Back in 2017 Slava Akhmechet wrote a post-mortem on the RethinkDB project:
If you do set out to build a developer tools company, tread carefully. The market is filled with good alternatives. User expectations are high and prices are low. Think deeply about the value you’re offering to the customer. Remember – wanting the world to be a certain way doesn’t make it so.
As a veteran of a developer tools startup, my view of that market is similarly jaundiced.
Every hacker has a great idea idea for a developer tools startup at some point. But it’s a tough market to succeed in.
- It’s just not as big a market as you think it is. Yes, there is gobs of money in the software industry as a whole. But the money available for tools servicing that industry is orders of magnitude smaller.
- Other shops’ pain points are less similar to yours than you think.
- Everyone looks at your great idea and thinks “oh, I could do that internally, it’s just a simple matter of coding”. The fact that they are wrong does nothing for your bottom line.
- The more desperately a company needs your tools, the more peculiar will be their ball of legacy code and the more unexpected and non-standard will be their workflows. You will dump hundreds of hours into supporting these hard cases, in order to have compelling success stories. But most of that work won’t translate into supporting the next special snowflake.
- The gulf is deceptively wide between “that’s a really cool idea!” and “I’m going to invest time and energy into incorporating it into our processes.”
- If the idea really has legs, the proof will be that established developer tools companies copy it and commoditize it and it becomes part of the new baseline of tools. Which most likely leaves you back at square one, hopefully having sold your technology to a enterprise dev tool company before the market for it tanked. Of course, if the commoditization happens in the form of a really great Open Source alternative, even that exit may not be an option.
(This article was adapted from a SIGAVDI email from January 2017.)