Finding Early Users, Chasing Dev Tool Integrations & Distribution

🔍 Getting Customer Discovery Right (Reddit has been 🔥)

I’ve been posting in places like r/ycombinator and r/devops, asking real devs and founders when they actually start caring about observability - trying to find out what triggers that "okay, we need logs and alerts now" moment.

It’s been super helpful for getting honest insights and setting up a few early calls with teams that feel the pain. If you’re struggling with outreach, I highly recommend just starting authentic discussions where your audience already hangs out.

🔧 Integrations Are the Make-or-Break Moment

I'm now learning that integrations are everything.

A debugging tool isn’t very useful if it can’t talk to your stack. That means deep hooks into:

• Loki for logs

• Prometheus for metrics

• Kubernetes APIs for cluster context

Every dev I’ve spoken to has a slightly different infra setup, which makes it clear: if we want adoption, we need to meet devs where they are, not force a new stack on them.

🧭 Still Figuring Out the Right Distribution

This is a big one.

We’re currently deciding:

• Do we go open-source to build community and trust?

• Package it as a SaaS app for quick onboarding?

• Offer an Electron desktop app for local debugging?

• Or maybe… all three?

Each one has tradeoffs in terms of trust, speed to value, and business model. If you’ve walked this line before, I’d love your input here.

What's Next?

I’ll be shipping some updated Loki/K8s integrations, making setup smoother, and probably leaning harder into open source + community-led distribution.

If you’ve built something dev-facing, I’d love to hear:

• How did you approach early integrations?

• What distribution path worked best for you?

• Any lessons learned from doing customer discovery in the devtools space?

Thanks for reading - and if you’re into AI, infra, or debugging tools, hit me up! Always down to swap notes 👇

- Leon
🐞 www.dingusai.dev
🔗 github.com/dingus-technology/chat-with-logs