Is dev tools market tough to enter?
I've read in a newsletter today that developers tools market is tough. Dev do not like to pay for products and search open-source alternatives.
Do you agree?
What are examples of indiahackers who could crack it?
What marketing strategies to use in this niche (open source+paid hosting/content marketing/building in public)?
I've also been looking at developers tools. My take on the market is:
Solo developers act like consumers rather than businesses. They will buy stuff but they are very picky about what they spend their money on.
Once a business reaches a certain size there will be an engineering lead/manager who is looking at things differently. They understand that developer time is expensive and will value paying for an app that solves a problem or saves time.
I think this explains why so many tools have free plans that cover solo developers/small teams but then jump to $50 or $100/mo. The free plan allows developers to trial software without needing a credit card and even use it for their personal projects. Once they're comfortable with the product they will recommend it at work.
This is spot on.
Think your comment nails it right on the head.
I think selling to developers as individual users is pretty rough. As a group they seem really adverse to paying for software (even more so than regular consumers.). Check the typical Hacker News thread for a product when someone says, "I could've built that myself."
There's subsets though that are willing to pay more for business needs, thinking specifically of indie hackers and small-to-large sized businesses.
For marketing to developers, I honestly think having something like dev docs is a marketing tool. When you're writing your copy, it might be helpful to not just include "what are the benefits" but really get into the details of "how does this work."
There's a general tendency IMO to want to know more details about how a product works before purchasing. Could be wrong on that though.
That an interesting thought.
If I have a tool with free tier to attract individual devs so that they later can introduce paid version in a company they work for, what might be a good example of such dev docs? In depth articles about the tech? Answering on reddit/dev.to?
How many paid tools do you run as a solo dev?
How many paid tools does your employer give you?
I'm building something that is tangentially a dev tool, but someone else pays* for it, not the dev.
`* - will pay, hopefully
As a dev I rely mostly on open source free tools. I personally pay for DNS hosting and a bit to AWS in general when I'm above free tier.
My employer though pays a lot for dev tools - Azure DevOps, PyCharm, Oracle licenses, Slack, Hashicorp
What tool do you have in mind?
Observability for serverless architecture. Something that Lumigo does. But I'm still not sure what would differentiate my solution though
A webinar with a builder of a dev tool in a crowded space - CTO.ai. It started with a unique insight. Thought you may be interested in the back story https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTHmMQlRINU
That is definitely a crowded space. I witnessed 2 dev products built in my presence (shared office). Both started as internal projects and were already quite mature by the time they opened them up to other devs.
It’s not indie-focused, but Heavybit has some great resources for building dev tool businesses https://www.heavybit.com/library/
Thank you! Looks interesting - I'll check it out
Shameless plug but I also do some similar interviews to heavybit but usually earlier stage (incl. some indies) https://scalingdevtools.com/