Are you working on developer tooling? Share your project and the challenges you've faced!
Curious to see what IH community has got cooking for the Dev Tools space!
If you've got something - share it, along with some of the challenges you've faced with being in the space 👨💻
Trending on Indie Hackers
Building https://www.kloudmate.com.
Biggest learning, you cannot sell a DevTool to Developers. The Developers choose to buy it.
Therefore, challenge is that you cannot really use conventional marketing techniques for a Developer Tool.😅
Your landing page looks swish! 👌
Most orgs I've worked at really struggled with observability. I like that it's selling itself as a simpler version of well known industry standard tooling. Definitely something I could see myself using.
How are you marketing it, if you don't mind me asking?
@SkepticalHippo Thank s for saying that! We're mostly trying seed the word through content marketing, meetups, webinars, the works.
I also realise, one must stay in the game long enough, before you're taken seriously. It's true, when it comes to tech audiences. 😅
Let me know if you'd like to use it, or know someone who might want to. Will swiftly set it up!
I recently launched free beta access to secutils.dev - an all-in-one (eventually) toolbox for security-minded engineers. The target audience is a bit challenging to please and gather feedback from, so the journey to achieving product-market fit is moving along slowly, but it's definitely progressing :)
Thanks for sharing!
A few questions, if you don't mind:
That's an easy one. As a full-time application security engineer, I try to solve the issues I face with the existing tooling when developing secure applications today (in my case it's Kibana).
Sure, here's the thing, based on my own experience and conversations with others. There are plenty of security tools out there for big enterprises and infosec teams, but not so many options for us regular engineers. That means we end up creating our own bag of tricks over time - you know, code snippets, bookmarked links, custom scripts - all those little things we crafted for those special occasions.
Now, when someone comes along and offers a shiny new tool that can handle some of those tasks even better, it's hard to let go of our precious creations. As I see it, that's where the endowment effect kicks in. We get attached to our stuff, even if the new tool is way better and can save us a ton of maintenance headaches. So here's my plan to tackle this resistance:
First off, I want to build a solid reputation and trust. I build in public, all components are open-source and I offer a free self-hosted option. That way, engineers can give it a go without worrying about jumping in headfirst.
Second, I focus on solving the tough problems that engineers haven't quite cracked yet. If I nail those challenges, I can show them the true value of the tool. Once they're hooked for just one little thing they didn't have a script for, expanding into other areas might meet much less resistance. I hope, but let's see :)
For all the devs out there building apps on top of ChatGPT or other OpenAI APIs, I recently launched AISpend (.io). It'll keep track of costs and type of requests. Especially with LangChain becoming popular, the risk of building an app that's going to cost you a lot is there.
It's hard to get devs to think about financial monitoring, though. 😅
Ooh, this is interesting. I've never actually ever heard to the phrase "financial monitoring" before.
How/where are you marketing this, if you don't mind me asking?
Product looks ace! Keep up the good work!
Thanks! And I try to find places with AI devs hang out, see what if they're thinking about this, working on SEO to be found on AI monitoring, stuff like that.
I've been hit with surprise billing from awesome APIs in the past (👀 at you, AWS), so I've got monitoring in place for all the services I use and want to prevent others from having the same experience.
Interesting, thanks for sharing!
Have you ever thought about targeting decision makers in organisations instead of developers? I feel like leads, heads of and CTOs will care more about budgets rather than developers, so you might have more success there?
I've made a Chrome Extension to help Web-Developers save time when tinkering with Colors.
You can find it on the Chrome Webstore if you search "ColorCraft"
or go to my website colorcraft. io
(I am not allowed to post links yet)
Someone else in the comments here said it Marketing is difficult. Personally I don't know any other extension that does this, so it's hard to pinpoint which people might be interested and where I can find them. I assume web-developers..
As of now I'm just trying to get enough people to use it so I can get a little bit of feedback.
Had a look at your website, and it's a bit difficult to know what is it that the extension does? What do I get from it as a web developer?
There are some brief descriptions of functionality on the site, but the words don't really connect with me as a web dev. I'm struggling to understand what the process looks like and how I'd get value from it.
What would help me personally is to see the extension in action. Maybe have a series of gifs or autoplay videos embedded on the site?
Hi thanks for your feedback. I should have added something so simple before but it didn't cross my mind until you pointed it out.
Could you look at it again?
Much better IMO!
I've made a couple of things.
It's been particularly difficult to market these, although I've been somewhat successful at times on Reddit, Twitter & ProductHunt they haven't took off by themselves and require constant marketing effort.
Don't know why I expected marketing these to be easier. Then again these are niches & generally highly competitive with established solutions, some of which are open source. Tried to compete on price, great UX and simplicity. Let's see how it evolves.
I'll keep pushing :)
Thanks for sharing. If you don’t mind sharing a bit more, curious if your biggest problem is around:
Those look great! Thanks for sharing!
Dev tools are definitely notoriously difficult to market. Price, UX and simplicity sound like great things to try and improve on. Best of luck 🙏
I’ve recently made https://indietools.dev Despite marketing challenges, I'm actively working to increase its visibility. This platform would be like a "product hunt" for developer tools, connecting developers with cutting-edge resources.
Interesting idea! When did you start working on this? Looks like it's still fairly early doors?