Scaling DevTools

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

Steve Krouse is the founder of Val.town - a social website where you can write and run code.

• Introduction to Val.Town's vision 0:00
  • How long it took Github to make money on Steve
  • Val Town is a social website where you can write and run javascript or typescript, run the code on servers, and see the results.
• Knocking down friction points 2:12
  • Val Town is making it so that programmers can create cool stuff without having to go through the pain of sending an email.
  • Zapier for developers is another kind of tagline that has been seen other people that you've interviewed on this podcast.
• Categorising use cases on the website. 4:45
  • Val Town recently made a list of favourite use cases and categorised them on the website. The challenge is explaining to people what it is and what it can be used for.
  • What can be made with Val.town section
• How to get people to make cool things with your tool 15:51
  • People hear about Val Town because other people are using it. The more people sign up, the more people are signing up for it.
  • Val Town has a smaller number of people who are excited about it and use it a lot, but it's not a mythical product market fit.
  • Every Thursday, the team is not allowed to work on the product. They all have to try and make Vals to go viral, which is a really fun creative day.
  • The last one that went viral was hacker news follow, which was branded as an installable script.
• How do you think about notifications? 24:30
  • Val Town is perfect for programmatic customization of notification emails, so that installing those into your account will be part of the tutorial.
  • Val is passionate about education, and it feels like that's a big challenge because there's lots of new stuff with val.
  • Medium-term ambition, build a learn to code interactive course on top of Val Town. Long term ambition is to have hundreds or thousands of Learn to Code courses on Val Town, embedded in the product.
• Future of coding meetups. 29:36
  • An interview with Brian Dougie, early at Github, and how he helped with bootcamps and how to run code with Netlify.
  • Future of coding meetup in london.
  • Managing a community is a funny thing. The people who start and manage communities are often weird people.
• Date Me Docs 35:33
  • Some people are looking for a unique snowflake, while others are sensitive and don't want attention on their date me docs.
  • The future of dating is a great exercise to go through to get clear in words about who you are and what you're looking for.

Links:
- Val Town - https://www.val.town/
- Steve's Twitter - https://twitter.com/stevekrouse

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 

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/ 

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

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

Josh Twist is the founder of Zuplo, an API gateway

• Introducing Josh Twist, the founder of Zuplo. 0:00
  • Zuplo vs Azure API management.
• How do you make this fit into the developer workflow? 3:06
  • How Zuplo fits into the development workflow.
  • How to democratize API management and make it something every business wants to use.
  • Best practices for implementing API key authentication.
  • Stripe quality API out of the box.
• The power of removing friction in creating a better experience. 8:58
  • The power of removing friction from the process.
• How do you create a product that is easy for beginners but still has a powerful experience? 11:31
  • Loom is a great example of a product that exists only because it removes friction.
  • Building a product is like building a video game.
  • How to keep both the developer and the customer experience in mind.
  • The formula one analogy for designing a product from scratch.
• What’s going to go into the next generation of Zuplo? 17:27
  • How Zuplo keeps things simple and makes decisions.
• Why you have to have a lot of customer empathy and invest in tools. 19:39
  • The importance of customer empathy.
  • Why Josh made the decision to switch over to OpenAPI.
  • Killing features can be hard as a business-to-business company.
  • One chart to think about.
• The importance of partnerships and content. 24:29
  • Making videos for supabase customers.
  • Partnerships with other small businesses.
  • How Zuplo got their first customers.
• Zuplo rate limiting feature. 28:02
  • Rate limiting in Zuplo and Supabase.
  • Developers who are small-scale loving Zuplo
  • Making videos
  • Removing friction and building an 11-star experience.

Zuplo - https://zuplo.com/
Josh Twist - https://twitter.com/joshtwist

Dan is head of DevRel at FusionAuth - Auth Built for Devs, by Devs

• FusionAuth’s journey from moderation to auth provider.
  • Introduction to Dan Moore, head of DevRel at fusion.
  • Fusion's journey
  • Free to use for many users, but also a cloud offering.
• Synchronous communication vs asynchronous communication.
  • Synchronous communication vs asynchronous communication.
  • 10% of their traffic is coming from forum pages.
• No one ever searches on Stack Overflow.
• What are some of the experiments that have gone well? 
  • Efforts to promote community feel.
  • Community stories, finding out user pain points and wins.
• The importance of getting your community to know each other.
  • Getting 20 or 30 blog posts on the blog.
  • Dan's experience on Screaming into the cloud.

Dan's Twitter - https://twitter.com/mooreds
FusionAuth - https://fusionauth.io/ 

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

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