company is new to open source, they need a tool to help them with a workflow tool, marketing, etc.
• How did you find out about rescue? 25:36
  • The number of people using rescue is small. There are very small projects with just one or two people mentioning it to project being run by 50 or 100 person behind.
  • The main goal is to actually work on the open source projects, not start a new one.
  • Redhat was working on an open source project with Eddie when they started. Redhat is a great leverage for building a company.
  • One takeaway for a dev tool founder, be strict about splitting 50% of your time between building the product and doing the fun stuff.

Aaron Francis is someone who needs little introduction. Especially if you've ever used Laravel or MySQL.

Aaron built up the highly acclaimed PlanetScale YouTube channel and now publishes content on his own channel and founded Try Hard Studios to help developer tools make amazing video content.

Here are some quotes from Aaron's viewers:

• hey man your videos kick ass and i cannot thank you enough for your approach with these. your videos can be watched once and understood... every single one of them... i don't know how you do it, but the way you have picked to teach anything you teach is incredible. you freaking rock! thank you!
• Great stuff! Love that you mix in a bit of fun with the content, it's what got me to subscribe!
• I have been working with MySQL for last 17 years and I never use cursor but your video helped me to understand MySQL cursor. Thank you
• iterally laughing out loud several times. absolute gold.
  (partner's like "what are you watching?!" "a guy seeding a database!"

In this episode, we take a deep dive into how Aaron makes videos and what you can learn from his approach.

This episode is sponsored by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Links:

• Aaron's channel: https://www.youtube.com/@aarondfrancis
• Aaron's Twitter https://x.com/aarondfrancis
• Mostly Technical Podcast - https://mostlytechnical.com/ 
• Try Hard Studios: https://tryhardstudios.com/
• Aaron's Handwriting robots - https://x.com/aarondfrancis/status/1438888219471491074?lang=en 

Juri Strumpflohner is the Director of Developer Experience at Nrwl Technologies. Nrwl works with global enterprises to provide remote consulting, training, and engineering. Nx is Nrwl’s open source product which provides advanced tools that help scale enterprise development. 

What we cover

• The  story, Nrwl, and Nx?
• Solve the problems you see
• Open source business model
• How Nx got to 2million downloads per week 
• Hiring for growth
• Taking over an existing open source proejct

Where to hear from Juri

• Twitter: @juristr
• https://nrwl.io/
• https://nx.dev/
• https://www.youtube.com/c/Nrwl_io
• https://nx.dev/conf

In this episode, I pull out some of the key DevTools lessons I've learned in the last 120 interviews. 

Including:

• The importance of deeply understanding the problem you're solving by talking to developers directly, as emphasized by Adam Frankl.
• Ant Wilson's advice on experimenting with different go-to-market strategies and channels rather than relying on conventional wisdom. 
• Zeno Rocha's emphasis on the importance of the last mile—packaging and presentation. He shares how spending more time on documentation and onboarding materials helped his open-source project gain massive traction.
• Gonto's perspective that "it's better to be different than better," and how creativity, uniqueness, and understanding developer habits are key to successful marketing.
• My personal reflections on overcoming fear and discomfort in go-to-market efforts.

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. https://workos.com.

Ivan Burazin is the cofounder of Daytona

What we cover:

- Scaling a 5,000 attendee conference
- How to drive change in big organizations
- Top down vs bottoms up approaches to growth

Daytona is an enterprise-grade GitHub Codespaces alternative for managing self-hosted, secure and standardized development environments.

Ivan Burazin - https://twitter.com/ivanburazin
Daytona - https://www.daytona.io/

In today’s episode, Jack discusses what it was like working in a sales team at Stack Overflow, selling to developers, and why you should think about sales in terms of champions. 

What we cover

(01:07): Being a Sales Development rep.

(03:34): When a salesperson gets an inbound lead, it's a euphoric moment.

(03:09): Developers rarely check emails.

(05:04): Connect with people that already have a problem.

(05:48): Qualify your leads.

(07:04): Think about sales in terms of champions.

In this conversation, Anurag Goel, founder and CEO of Render, discusses the evolution of Render as a cloud infrastructure platform is actually simple to use.

He shares insights from his time at Stripe, emphasizing the importance of customer focus, crafting a seamless user experience, and the philosophy of progressive disclosure of complexity.

Anurag also highlights the significance of customer support as an integral part of the product and offers advice for aspiring founders on finding their passion and maintaining empathy in their work.

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

What we discuss:

• Building in special details enhances customer experience.
• The delicate balance between simplicity and capability. 
• How the power of sensible defaults. and progressive disclosure of complexity improves usability.
• Focus on customer needs drives product development.
• Customer support should be treated as a product.
• Finding founder market fit is crucial for success.
• Empathy for users is essential in product development.

Links

• Anurag's Twitter https://x.com/anuraggoel
• Render https://render.com/
• Stripe https://stripe.com/

Keywords
Render, developer experience, cloud infrastructure, customer support, startup culture, Anurag Goel, Stripe, product development, user experience, technology

Søren Bramer Schmidt, co-founder and CEO of Prisma, joins us to discuss the journey of building one of the largest developer communities in DevTools. 

Søren shares how Prisma's deliberate strategies have shaped its growth, feature prioritization, and the launch of new products like Prisma Postgres. 

We also explore the challenges of managing a vast user base and how Prisma is adapting to shifts in application development.

We discuss:

• How intentional partnerships with educators and influencers fueled Prisma’s early growth.
• Strategies to engage the GraphQL community and gain visibility on platforms like Hacker News.
• Managing a large developer community while balancing innovation with stability.
• The evolution from Graphcool to Prisma ORM, including lessons from early pivots.
• Launching Prisma Postgres and how community feedback influenced its development.
• Implementing a simple, usage-based pricing model and reducing infrastructure costs through self-hosting.

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. https://workos.com/

Links:

• Prisma (https://www.prisma.io/)
• Prisma Postgres (https://www.prisma.io/postgres)
• Feldera (https://feldera.com/)

Flo Merian is a developer marketer who has run successful Product Hunt launches for numerous developer tools.

Flo is also a maintainer of the Developer Marketing community and curates LaunchWeek.dev

Flo is a Product Marketer at Clerk - a user management tool 

Links:

• https://twitter.com/fmerian
• https://marketingto.dev/
• https://launchweek.dev/
• https://github.com/fmerian/awesome-product-hunt

Jamie Barton is a DevRel Engineer at Grafbase https://grafbase.com/ and the host of https://graphql.wtf/

Escape helps you Find and fix GraphQL security flaws at scale within your DevSecOps process

• Introduction to Tristan and Antoine. 0:00
• How did they get started in cybersecurity? 4:35
• How did you get your first few customers? 9:49
• Challenges from a product and tech point of view. 13:57
• Challenges of integration into the development process. 18:10
• How to find the right team? 22:55

Links:

• Escape.tech https://escape.tech/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=devtools-podcast
• Tristan's Twitter - https://twitter.com/TristanKalos
• Antoine's Twitter - https://twitter.com/iCarossio

Kimmy Leslie is a marketer at Stream. Stream power chat messaging and activity feeds for billions of global end-users across thousands of different apps.

What we cover

(00:42): What does community mean to Stream?

(01:37): What are good events like in the developer space?

(02:31): How did you find having a blank canvas of events that you could run and sponsors that you could find?

(03:30): Do you have any advice for anyone at a startup where they aren’t doing any events or sponsorship?

(05:20): Do you think sponsors and events play into the product in terms of how it develops, as well as all the relationships that you are building with different communities?

(07:38): What do you do when you have a successful sponsor, what happens next?

(08:25) Would you recommend for someone just getting started to allocate their budget between different events and sponsors?

Where to hear from Kimmy

• Twitter: @LeslieKimmy
• Stream - https://getstream.io/

What we cover

• Creating content is a process, not a project
• Reusing content effectively
• Stay on message!!
• Consistent gentle pressure
• Boring but effective strategies

Where to hear from Jason

• Twitter: @jlengstorf
• jason.af/links
• https://www.learnwithjason.dev/

Josh is a Navy Seal turned founder of Uffizzi. Uffizzi provides environments as a Service and works with open source projects like Backstage.

Topics
- Pivoting between ideas
- Working with open source projects to improve products and build credibility

Links:

• Uffizzi
• Josh's Twitter

Nikolaus West is the founder of Rerun.io - Visualize computer vision.

What we discuss:

• Finding a problem to work on 
• What are some of the features that will be free and open source?
• What’s the difference between a commercial and a free service?
• The most important thing is that we’re building something that will be useful
• How to get into the minds of computer vision developers
• Why build in Rust

Rerun - https://www.rerun.io/
Niko's Twitter - https://twitter.com/NikolausWest

In 2017, Rasmus Makwarth sold his previous APM (Application Performance Managment) startup Opbeat to Elastic for an undisclosed amount. Opbeat became Elastic APM, which became a big part of the Elastic Observability solution and Rasmus became Senior Director of Product Management - with a focus on Developer Experience.

Today, Rasmus is the founder and CEO of Bucket.co - a feature flagging tool built for B2B teams. Bucket has raised $5.7m from investors such as Project A and Creandum.

We dig into:

• The realities of fundraising on a deadline
• The role of San Francisco in fundraising - do you need to be there?
• How exit opportunities can come from unexpected sources and the importance of showing up 
• The importance of building a great product
• What Rasmus learned at Elastic - one of the biggest DevTools in the world 
• Why Bucket is betting on helping engineers at b2b companies understand how users use their features
• The future of product engineering

Where to find Rasmus:

• LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/makwarth/?originalSubdomain=dk
• Twitter/X https://x.com/makwarth
• Bucket https://bucket.co/

References

• Elastic https://elastic.co/
• Opbeat acquisition announcement https://www.elastic.co/blog/welcome-opbeat-to-the-elastic-family
• Shay Banon - founder of Elastic https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimchy/
• Gregory Tademoto - VP Global Business & Corporate Development https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregorytademoto/

To support Scaling DevTools, check out the Enterprise Ready Conf from WorkOS https://enterprise-ready.com/

This is our 100th episode! 

And we're thrilled to welcome back fan favourite Ant Wilson - the cofounder and CTO of Supabase.

They discuss the evolution of Supabase, the importance of open source, and effective marketing strategies. 

Ant shares insights on community engagement, the significance of developer-centric branding, and the challenges of navigating the enterprise landscape. 

We also touch on the rise of AI and vector databases, emphasizing the power of open source in development. The conversation concludes with reflections on the journey and future aspirations.

Thank you to everyone who made it our 100th episode!

Takeaways

• Open source can significantly enhance hiring opportunities.
• Building a strong brand requires understanding your audience.
• Open source provides a competitive edge against incumbents.
• The importance of stability and security for enterprise clients.
• Time in the market builds trust with potential customers.

Links

• Supabase https://supabase.com/
• Ant Wilson's Twitter https://x.com/antwilson
• pgvector https://supabase.com/docs/guides/database/extensions/pgvector  
• Greg Richardson https://x.com/ggrdson
• Previous episode with Ant https://podcast.scalingdevtools.com/episodes/product-market-fit-is-one-pivot-away-with-ant-wilson-founder-of-supabase

Keywords

open source, developer tools, marketing strategies, community engagement, AI, vector databases, enterprise solutions, product development, tech podcast

Fred Schott is the founder of Astro.build and the Astro technology company. 

Astro is the all-in-one web framework designed for speed. Pull your content from anywhere and deploy everywhere, all powered by your favorite UI components and libraries.

Snowpack is a lightning-fast frontend build tool, designed for the modern web. 

Before this, Fred founded Snowpack 

• What is Astro and what is it doing? 0:00
  • Fred introduces himself and talks about astro.
  • Fred explains what astro is and what it does.
• What’s changed in the web over the last 10 years. 2:20
  • The last decade has been defined by full stack javascript.
  • Astro is a server-first HTML rendering.
• Astro’s unique model of building an open source company. 4:51
  • Building a sustainable company around an open source project.
  • The astro technology company model.
  • How Fred got started in open source.
  • What Fred worked on before astro.
  • How Fred got started in open source software.
• Pika was the first project that I really sunk my teeth into. 11:15
  • Pika was the first project Fred really sunk his teeth into.
  • Building snowpack and
• Why is it so bad to create a slack channel for your open source project? 14:00
  • Stop creating slack communities for open source projects.
  • The importance of community
• What it’s like at the beginning of an open source project. 16:26
  • The first users are essential for an early-stage open source project.
  • The power of responding quickly to feedback from the community.
  • The first version of astro
  • The spirit of open source and the importance of licencing code.
• The importance of having fun working on something that’s your own. 22:29
  • The drive to just build it.
  • The importance of having fun working on free software.
  • The psychology of over-architecture.
• The importance of dog-fooding and how to use it. 26:13
  • Dog fooding projects, how to build a tool for someone to use by seeing what they are doing.
• How do you get people to use the tool if they’re not already using it? 29:16
  • Finding a real use case for snowpack.
  • How to approach feedback from users.
  • Using a Github repo to test new changes.
  • Prioritising what to work on.
  • Death by 1000 paper cuts.
  • The importance of listening to users for feedback.

Links:

• Fred's Twitter https://twitter.com/FredKSchott
• Astro https://astro.build/
• Snowpack https://www.snowpack.dev/
• 5 Things I Learned Building Snowpack to 20,000 Stars https://dev.to/fredkschott/5-things-i-learned-while-building-snowpack-to-20-000-stars-b9d
• 6 More Things I Learned Building Snowpack to 20,000 Stars (Part 2)
  https://dev.to/fredkschott/5-more-things-i-learned-building-snowpack-to-20-000-stars-5dc9

​Samuel Colvin​ - the creator of ​Pydantic​ - the most popular data validation library for Python. Used by literally everyone (Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, NVIDIA, even the NSA). He shares the story behind his startup ​Logfire​ which just raised $12.5m from Sequoia.

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Key takeaways:
- You can just build a different product to your open source project and leverage your brand
- Quality of product matters a LOT (if you can build a popular open source project, can probably build a quality paid product)
- Really helps to be part of a movement. Hard to predict but Pydantic benefited from two (types and LLMs)
- GitHub stars are a vanity metric compared to download numbers

Links:
- Pydantic
- Logfire
- Samuel Colvin

Chapters
00:00 The Genesis of Pydantic
02:46 The Evolution of Software Development
06:02 Building a Successful Open Source Library
08:52 The Impact of Community and Adoption
11:51 Metrics of Success in Open Source
15:08 Transitioning from Pydantic to LogFire
17:59 The Vision Behind LogFire
20:50 The Connection Between Pydantic and LogFire
24:05 Navigating the Challenges of Building a Startup
26:56 The Future of Observability and Databases

P.s. thanks to my friend Abeed for making the episode happen!

James Hawkins is the cofounder and CEO of PostHog. PostHog is a platform to analyze, test, observe, and deploy new features.

This is the second time James has been on and the episode is mostly about how they run PostHog.

It's a pretty unconventional approach - probably because James thinks very deeply about how organizations should operate.

What we discuss:

• How PostHog hire
• His approach to one-on-one meetings
• The role of engineers in product development
• The impact of open source projects on PostHog's success
• A surprising secret to success (fun)
• Importance of listening to developers

Links:

• James's Twitter https://x.com/james406
• PostHog https://posthog.com/
• The Mental Workload of Hoovering https://jefhawkins.com/blog/mental-workload-of-hoovering
• Ray Dalio's Principles https://www.principles.com/  
• James's first interview https://podcast.scalingdevtools.com/episodes/working-with-enterprise-clients-with-james-hawkins 

This episode is sponsored by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Gabriel Savit is the founder and CEO of Runway - a tool to coordinate and automate mobile app releases.

• Introductions 0:00
  • Introduction to Gabe
  • Underlying themes of runway mobile release management.
• What’s it like to work with mobile teams? 2:19
  • Challenges for mobile teams to keep tabs on.
  • The third party ecosystem problem.
  • The origin story of the team.
• The process of running a release was something that resonated immediately. Different teams set this up differently. 8:23
• What was the next step after you gathered the feedback? 10:38
  • The first round of interviews to validate the problem space.
  • How the interviews were conducted.
  • The feedback loop is not always closed.
  • The next step after gathering the feedback.
• How do you get an MVP out quickly? 15:31
  • Starting with one integration, one part of the process.
  • The first few pilots.
• How did you get your first customer to buy in? 18:24
  • Onboarding the first customer or first user.
  • Getting the first cohort involved.
  • Aligning with the overall vision of the platform.
• What is the go to market motion? 33:14
  • Go-to-market motion, demo, sync, sign up, demo.
  • Self-service, keeping the entry point open.
• What’s the future direction of the platform? 36:18

Links:
- https://twitter.com/gabrielsavit
- https://runway.team/ 

This episode is a deep dive into DevTools marketing with Jason Lengstorf, founder of CodeTV.

Links:

• Jason on X
• CodeTV
• Jason's YouTube

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. 

Ellen Chisa is a partner at Boldstart Ventures. Prior to Boldstart, Ellen founded Darklang - a programming language. Before Darklang, Ellen worked in product.

What we discussed: 

• Startups should focus on building one SDK and doing it well, rather than trying to build multiple SDKs at once.
• North Star metrics
• Developer tooling companies can learn from consumer-facing companies in terms of marketing and creating an identity for their product.
• Being authentic as a founder and actively engaging with the community can help establish a strong brand and attract users. Recognize and leverage your unique strengths and skills.
• Busy work can be valuable
• The importance of segmenting your message

Links:

• Ellen's Twitter/X https://x.com/ellenchisa?lang=en
• Boldstart Ventures https://boldstart.vc/
• darklang https://darklang.com/

Sarah Jane Morris is the Senior Manager of Developer community at HubSpot. Hubspot is a CRM platform that brings everything scaling companies need to deliver a best-in-class customer experience into one place.

What we cover

(00:21): How should early-stage startups be thinking about community?

(06:09): Once the community has found momentum, what would the next focus be?

(12:27): In terms of tangibly measuring how well you're doing, what kind of things do you care about?

(18:39): Community can sometimes be put on the back burner, but at the same time you see so many of the most successful dev startups invested in community really early on. Do you see a pattern or do you have any advice for startups that are at this stage?

Links mentioned by SJ

• Twitter: @SarahJaneMorris
• https://www.hubspot.com
• https://haxor.sh/
• https://www.twilio.com/
• https://www.commonroom.io/ 
• https://projectinclude.org/

Scaling DevTools is the podcast that investigates how DevTools go from zero to one. 

What we cover

• An introduction to Miro
• What does ‘humanness’ mean?
• How to leverage ‘humanness’
• The four pillars of DevRel
• Outreach
• Product
• Education
• Community
• Always be empathetic
• Always be respectful

Where to hear from Carla

• Twitter: @CarlaSofii
• Linkedin: Carla Sofia Teixeira
• **https://developers.miro.com/**

Zach Goldie is a DevTools messaging consultant

• Ship code faster is an empty statement. 0:00
• How do you position yourself against the competition? 1:56
• The problem with free monitoring tools. 6:43
• Explain why fast is a good thing. 11:44
• Curse of knowledge and how to overcome it. 16:42
• The problem with copy length and word count. 21:37
• How do you know if a page is good? 27:05
• Pitching self-serve to users. 32:42

Links:
- Zach's Twitter https://twitter.com/DitchingData
- Zach's site https://www.zachgoldie.com/ 
- Benefit layers https://dx.tips/benefit-layers

There are more and more open source DevTools startups. I’ve interviewed dozens. But I am still confused about open source licenses. So I decided to ask questions to two people who actually understand them: my friends Eric and Matt - founders of open source background jobs tool Trigger.dev.

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

What we discuss:

• Two Key Questions for License Selection
• What are the benefits of permissive licenses?
• What are the main licenses?
• Why shouldn’t you write your own (open source) license?
• What is Copyleft?
• Post Open Source" Movement

• (00:50) - Open Source Licensing
• (18:18) - Protective Licensing
• (23:12) - Copy Left Concept
• (43:30) - Wordpress

Trigger:

• Eric Allam - https://x.com/maverickdotdev 
• Matt Aitken - https://x.com/mattaitken
• Trigger.dev https://trigger.dev/
• JSON Hero https://jsonhero.io/ 

Licenses

• MIT License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License - Matt’s “most permissive license”
• Apache-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_License - “Like MIT but with trademarks”
• FSL / Fair Source License https://fair.io/ - created by Sentry
• Heather Meeker - Open Source Licencing expert https://www.linkedin.com/in/heathermeeker/ 
• A practical guide to Open Source Licencing https://www.amazon.co.uk/Open-Source-Business-Practical-Licensing/dp/1544737645 

References

• Sentry https://sentry.io/welcome/ 
• Redis https://redis.io/ 
• Valkey https://valkey.io/ 
• Clickhouse https://clickhouse.com/ 
• Background to Continue.dev and PearAI https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/30/y-combinator-is-being-criticized-after-it-backed-an-ai-startup-that-admits-it-basically-cloned-another-ai-startup/ 

Taylor Otwell is the creator of the Laravel framework. Taylor has created numerous paid products that have generated millions, such as:

• Laravel Forge (server provisioning/management)
• Laravel Vapor (serverless Laravel hosting with AWS)
• Laravel Envoyer (zero downtime PHP deployments)
• Laravel Nova (Laravel admin panel)

In this interview, Taylor shares why he is now building Laravel Cloud - an infrastructure platform for Laravel apps and why Laravel Cloud needed VC funding.

We also cover:

• The different challenges of bootstrapped and VC funded startups
• How the Laravel ecosystem became so entrepreneurial 
• Building products for the average joe developer
• The role of taste and craft in developer tools
• What Taylor and Adam Wathan learned from each other 
• Fear and Taylor's comparison with  Alex Honnold 

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Links: 

• Laravel  
• Taylor Otwell 
• Laravel Cloud 
• Open jobs at Laravel 
• Adam Wathan 

Chapters:
00:00 The Journey of Laravel's Creator
02:48 Transitioning from Bootstrap to VC Funding
06:10 Building Laravel Cloud: A New Challenge
09:04 The Shift in Company Structure and Culture
11:50 Maintaining Quality and Usability in Development
15:09 Community Impact and Collaboration
17:56 Craftsmanship and Design Philosophy
20:45 Navigating Growth and Market Needs
23:54 Advice for Aspiring DevTool Founders
26:48 Future Directions and Innovations in Laravel

Thank you to Michael Grinich for making this happen. Thank you to Ostap Brehin for introducing me to Laravel. Thank you to Hank Taylor for helping me prep.  

What we cover

• The early days of Corrello
• The advantages of marketplaces

Where to hear from Robin

• Robin's Twitter
• Robin's Mastadon
• Corrello
• Blue Cat Reports 

Paul Butler is the cofounder of Drifting in Space. They believe that browser-based applications can feel like magic if they’re built with the right tools. They make Jamsocket, a platform for building applications with session backends, and Plane, the open-source server that powers it.

What we cover:
- The power of in-person meetups
- How to communicate complex problems
- Deconstructing topics for developer content
- Writing about trends e.g. GPU rendered UIs
- Going after developers doing "something ambitious with browsers"

Megan Reynolds is an investor at Crane Venture Partners. Crane are an early stage VC who have invested in developer tools such as Gitpod, Encore and Novu. 

What we cover

• What is happening in the market right now?
• Critical path for developers
• What can devtools do to make themselves more critical?
• Understanding your landscape
• What are the good founders doing? Gitpod example
• Why Megan invested in Novu
• What Megan is looking for in devtools

Where to hear from Megan

• Twitter: @meganreyno
• https://crane.vc/

Dev Tools mentioned

• Gitpod - open source remote developer collaboration
• Gitpod // Factorial case study
• Novu - open source notification infrastructure
• Encore - backend development engine
• Firebase - backend as a service
• Supabase (open source alternative to firebase)
• Posthog (open source alternative to mixpanel)

Guy Podjarny is the founder of Tessl - a startup that is rethinking how we build software.

Guy previously founded Snyk - a dependency scanning tool worth billions of dollars. Before Snyk, Guy founded Blaze, which he sold to Akamai.

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

In this conversation, we talk about the future of programming and the future of DevTools. 

• The future of programming will focus on writing specifications.
• Trust in AI tools
• Snyk is an example of how tools can integrate into existing workflows.
• Code can become disposable, allowing for flexibility in development.
• Specifications will serve as repositories of truth in software development.
• Developers will need to adapt their skills to leverage AI tools effectively.
• Community collaboration is essential for the evolution of AI development tools.
• AI simplifies and democratizes the process of software creation

Thanks to Anna Debenham for making this happen. 

Nikita Shamgunov is the founder of Neon, an open-source serverless Postgres company. Before Neon, Nikita co-founded MemSQL, now SingleStore, which is valued at over a billion dollars. He has also worked as a VC at Khosla Ventures and held engineering roles at Meta and Microsoft. Nikita is known for his strategic thinking and transparency about his decision-making process.

We discuss:

• The importance of storytelling and providing a clear narrative for your company
• When to introduce a sales team and how to build a sales and marketing "machine"
• Pricing strategies, including pricing for storage and compute in the data and analytics space
• The evolution of revenue models in DevTools: from selling seats and storage/compute to selling tokens
• Lessons learned from hiring MongoDB’s VP of Engineering, focusing on improving reliability and building strong team management processes
• The benefits of using a high-quality recruiting firm and avoiding the pitfalls of bad hires
• Balancing competitiveness with respect for competitors to maintain credibility, particularly in the developer tools market
• The idea of “developing your taste” in product development, inspired by Guillermo Rauch from Vercel
• How modern dev tools can monetize through seats, storage/compute, or tokens, with tokens currently being the most profitable
• Why Nikita advises DevTools founders to understand the business model framework and align it with their strategy

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. 

Links:

• Neon
• SingleStore 
• Khosla Ventures 
• Fusion Talent 

Greg Lazarus and Matt Althauser are two of the cofounders of Polychrome - a company that buys small to medium sized B2B software businesses: with a focus on Developer Tools. Their portfolio includes the feature flagging tool Flagsmith (we recorded an episode with them last week) and the browser automation tool Browserless.

In this episode we cover the ins and outs of buying developer tools.

Links:
- Polychrome https://www.polychrome.com/
- Matt Althauser https://x.com/malthauser?lang=en
- Greg Lazarus https://x.com/greglaz5

This episode is sponsored by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Ronak Ganatra is the Director of Marketing at Lano, a global software solution enabling businesses to hire and pay full-time employees and contractors. Ronak was previously VP of Marketing at Hygraph and has also founded https://marketingto.dev/.

What we cover

(00:37): What was it like on your first day working at Hygraph versus three years later?

(07:03): What do you think being a better developer marketer means?

(08:36): How do you approach things like performance marketing?

(12:17) How should developer marketing teams be working with sales teams?

Where to hear from Ronak

• Twitter: @gunnyganatra
• savepad
• https://marketingto.dev

Erik Bernhardsson is the founder of Modal Labs. Modal Labs is a tool to run generative AI models, large-scale batch jobs, job queues, and much more.

Links:
- https://twitter.com/bernhardsson
- https://erikbern.com/
- https://modal.com/

Thomas Peham is the VP of Marketing and Julius Hemingway is an Analyst Relations Manager at Storyblok. Storyblok harnesses a headless, API-driven CMS architecture empowering developers to build anything, publish everywhere, and integrate with any technology stack.

What we cover

• What do you do at Storyblok?
• Growing up fast
• Product market fit
• Advice for startups
• Collaborating with partners
• What opportunities do you see out there, working with analyst companies?

Where to hear from Thomas & Julius

• Thomas: @tompeham
• Julius: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julius-hemingway-b720b1136/
• https://www.storyblok.com/

Ankur Goyal is the founder of ​Braintrust​, a year old LLM eval platform that is already used by Figma, Vercel and Stripe and just raised $36m from a16z. It's a rocketship.

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Key Success Factors
- Started with a targeted list of ~50 companies already working with AI
- Focused on early adopters and innovators in the space
- Strategy: If they could make the frontrunners happy, others would follow

Links:
- Braintrust
- Ankur Goyal
- Alana Goyal
- Basecase 
- Elad Gil 
- Martin Casado

Chapters:
* 00:00  Introduction to BrainTrust and Its Success
* 02:52  The Importance of User Research in Product Development
* 06:11  Building Relationships with Key Customers
* 09:05  The Role of Feedback in Product Improvement
* 11:54  The Impact of Mentorship on Entrepreneurial Success
* 15:11  Identifying Market Opportunities in AI Development
* 18:00  Effective User Interviews and Problem Validation
* 20:59  The Evolution of BrainTrust's Product Features
* 23:55  Advice for Aspiring DevTool Founders
* 26:48  Exciting Developments in the DevTool Space

Guest: Logan Kilpatrick, member of OpenAI’s developer advocacy team, often described as OpenAI’s first DevRel.

Highlights:

• Challenges and Growth: Logan discusses the evolution of developer engagement from GPT 3.5 to the explosive growth following ChatGPT's success. Initially faced with the challenge of generating developer interest, the release of ChatGPT marked a significant shift, highlighting the shift from awareness to scaling and improving developer experience amidst high demand and compute-intensive operations.
• Developer Experience Focus: Logan emphasizes the focus on developer experience, detailing the balance between improving platform features and releasing new models and APIs. Despite past trade-offs, the goal remains to enhance core platform functionalities and developer-friendly features.
• Decision Making and Prioritization: Logan shares insights into the dynamic and fast-paced environment at OpenAI, which requires flexibility in planning and prioritization. Key focus areas include documentation, product improvements, direct developer interactions, internal coordination, and supporting launches, especially the GPT Store.
• Impact of Documentation: Underscoring the critical role of documentation, Logan points out that effective documentation is paramount for developer success, guiding the use of OpenAI's API and models. Efforts are underway to improve documentation quality and support various user personas beyond developers.
• Developer Community Engagement: Lessons from engaging with the developer community include the need for diverse content formats and accommodating various user personas. Logan acknowledges the challenge of keeping documentation and resources updated in a rapidly evolving API landscape.
• Building a Superior Developer Experience: Logan stresses the importance of OpenAI's mission to benefit everyone and the role of the API in achieving widespread impact. The commitment to providing the best tools for developers is seen as a differentiator in the competitive landscape of AI model providers.
• Managing Attention and Feedback: Despite the challenges of being a public figure within the developer community, Logan values direct feedback for continuous improvement. Balancing public engagement with deep work, especially on documentation and launch support, is highlighted.
• Community Questions and Answers: Logan addresses questions from the community, touching on the desire for innovative applications of OpenAI technology, plans for global events, prioritizing documentation, addressing developer concerns about scaling, and sharing personal preferences for deep dish pizza in Chicago.

Rapid Fire Community Q&A:

• Innovative Applications: Logan hopes to see development of multiplayer, multimodal text-first AI assistants.
• Global Events: OpenAI is expanding its presence, including hiring in London and considering events in cities like Atlanta.
• DevRel Strategy for 2024: Focus on creating excellent documentation.
• Developer Concerns: Addressing challenges around freedom to scale and capacity constraints.
• Personal Time: Logan plans to take vacation during the end-of-year code freeze in 2024.
• Chicago Deep Dish Recommendation: Lou Malnati's and Paradise Park are Logan's picks for the best deep dish pizza.

Links:

• Logan's Twitter - https://x.com/OfficialLoganK
• Romain's Twitter https://twitter.com/romainhuet
• OpenAI https://platform.openai.com/
• tlDraw https://www.tldraw.com/
• Bloop https://bloop.ai/ 
• Joyfill https://joyfill.io/
• https://portkey.ai/
• Stripe docs https://stripe.com/docs 

This episode provides a behind-the-scenes look at OpenAI's efforts to enhance developer engagement, the challenges of balancing innovation with platform stability, and the importance of community feedback in shaping the future of AI development tools.

Show notes generated with gpt4 (using a blog post I wrote) 

Dax Raad is building SST - an open-source framework that makes it easy to build serverless apps.

• What Is SST? 0:00
  • The theory in January was to make content that has nothing to do with SST and still convert people. Dax validated the theory within the first hour.
  • Dax tells us a little bit about SST, a framework for building applications on AWS, and how it works.
• The importance of marketing and content. 2:42
  • The focus now has to be on marketing. 
  • The top of the funnel is when someone has no idea who you are.
• Pitching the idea to his boss. 5:16
  • Dax pitched the idea and Fred Schott was immediately down. He spent a day just watching every single episode of Between Two Ferns and wrote down all the patterns of jokes.
  • He learned a lot from the first one, and is doing another one today at 230.
• How much goes into the show? 8:04
  • The original show is fully done and edits, and that is true of the one that video was made. The video was not close to what actually happened, but it was his response to the video.
  • The original is very specific and it's funny how specific the jokes are.
• The importance of having a unique angle. 10:40
  • For most companies, announcing an integration is not the most exciting thing to announce.
  • The bar is incredibly low, and the expectations are super low.
• Invest more in marketing and content. 12:35
  • They are looking to hire a comedian or someone who makes good content on YouTube.
  • They are planning a series A, and are looking for people who are talented and can help them.
• Educational vs entertaining content. 14:57
  • The only way to capture someone like you is through a different angle.
  • The theory in January was to make content that has nothing to do with SST and still convert people into trying out SST.
  • Finding an angle that is genuine for yourself.
• How he got over the hump of clickbait. 17:54
  • He went through the same hump that everyone goes through when trying to publish content on youtube.
  • He was sent a video by a guy who was very successful on youtube and he was explaining why he does what he does.
• The importance of having a good content. 20:51
  • Youtube is an amazing place. People will watch it if it's good.
• Marketing is a huge lever. 23:20
  • They are a very small company. They are able to do a lot given their small size and they are going to continue to be a small company, so they need to find ways to find leverage anywhere they can.
  • They are excited about what they can invest in.
  • Dax would love to work with someone who is good at filmmaking and editing to keep it engaging and keep it fun. He also thinks about shows that are authentic.
  • Key takeaways for anyone listening, remember that if you're building a company you do need to do marketing.

Links:
- SST https://sst.dev/
- Dax's twitter https://twitter.com/thdxr
- Between Two Nerds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I2Xep0GTQY&ab_channel=SST 

Vivian Dufour is the CEO and co-founder of Meterian.

Meterian is an open source vulnerability scanner.

In this episode we talk about topics like:

• Selling to enterprises
• Why you need to make your product easy to test
• Hiring and managing salespeople

Links:

• Meterian: https://www.meterian.io/
• Vivian Dufour - https://www.linkedin.com/in/viviandufour/ 

Stefan Avram recently tweeted that "You shouldn't have devrels. Your customers should be your devrels"

So I invited Stefan on to debate this with one of the industry's most respected DevRels Dan Moore from Fusion Auth.

This is episode is sponsored by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Links:

• Stefan's tweet https://twitter.com/StefanTMD/status/1735022106822295920
• Dan Moore https://twitter.com/mooreds 
• Fusion Auth https://fusionauth.io/
• Wundergraph https://wundergraph.com/ 

Nick Gomez is the co-founder and CEO of InKeep. InKeep is an AI customer support tool focused on Developer Tools.

They discuss the importance of understanding developer needs, the role of AI in technical support, and how community engagement can enhance support efforts.

What we discuss

• AI support for developer tools is different from traditional B2B SaaS support.
• Developers often seek help through documentation and community forums.
• Scaling technical support requires understanding the developer's tech stack.
• Clear communication channels can improve support efficiency.
• AI solutions must prioritize quality to build trust with users.
• Community engagement can help crowdsource support efforts.
• Support teams should continuously improve documentation based on user inquiries.
• 24/7 support can be achieved through AI tools.
• Investing in customer relationships can lead to valuable insights and support.
• Innovative tools are changing the landscape of developer support.

Links:

• Nick Gomez's Twitter https://x.com/nickgomezc
• InKeep https://inkeep.com/ 

Keywords
AI support, developer tools, technical support, community engagement, customer investment, quality assurance, support team structure, 24/7 support, innovations in development

Resources

• Crossing the chasm by Geoffrey Moore
• Airbyte
• Netlify Auth Library
• Wardley map
• Strategy Letter V by Joel Spolsky
• The hardest working graphic in software
• 10x-ing Svelte (Svelte Summit 2022 Talk Notes)

swyx’s links:

• Twitter
• swyx
• DX Tips
• AI writing
• Learninpublic.org
• Intro to tech strategy

Key points:

• Everyone in tech should understand the technology adoption cycle and know which stage of the adoption cycle you’re at
• First time founders obsess about products and second-time founders obsess about distribution.
• At the beginning, focus-in on one offering - have conviction in who your users are
• Your tech IS the story at the earliest stage of the adoption cycle. Because you are targeting innovators and they love to know you use Rust for example! At the later stage, tech no longer matters; the cost matters. Your messaging evolves
• You should be picking industries and companies with a strong chance of success

Louis Knight-Webb is the CEO and co-founder of Bloop.

Bloop helps with modernizing legacy software, particularly focusing on COBOL and mainframes.

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Takeaways:
- Mainframes and COBOL are still foundational in many industries.
- Bloop started with a focus on code search but evolved to address legacy code modernization.
- The transition from COBOL to Java is a significant challenge for many enterprises.
- Innovative approaches are needed to effectively translate legacy code.
- Ensuring code quality during migration is crucial to avoid operational disruptions.
- AI can enhance the code translation process but has limitations with legacy languages.

Links:
- Louis Knight-Webb
- Bloop 

Chapters:
00:00 The Legacy of Mainframes and COBOL
03:05 The Evolution of Bloop and Code Search
05:58 Challenges in Modernizing Legacy Code
08:48 Navigating the Enterprise Code Landscape
12:11 The Transition from COBOL to Java
15:05 Innovative Approaches to Code Translation
18:02 Ensuring Code Quality and Functionality
20:56 The Future of Development and AI Integration
23:52 Building Relationships in the Enterprise Space
26:45 The Long-Term Vision for Legacy Code Modernization

How do you do onboarding in a way developers actually like?

Kilian is the founder of Polypane - The browser for ambitious web developers https://polypane.app/
Kilian's Twitter - https://twitter.com/kilianvalkhof

David is the CEO of Arcjet. Arcjet is a tool that helps developers protect their apps once they go into production. It offers Bot detection, rate limiting, email validation, attack protection, data redaction.

David is also the creator of the console.dev newsletter and podcast. It's where thousands of developers discover developer tools. 

In this episode we discuss how David thinks about creating content. Why he believes go-to-market is more difficult than product and how he works on creating great developer experience. 

Links:
- Arcjet https://arcjet.com/
- David Mytton - https://davidmytton.blog/
- Console https://console.dev/

AI DevTools hackathon this weekend in SF:
- Event page https://lu.ma/devtools-hackathon
- More info https://www.devtoolshackathon.com/

Hamzah Chaudhary is the cofounder of Lightdash, an open source, self-serve BI tool.

In this episode, Hamzah shares:

• Their initial plan to build a consultancy and how it morphed into a product to solve their customer's needs
• How open source works as a strategy
• Bringing software engineering tools to the BI domain
• How they reach their users
• How they partner with bigger organizations

Links:

• Lightdash https://www.lightdash.com/
• Lightdash GitHub https://github.com/lightdash/lightdash
• Hamzah's Twitter https://x.com/hamzahc1

André Eriksson is the founder of Encore. Encore is a backend development engine built on the belief that escaping complexity unleashes a higher state of creativity.

Scaling DevTools is the podcast that investigates how DevTools go from zero to one. Created by Jack Bridger, founder of BitReach. BitReach helps DevTool companies reach more developers. In scaling DevTools, Jack explores how startups sell to developers, build tools and become successful.

What we cover

• An introduction to Encore's Go framework
• What drove André to create Encore and where he found his conviction from frustration
• Problems faced by experienced backend developers
• Obtaining your first customers who immediately get it
• Focusing on content to bring developers to you
• Sales at Encore - tailoring everything to what is important to customers 
• Building technical trust - can you trust it will do what I want?
• Building business trust with open source

Where to hear from André

• Twitter: @_eandre
• https://encore.dev/

Where to hear from us

• Twitter: @JackSBridger
• https://blog.bitreach.io
• Newsletter: https://www.bitreach.io/

Maxim Fateev and Samar Abbas from Temporal join us to discuss how their durable execution platform ensures processes complete reliably at scale.

We discuss:

• How Temporal gained enterprise adoption with companies like Airbnb, HashiCorp, and Snapchat.
• Why Temporal compensates salespeople based on customer consumption.
• Temporal’s role in Snapchat’s story processing and Taco Bell’s Taco Tuesday scalability.
• How Temporal earns enterprise trust through security, reliability, and scalability.
• The structure of Temporal’s sales team and their focus on long-term customer success.
• Exciting trends in AI and low-code/no-code development.

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. 

Links:

•  Temporal
•  Temporal GitHub

Ruben is the founder of Windmill https://www.windmill.dev/ which helps you turn scripts into workflows and UIs in minutes 

Some of the things we talk about:

• Getting to the threshold of being useful.
• Speed is the key to success.
• The second mover advantage
• Getting early users of the product.
• Why infra is an interesting market for him.
• The challenges of being a solo founder.
• The recipe for a digital startup is to be really passionate about the project.
• Advice for founders who are building ambitious projects.
• Doing everything that no one wants to do.

You can find Ruben at https://twitter.com/rubenfiszel

Lu Wilson AKA todepond is one of the people behind tldraw, the infinite canvas for the internet.
Lu also has a youtube channel, todepond.
Lu also built the [hilarious] programming language dreamberd
Lu is also a researcher with Ink & Switch - an independent research lab

In this episode Lu shares how tldraw went viral again and again and again this year.

My biggest takeaways were to share your whole process and default to visual communication.

Links:
- https://www.todepond.com/
- https://www.youtube.com/@TodePond
- https://github.com/TodePond/DreamBerd
- https://www.tldraw.com/
- https://www.inkandswitch.com/

Adam Frankl has been VP at four Developer Tools unicorns, including JFrog, Neo4J and Sourcegraph.

Adam is the author of the Developer Facing Startup and recently launched the Developer Facing Startup Founders Academy: a program that helps founders launch and grow their developer tools.

In this conversation, Adam Frankl discusses the critical role of a Technical Advisory Board (TAB) in the success of developer-facing startups.

He emphasizes the importance of understanding developer needs, effective interviewing techniques, and the necessity of building credibility and community. Adam outlines a structured approach to gathering insights from developers.

He also highlights the significance of storytelling in marketing and the need for founders to engage deeply with their user base to discover and address their problems effectively.

Takeaways:

• A Technical Advisory Board is essential for startup success.
• Founders must prioritize understanding developer needs.
• Effective interviews should focus on the problem, not the product.
• Social proof is crucial for building credibility.
• Developers are influenced by their peers and community.
• The 'Dream Sequence' outlines the developer adoption process.
• Storytelling is key to engaging potential users.
• Founders should continuously engage with their user base.
• Identifying key personas is vital for targeted outreach.
• Developers are not leads; they require a different approach.

Links:

• Developer Facing Startup Founders Academy https://developer-facing-founders-network.mn.co/
• Adam Frankl's LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamfrankl/
• The Developer Facing Startup https://www.amazon.co.uk/Developer-Facing-Startup-market-developer-facing/dp/B0D4KJNSPP

Keywords:
Technical Advisory Board, Developer Startups, User Research, Developer Needs, Social Proof, Community Building, Founder Responsibilities, Developer Adoption, Interview Techniques, Startup Success

Russ D’Sa is the founder of LiveKit. They are an open source tool for real time audio and video for LLM applications and they power the voice chat for ChatGPT and Character AI.

We discuss:
- How lightning works (using ChatGPT/LiveKit)
- How LiveKit started working with OpenAI
- Why Russ turned down an early 20m acquisition offer
- What it’s like to work with the fastest growing company (ever?)
- How to prepare for massive scale challenges
- Russ’s 3 letter twitter handle

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign-On and audit logs.

Links:
- LiveKit 
- Russ’s Twitter 

Phil is the founder of Tiiny.host. Tiiny.host is a web hosting application that allows you to simply host & share your web project. 

What we cover
(00:28): What has growth been like at tiiny.host?

(04:44): Why does the world need a new hosting provider?

(10:50): How did you decide to position tiiny.host?

Where to hear from Phil

• Twitter: @_baretto
• https://tiiny.host/

Mike McQuaid and John Britton are cofounders of Workbrew - a tool that gives you the missing features for enterprises running homebrew.

John has previously worked at GitHub and Twilio and is a contributor to Homebrew. Mike has also worked at GitHub as well as being the project lead and longest running maintainer at Homebrew.

 We dig into:

• How Homebrew can trace its origins to a pub in London
• How Apple actually work with Homebrew
• How Homebrew managed to grow and scale up
• How Workbrew are avoiding misaligned incentives so common in open source

Links for Mike, John and Workbrew

• Mike McQuaid https://mikemcquaid.com/
• John Britton https://johndbritton.com/
• Workbrew https://workbrew.com/

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Shomik is a Partner at boldstart where he focuses on investing in Developer Tools and other enterprise software startups. 

What we cover

• An introduction to Shomik
• Where to start?
• Early stage versus late stage
• What should be Open Source?
• How to approach pricing
• What to do when things slow down

Where to hear from Shomik

• Twitter: @shomikghosh21
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shomik-ghosh-a5a71319/
• https://shomik.substack.com/
• https://boldstart.vc/
• Interview with CISO of DataDog https://shomik.substack.com/p/emilio-escobar-ciso-of-datadog-how#details 

James Hawkins is the CEO & Co-founder of PostHog. PostHog is an open-source product analytics suite, built for engineers.

What we cover

• PostHog - implement without ever getting up from your desk
• How PostHog have cracked being bold and transparent
• Small cross-functional teams at PostHog
• Two people in Sales > $100Million of revenue
• Working with enterprise clients

Where to hear from James

• @james406
• https://posthog.com/
• The handbook - https://posthog.com/handbook

Alan Shreve is the founder & CEO of ngrok. 

ngrok is a simplified API-first ingress-as-a-service that adds connectivity, security, and observability to your apps in one line

What we cover:

• Creating a simple experience for users.
• Designing for the 90% use case vs. the 10%.
• How did the idea for ngrok emerge?
• How the first iterations of the product came about.
• The internal struggle to create simple interfaces.
• How do you test your library design?
• One of the best ways to test library design.
• Amazon's one-click checkout.
• Chasing simplicity vs complexity in a complex system.
• Product processes to help chase simplicity.
• How does NGrok measure and track user growth?
• Time to value, kpi, time to value.
• Empowering developers to do their jobs.
• How does a hobbyist use case expand into a commercial use case?
• How do you think about the problems that ngrok solves?
• How do you get an application online with minimal configuration?
• What’s the takeaway for other developers or founders?

Links:
- ngrok: https://ngrok.com/
- Alan's Twitter: https://twitter.com/inconshreveable
- Thanks to Danger Casey https://twitter.com/CaseySoftware for organising this
- swyx article https://www.swyx.io/self-provisioning-runtime
- Joel Spolsky talk https://mixtape.swyx.io/episodes/elegant-software-joel-spolsky 

Kyle Gawley is the Founder of Gravity. Gravity help founders build SaaS products at warp speed.

What we cover

• Introduction to Gravity
• The journey so far
• Why trust is important
• Creating and building trust
• Marketing approach for Gravity
• Specific problem to solve
• Tips for SEO
• Selling to developers badly (things to stay away from!)
• The future of Gravity

Where to hear from Kyle

• Twitter: @kylegawley
• https://usegravity.app/
• Learn how to build a SaaS product from scratch course: https://usegravity.app/how-to-build-a-saas
• https://aigraphics.io/

Glauber Costa is the founder of Turso - a fully managed SQLite database platform.

Glauber shares how to make great CLIs, the story of Turso's pivot. Their pricing. And the importance of moving fast.

Links:

• Turso - https://turso.tech/
• Glauber's Twitter - https://twitter.com/glcst

This episode is sponsored by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Kuba Czakon is the CMO of Neptune.ai, a Metadata store for MLOps, built for research and production teams that run a lot of experiments. Kuba is also the author and creator of https://www.developermarkepear.com/.

What we cover

(00:54): How should we be doing developer marketing?

(01:06): How are you applying your four pillars of developer marketing at Neptune?

(11:00): How are you thinking about SEO?

(13:21): How are you allocating your resources now that you are the CMO of Neptune?

Where to hear from Kuba

• Twitter: @JCzakon
• https://neptune.ai/
• https://www.developermarkepear.com/
• Developer Marketing community - https://marketingto.dev/ 

Brian Douglas - or bdougie - is the founder of OpenSauced - an open source intelligence tool. Brian was previously Developer Experience Lead at Netlify and Director of Developer Advocacy at GitHub

Summary

• Every engineer is an advocate. 0:00
• Joining GitHub with a 30/60/90 plan. 1:17
• What was the goal when you joined Netlify? 3:16
• How to get started with bootcamps. 7:53
• What are the top projects in open source? 10:52
• The bottom up strategy for adoption at GitHub. 15:22
• Netlify’s Aha moment. 21:19
• How do you get started in reaching out to community and consistently? 25:57

Links:

• https://opensauced.pizza/ 
• https://twitter.com/bdougieYO

Karl Hughes is the founder of Draft.Dev - a marketing content agency focused on creating great content for software engineers. Since founding the company in 2020, the team has grown to include marketers, editors, engineers and over 130 technical writers. Karl also lectures and writes about his learnings and experiences and was previously CTO at a Venture-backed startup. Karl is the perfect person to talk to if you're serious about scaling your developer content.

What we cover

(01:20): Content is pretty much accepted as one of the most predictable paths to grow for developer tools, but the payback is also sometimes a little slower than other channels. Karl, against this backdrop, how should DevTools startups be thinking about content?

(09:44): How does the reputation of your DevTool come into it?

(12:42): I'd love to hear about how you think about promotion, and especially at the moment if there's anything that startups can be doing to shorten the payback of some of their content?

(16:12): Have you had any experiences with developer content on TikTok?

Where to hear more from Karl

• Twitter: @KarlLHughes
• https://draft.dev
• Blog: https://draft.dev/learn/ 

We dig into the the build vs. buy dilemma for APIs, and the role of OpenAPI in effective documentation.

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

We explore how AI is transforming the landscape of APIs and developer tools, and discuss the future of coding.

• The choice between building and buying SDKs depends on company maturity.
• OpenAPI is crucial for generating quality API documentation.
• AI is revolutionizing how APIs are created and consumed.
• Maintaining SDK libraries can be a significant challenge.
• Developer tools must evolve to keep pace with API design changes.
• Trust in AI-generated code is growing among developers.
• The future of coding will likely involve more AI integration.

Links:

• APIMatic
• Sid Maestre

Felix is the founder of Hanko. Hanko is the Open source auth and passkey infrastructure for developers.

We talk about:
- The challenges of pivoting
- Layoffs
- The intangible goal of developer love

Check out Hanko: https://www.hanko.io/

In this episode, we're joined by returning guest Colin Sidoti - the cofounder and CEO of Clerk.

Clerk is a comprehensive user management platform. 

What we cover:
- The origin story and South Park Commons
- Clerk's dramatic growth since the first episode - what changed? What did they do right?
- 7% growth per week
- Tiny details that improve the developer experience
- How to you know if a change is better - watching people's faces as they try it
- The difficulties of bringing new joiners up to speed in a very high context environment
- Obsessions of founders
- Zuckerberg's obsession and South Park Commons talk
- Nick Parsons appreciation: why it's hard to hire good developer marketing people
- The uniqueness of marketing developer tools
- Buying a van and parking it outside YC
- Local marketing campaigns in San Francisco

Links:
- Clerk https://clerk.com/
- Colin's Twitter https://x.com/tweetsbycolin
- Nick Parsons' Twitter https://x.com/nickparsons
- Jakob's tweet https://x.com/jakeplusev/status/1827791946380877828
- Malte Ubl's blog https://www.industrialempathy.com/
- Zuck's talk at South Park Commons https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02fBBoZa9l4

Scaling DevTools is the podcast that investigates how DevTools go from zero to one. Created by Jack Bridger, founder of BitReach. BitReach helps DevTool companies reach more developers. In scaling DevTools, Jack explores how startups sell to developers, build tools and become successful.

What we cover

• Introduction Hygraph
• Finding your focus
• Demand Generation
• What is a good SEO strategy?
• Does performance marketing work with developers?
• How to target developers
• Working with sales teams
• Collaborating on content

Where to hear from Dino

• Twitter: @DinoKukic
• https://hygraph.com/

Where to hear from us

• Twitter: @JackSBridger
• https://blog.bitreach.io
• Newsletter: https://www.bitreach.io/

Robby (Amanda Robson) is the co-host of Open Source Startup Podcast (with Tim Chen).

In this episode we discuss:

• There are many ways to open source success
• When open source is a good strategy and when it isn't
• Why open source projects usually need time to brew
• How to know if your project is venture scale
• Why Robby believes in the Open Source model
• Robby is working on a highly mysterious new thing 👀

Links:
- Robby's Twitter/X https://x.com/amanda_robs?lang=en
- Open Source Startup Podcast https://oss-startup-podcast.launchnotes.io/
- Interview with Paul from Supabase https://oss-startup-podcast.launchnotes.io/announcements/episode-43-building-supabase-the-open-source-firebase-alternative
- Interview with Leyland from Mobile Dev https://oss-startup-podcast.launchnotes.io/announcements/episode-63-mobile-dev-s-new-mobile-testing-framework-maestro 
- mobile dev https://www.mobile.dev/
- Tim's Twitter/X https://x.com/tnachen

Elston Baretto is the founder of Tiiny.host - the simplest place to put your work online. In this episode we talk about how Elston has been able to grow Tiiny to 70,000+ sign ups per month with content marketing.

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Links:
- Tiiny.host
- Elston Baretto
- Ramen Club
- Charlie Ward
- Sabba
- Veed 

Dylan Fox is the Founder & CEO of AssemblyAI. AssemblyAI is an AI company that researches, trains, and deploys State-of-the-Art AI models. Thousands of developers and product teams build with AssemblyAI's simple API to automatically transcribe and understand audio data at scale.

What we cover

(00:20): Could you tell us a little bit about AssemblyAI?

(01:10): Could you talk about your content strategy?

(03:37): How do you balance the goal of promoting AssemblyAI with creating authentic, useful pieces of content?

(09:59) How are you able to produce such in-depth content?

(11:22) What was it like going through YC and acquiring your first users?

Where to hear from Dylan

• Twitter: @YouveGotFox
• https://www.assemblyai.com/
• https://twitter.com/AssemblyAI

Natwar Maheshwari is a Developer Marketing Lead at Algolia. Algolia is known for empowering builders with the search and recommendation services they need to build world-class experiences. 

What we cover

(00:43): How do you think we should think about developer marketing when we're just getting started?

(03:34): Are there things we can do to create that experimental culture?

(07:10): It's about not being afraid to do things that you don't have a lot of knowledge on and try them out just because they seem like a good idea. But also try to get at least a little bit of expertise thrown in there so that you're not, for instance, doing an SEO experiment over 24 hours and expecting to see some results.

(09:48): When you're experimenting with different things, does that play into brand building?

(12:12): When we talk about experimentation, is it experimenting within constraints? How would you describe the kind of process?

Where to hear from Natwar

• Twitter: @natwar86
• https://www.algolia.com
• Newsletter: https://www.engineeringbrew.com

Richard Moot is the Head of Developer Advocacy at Square. Square helps millions of sellers run their business-from secure credit card processing to point of sale solutions. 

What we cover

(00:32): Could you tell us about the work that you're doing on YouTube with Square?

(01:00): If a startup is thinking of getting started with YouTube, how would you suggest they get started?

(03:39): Could you talk us through the types of tasks that you or other members of the team do?

(07:28) Could you talk a little bit about examples?

(09:16) How do you approach them quality vs quantity when it comes to good examples?

(11:52) Where and how does fun come into it all?

Where to hear from Richard

• Twitter: @wootmoot
• https://squareup.com
• https://developer.squareup.com/us/en
• https://www.youtube.com/c/SquareDev

How do you write a developer quick start guide that they will love?

That's what we talk about with Amit Jotwani. Amit is the founder of HelloDX and previously worked in developer experience at Retool and Amazon Alexa.

This came about because I was reading Amit's fantastic guide on EveryDeveloper.

Links:

• Amit's website https://ajot.me/
• HelloDX https://hellodx.co/
• Craft Quick Start Guides That Developers Will Love https://everydeveloper.com/quick-start-guides/
• Amit's Twitter/X https://x.com/amit

This episode is sponsored by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Gonto (Martin Gontovnikas) was the 6th employee at Auth0 and helped them grow fast and sell for $6.5billion to Okta. 

Now he is the founder of Hypergrowth Partners and helps DevTools grow fast.

We discuss:

• What Auth0 did to become so valuable so fast
• What the best founders do (Guillermo Rauch)
• Different is better than better 
• People follow people not brands
• Why bleeding edge matters

Resources

• Why Technical SDRs are the Future of DevTools
  https://playbooks.hypergrowthpartners.com/p/product-advocates-technical-sdrs
• Gonto's website https://gon.to/
• Gonto's Twitter https://twitter.com/mgonto
• Hypergrowth Partners https://www.hypergrowthpartners.com/
• Code to Market https://codetomarket.fm/
• Guillermo Rauch https://x.com/rauchg

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Brandon West joined SendGrid, a customer communication platform for transactional and marketing email in 2011 as their first Developer Evangelist. Since then he’s had a brilliant career, working at AWS and CoScreen, which has just been acquired by Datadog. 

What we cover

(00:57): What does DevRel look like at startups at the earliest stage? 
(05:13): How do you balance doing the right things and building credibility with the fact that you're also willing to push and demo things, which aren't perfect yet. 
(07:13): What was it like when you were at SendGrid? 
(11:46): What did the relationship look like with the product team?

(17:04): Where can people learn more?

Guest links

Twitter: @bwest
Site link: http://bwe.st

DataDog: https://www.datadoghq.com/
CoScreen: https://www.coscreen.co/

Adam DuVander is an expert in developer marketing and the author of two books: Developer Marketing Does Not Exist and Technical Content Strategy Decoded. 

In this episode, we dive deep into the world of developer marketing, specifically focusing on early-stage companies building tools for developers and how to create engaging content for your audience.

What we cover:

• Adam's journey from journalism to developer marketing
• The importance of developer marketing for early-stage companies and its role in product growth
• Identifying your target audience and understanding their pain points
• How to create content without directly promoting your product, yet staying relevant to your target audience
• The concept of becoming a media company within your niche and providing value through content
• The importance of engagement metrics over vanity metrics for early-stage companies
• The Jedi Developer Mind Trick: how to showcase the value of your product without directly promoting it, especially for early-stage companies
• Examples from successful early-stage companies like LogRocket and Stoplight
• How to measure the success of your content and know if it's working for your early-stage company
• Tips on choosing the right topics that resonate with your audience and relate to your product
• Adam's new book, Technical Content Strategy Decoded

Buy Adam's new book here 

Michael Christofides is the co-founder of pgMustard, a Postgres tool that speeds up your journey from knowing which query is a problem to working out what can be done about it. The aim of pgMustard is to build a small, sustainable business that is the best at what it does. pgMustard recently celebrated their 100th subscriber - so they are well on their way! Michael also consults, talks at conferences and writes about Postgres performance.

What we cover

(00:41): Could you tell us a bit about where pgMustard is right now and what your focuses are at the moment? 
(01:22): Could you tell us a bit about what you're currently doing in terms of growth and, what's keeping you up at night at the moment with pgMustard? 
(02:47): One of the things that I’ve noticed when I go to the pgMustard website, is that you’re very ethical. There’s no small print, everything is as kind as it could be. Is that something you’ve consciously gone after? 
(04:22): Let's say some founders are considering this. Has there been any tangible benefits that could persuade them to become whiter than white?

(06:52): You have previously worked as a Head of Customer Success at a big, what could be described as a DevTools, startup GoCardless. Do you think this is where some of your approach came from?

(09:42): Stepping back from pgMustard, what has and hasn't worked in terms of growth?

(14:09): Are there any kind of general lessons that you would give to maybe yourself starting again? Or another DevTools founder?

(19:54): How can people learn more about you and about pgMustard?

Guest links

Twitter: @michristofides
Site link: https://www.pgmustard.com

Mitchell Hashimoto - famously the founder of HashiCorp (creators of Terraform, Vault etc.) joins the show to discuss his latest open-source project, Ghostty, a modern terminal emulator. 

We discuss:

• Designing dev tools with a focus on human experience.
• Taking on large technical projects and breaking them down into achievable steps.
• Open source sustainability and the role of financial support.
• The impossible goal of building a perfect human experience with software.
• Passion and hiring—why obsession with a topic often leads to the best hires.
• Using AI as a developer and why Mitchell considers AI tooling essential.
• The motivation behind Ghostty and the idea of "technical philanthropy."
• The vision for libghostty as a reusable terminal core for other applications.

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. https://workos.com/

Links:

• Ghostty (https://ghostty.org/)
• Mitchell Hashimoto on Twitter (https://twitter.com/mitchellh)
• Mitchell’s blog (https://mitchellh.com/)

Adam DuVander is an expert on technical content strategy and the author of Developer Marketing Does Not exist. Adam was previously a Developer Marketer with Zapier & SendGrid and a journalist and developer before that.

Adam DuVander

Adam Duvander is the founder of Every Developer and author of Developer Marketing does not exist. He helps dev-focused marketers build content strategies to reach more developers. Adam was the perfect person to have on for our first episode because he literally wrote the book on developer marketing.

What we cover

• (01:47): How should these type of startups be thinking about prioritisation of content versus other things that they could be doing? 
• (04:13): Where do they start? 
• (05:44): You've written a lot in one of your talks about opinions and pushing an opinionated view of things. 
• (07:43): How do you get those developers to also be writing great content?
• (13:55): How do they know if it was a good piece of content?
• (19:51): Where can people learn more about Adam and about all of the amazing insights that you have on developer marketing?

Links

• Twitter: @adamd 
• Every Developer: https://everydeveloper.com
• Book: Developer Marketing Does Not Exist 

Luke Harries leads growth at ElevenLabs. Eleven Labs builds incredible AI voice models. Luke dives into why launches matter so much, the origin story of ElevenLabs and why a hackathon can change your life.

Links:

• Luke Harries 
• ElevenLabs   

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. 

P.s. I used Eleven Labs without any edits for the transcript/subtitles.

Rob Moore is the CTO and founder of Churnkey - a tool that reduces churn for you automatically.
 
What we cover:
- Developer documentation
- How Rob buys tools
- How Rob discovers tools
- Go slow & build good things
- How Churnkey works

References:
- Rob's twitter https://twitter.com/robmoo_re
- Churnkey https://churnkey.co/
- Super docs super.so 

Kate Holterhoff - an analyst from RedMonk - shares why frontend developers are increasingly dictating the adoption of new developer tools.

Kate shares specific examples, including Supabase.

Links:

• Frontend Developers: the Newest New Kingmakers https://redmonk.com/kholterhoff/2024/02/15/frontend-developers-the-newest-new-kingmakers/
• Kate's website https://www.kateholterhoff.com/
• RedMonk https://redmonk.com/
• Kate's Twitter/X https://x.com/KateHolterhoff

Dana Oshiro is a General Partner at Heavybit. Heavybit is a VC that invests exclusively in developer-first startups.

What we discuss:

• One sharp thing. Finding an addressable chunk of a bigger opportunity. 
  • Thinking big & small
  • Are 5 people seriously going to support our migration from DataDog? At Facebook you had a lot of support people/systems you're forgetting
  • Finding the sidedoor
• Stepping up as a founder
  • Fear of hitting up the people you respect.
  • Best founders build for themselves
  • Do founders get better at putting themselves out there?  
  • Speaking in front of people to make change - "there's a new approach. We deserve better!"
• Movements
  • DevOps & JamStack
  • Don't try to control the movement
  • Joining into other movements

Links

• Dana Oshiro https://twitter.com/danaoshiro
• Heavybit https://heavybit.com/

Thanks to Adam DuVander from https://everydeveloper.com/ for introducing us.

This episode is sponsored by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Michael is the founder of WorkOS. WorkOS helps startups cross the enterprise chasm - it's a bit like the Stripe of Enterprise features.

In this episode, we focus on selling to enterprises: the features you need, the team you need (e.g. sales!) and the common pitfalls Michael has seen.

We also talk about things like: what even is an enterprise customer?

This episode is sponsored by WorkOS. Thanks so much for supporting us as our first ever sponsor Michael and WorkOS.
If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Links:
- https://workos.com/
- https://x.com/grinich
- Crossing the Enterprise Chasm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IR2QZQrzoiA&t=368s&ab_channel=BriKimmel 

Julie Reboul is a Senior Developer Marketing Manager at Algolia. Algolia is an AI-powered search and discovery platform for dynamic experiences. Julie has also previously worked with companies such as Microsoft, Twitter, and Orange.

What we cover

(00:37): Could you tell us a bit about the kinds of things you're working on at Algolia?

(02:58): How do you cultivate a community of trust at Algolia?

(04:57): What is it that you and your partner focus on?

(06:25): What do you think attracts developers to want to join Algolia's live sessions or developer conferences?

(07:24): Could you tell us a little bit about how you approach co-marketing?

(09:10): Could you share a bit about the culture at Algolia?

(10:47): What changes have you seen in Algolia in the last five years?

(11:55): In the five years that you've been there, what do you think Algolia does well that's led to its success?

Where to hear from Julie

• Twitter: @juliereboul
• https://www.algolia.com
• Podcast: https://developerexperience.buzzsprout.com

Han Wang is co-founder of Mintlify - modern, out the box documentation.

In this episode, Han shares the story of Mintlify and how to make great docs.

We even talk about the time Paul Graham told them to change their name.

What we cover:
- the origin story of Mintlify
- what is good documentation
- the process of documentation
- how AI is affecting documentation
- why PG told them to change their name

Links:
- Han https://han.dev/
- Mintlify https://mintlify.com/

In this conversation, Daksh Gupta, the CEO of Greptile - an AI code understanding API - shares:

• Why it’s important to do unique types of marketing, like making an energy drink
• Why most people misunderstand sales
• How companies are buying AI tools and why it will probably change soon

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Links:

• Greptile greptile.com 
• Mintlify https://mintlify.com/
• Greptile energy drink https://x.com/dakshgup/status/1769813883194130856 
• Steve Ballmer boxes https://x.com/dakshgup/status/1854224733086359582 
• PostHog competition https://x.com/james406/status/1854557581030670478  

Dennis Pilarinos is the founder of Unblocked. Unblocked allows lets you talk to your code base.

Dennis previously founded Buddybuild - a CI/CD tool for mobile developers.

In 2018, Buddybuild was acquired by Apple, and Dennis became a director in Development Technologies at Apple.

Some topics we cover:
- The story of Buddybuild and the Apple acquisition
- Why did Apple buy Buddybuild?
- Segmenting when building a tool for everyone

Links:
- Dennis' Twitter - https://twitter.com/dennispilarinos
- Buddybuild acquisition - http://tcrn.ch/2CG9s4G
- Unblocked - https://getunblocked.com/

Jason Bosco is the founder of Typesense.
Typesense is the Open Source alternative to Algolia.
Typesense is a batteries-included Search API.

We discuss how Jason built Typesense to be a hugely successful company without VC funding.
We talk about what revenue-funding means and why it should be considered as a viable option for founders.

This episode is sponsored by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Links:
- Jason's Twitter: https://twitter.com/jasonbosco
- Typesense https://typesense.org/ 

An interview with Igor Zalutski & Utpal Nadiger from Digger.dev.

Digger is an Open Source Infrastructure as Code management tool that helps orchestrate Terraform and OpenTofu within your CI/CD system.

We talk about:

• What changed since Jack worked with Digger
• How they pivoted four times to find PMF
• How do you know you have something
• OpenTofu & ThePrimeagen

This episode is sponsored by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Links:

• https://digger.dev/
• Igor - https://twitter.com/igorzij
• Utpal - https://twitter.com/NadigerUtpal