Scaling DevTools

Pete Hamilton and Chris Evans are cofounders of Incident.io. Incident is an incident management tool. 

We discuss:

• How they think about brand and how it comes from their deep understanding of incident culture
• Lawrence’s article asking for new macbooks that went viral
• Gallows humor in incidents 
• Why incident.io started on Heroku despite being an incident response platform—and why “shipping fast” mattered more than “scaling perfectly.”
• The benefit of building for users who are just like you
• How Incident is using GenAI

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:

• Pete Hamilton on Twitter 
• Chris Evans on Twitter
• Incident 
• Macbook article
• The flight plan that brought UK airspace to its knees
• How Netflix drives reliability across their organization

Note: this was recorded on 13th December 2024.

David Cramer, co-founder of Sentry talks M&As and why they should be utilized more when you don’t achieve huge success. Plus we talk about the importance of good branding.

We discuss:

• The biggest mistake small startup founders make by not exploring potential acquisitions.
• The role of ego in startups
• Product-market-fit
• Hiring entrepreneurial talent and why acqui-hiring is so big.
• The significance of branding beyond just marketing – how it builds trust, recognition, and demand.
• Sentry’s approach to branding, emphasizing authenticity, community, and accessibility.
• What DevTools can learn from Liquid Death and Porsche
• Why brand matters

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:

• David Cramer's blog
• David Cramer on X
• Sentry

Ramon, creator of Raylib, joins us to discuss his journey from building an educational tool to establishing one of the most popular open-source game engines. As of February 2025, Raylib is the second most popular open-source game engine behind Godot, boasting 25,000 GitHub stars, 13,000 Discord community members, and over 8,000 subreddit members. Ramon has transitioned from lecturing and consulting to focusing on his paid tools built around Raylib.

We discuss:

• How Raylib started as a teaching project to help art students learn programming through simple and intuitive function naming.
• The active community behind Raylib and how Ramon personally engages with new members, contributing to the project's growth.
• Why simplicity and not making assumptions about prior knowledge can create a strong foundation for both beginners and experienced developers.
• The benefits of using a low-level library like Raylib versus higher-level game engines like Unity, particularly for small indie games.
• Ramon's approach to managing his workload as a solo developer, emphasizing organization, automation, and using his own tools to build tools.
• His method of testing new tools by quickly launching them, observing market response, and iterating on the most successful ones.
• The importance of enjoying the process of building an open-source project rather than focusing solely on commercial success.

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:

• Raylib (https://www.raylib.com/)
• Cat and Onion game (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2781210/CAT__ONION/)
• Raylib GitHub (https://github.com/raysan5/raylib)
• Raylib Discord (https://discord.gg/raylib)
• Raylib Subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/raylib/)
• Ramon's Tools (https://raylibtech.com/tools/)

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

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 

 David Placek from Lexicon - the man who named Vercel and Azure - explains the importance of selecting a name that goes beyond simply describing what a product does. He shares what you can do to come up with a great name. 

We cover:

• Common Naming Pitfalls: Discusses why names that merely describe a product or service fail to capture imagination and differentiation.
• The Strategic Impact of a Name: Explains how a well-chosen name can deliver significant returns on investment by reinforcing brand behavior and market positioning.
• Sound Symbolism and Cognitive Science: Covers research into how letter sounds (for example, the “V” in Vercel) influence perception and contribute to a name’s effectiveness.
• The Naming Process: Details the rigorous process behind naming—from trademark searches and legal reviews to global linguistic evaluations and whiteboard sessions with clients.
• Advice for Early-Stage Founders: Encourages startups to first define their market behavior and the change they intend to create. The right name will emerge from a clear strategic vision.

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:

• Lexicon Branding
• Vercel
• PG .com quote

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/)

Guillermo Rauch is the founder of Vercel. Vercel is a cloud infra platform so easy to use that it’s almost become a category: “I’m building the Vercel of X”.

Vercel also recently launched v0 which is potentially the next evolution of web development - type what you want and it builds it and deploys it for you.

He’s also the creator Next.js, socket.io and a ton of other open source tools and startups. Plus he’s a prolific investor in DevTools.

I’ve missed a ton of his achievements here but essentially, he’s the king of DevTools and you probably know him already.

What we talk about
- Why Guillermo bets on people who ship
- What AI has in common with Prettier
- v0 puts design first
- Saying ‘not yet’ is a boss move
- Why Guillermo thinks devs won’t lose their jobs
- How you can learn product building
- Why you should be careful when hiring from rocketships - not everyone was in the control room
- The value of people having a full stack skill set. And why communication is more important than ever
- Why it’s so important to explain what you do in simple terms
- Tools Guillermo is excited about right now

Links:
- Guillermo Rauch
- Vercel
- v0
- NextJS
- Socket.IO
- Browserbase
- LiveKit
- Languine

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/

Jacob Eiting, CEO of RevenueCat, joins us to discuss mobile developers and how they're different, RevenueCat's recent acquisition of Dipsea - and how it helps them dogfood.

We also go hard on content - something RevenueCat is great at.

We also talk about charisma in founders (but don't worry neither of us said rizz)

This was especially fun because I actually used RevenueCat way before I started this show. 

We discuss:

• How RevenueCat simplifies in-app subscriptions and why mobile monetization is more complex than it appears.
• Making developers feel like heroes instead of struggling with tedious implementation.
• RevenueCat’s acquisition of Dipsea—a customer with over 100,000 subscribers—and how it benefits both companies.
• The advantages of operating an app at scale to better test and iterate on new RevenueCat features.
• How in-app subscription businesses differ from traditional SaaS in terms of pricing, churn, and optimization.
• The importance of content marketing and transparency in building trust with developers.
• The role of personality and authenticity in developer-first marketing.
• The long-term vision for RevenueCat and how they plan to expand beyond their core subscription infrastructure.

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:

• Jacob Eiting (https://x.com/jeiting)
• RevenueCat (https://www.revenuecat.com/)
• Dipsea (https://www.dipseastories.com/)

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.