Scaling DevTools

This episode breaks down an article by Jason Cohen, founder of WP Engine and SmartBear, outlining his step-by-step roadmap from idea to product-market fit (PMF) for startups, especially DevTools. His 8 step roadmap provides insights on personal fit, market validation, customer interviews, building an SLC (simple, lovable, complete) MVP, sales focus, retention, prioritization, and founder psycholog...

This episode breaks down Marc Andreessen's 2007 article on why market matters most in startups, plus some great wisdom from Michael Seibel on spotting real PMF through explosive growth and customer pull. Links:    •  Marc Andreessen's article    •  Michael Seibel's post    •  Product Market Fit collapse This episode is brought to you by WorkOS . If you're thinking about selling to enterprise custo...

This episode is with Christopher Burns, the creator of c15t and founder of consent.io, an open-source, developer-first, ethical provider of privacy infrastructure. Chris explains why most cookie banners are not compliant, and if the EU is going to come after you for it. We talk about how he found product market fit and grew the company, and we also debate London vs SF for startups. Links:    •  Ch...

This is the story of how Amazon Web Services - arguably the most successful developer tool of all time - got started. 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.

Adam Frankl has been the first Marketing VP at three dev-facing unicorns. He returns to the podcast, to reveal the things that DevTool startups must get right in the early days, in order to be successful. We also discuss Jack's experience implementing Technical Advisory Boards (TABs) with a new startup, and the hurdles startups face with outreach, sustaining member enthusiasm across calls, and the...

Kyle Cheung, co-founder of Greybeam, shares how his team built a tool that reduces Snowflake costs by 70-95%, without migration, drawing from multiple pivots over two years. The discussion covers their quirky marketing tactics and advice on fundraising as storytelling. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS . If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enter...

In this episode, Matt Klein (Bitdrift, Envoy) reflects on building EC2 in the early days of AWS, the reality behind AWS’s origins, and what Amazon’s customer obsession looks like from the inside. He then dives into creating Envoy at Lyft, the challenges of open source at scale, and spinning Bitdrift out of Lyft to focus on mobile observability. He shares how to meet developers where they are and w...

Will Stewart is the CEO and co-founder of Northflank, the developer platform. He shares how a teenage gaming side project turned into a self-service developer platform that runs complex workloads on Kubernetes across any cloud. He talks about meeting his co-founder online, fundraising and hiring remotely and why they took years to launch. He offers some interesting insights on dealing with bugs, p...

In Shawn "swyx" Wang's third appearance on the podcast, we talk about his recent interview with Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan about AI in biomedical research, and the goal to understand and eventually eradicate all diseases. We also talk about how DevRel is unbelievable back, the challenges of uphill DevRel, the dynamics of the current AI investment bubble, and the new projects he is working...

Vincent D. Warmerdam from Marimo shares how they grew their YouTube channel for their Python notebook, using regular Shorts to reach thousands of new viewers each week. He talks about the importance of being genuinely excited about what you’re building and how consistent, authentic content can help both founders and creators connect with their audience. He gives practical advice and real-world ins...

Rik Haandrikman talks about sales incentives and growth at RevenueCat, and their creative approach to conferences. He explains why their sales team focuses on helping customers evaluate the product in their own way, how aligning incentives shapes company culture and how they make the most out of rare, compelling events. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS . If you're thinking about selling to...

The episode features Baseten CEO and cofounder Tuhin, who shares Baseten’s journey from a small team in the pre-GenAI era to scaling rapidly and raising $150M in Series D funding. The discussion delves into building robust inference infrastructure for AI applications, navigating market shifts, and developing tools that prioritize speed, developer experience, and customer feedback loops. This episo...

In this episode, Angelo Saraceno from Railway shares his experience balancing the technical challenges of building a developer-focused product with the realities of enterprise sales. They discuss how understanding customer needs beyond just features is crucial to growing a startup sustainably. Whether you're a founder or developer, this conversation offers valuable insights into turning good produ...

Guy Zerega led sales and marketing at Stack Overflow, where he once hired me. Now he leads sales at Cyborg - they offer end-to-end encrypted inference data. This is a 101 on what matters in sales; especially to developers. 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 lo...

Victor, VP of Marketing at Strapi, walks us through how AI can be used in content creation—what tools work, what to watch out for, and how you can try some of these techniques yourself. 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:    •  Victor's X    •  Vic...

Ben Dicken is a developer educator at PlanetScale, he's an incredible writer and teacher, who's made some amazing technical articles that developers actually love reading. We get into his reasons for working so hard on these articles, his process, and how he makes content that genuinely helps engineers understand complex ideas. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS . If you're thinking about se...

In this episode, we explore Adam Frankl's concept of a Technical Advisory Board, and how it helps DevTools founders learn directly from potential users. I share personal experience organizing one-on-one interviews to find out real customer problems and gives tips for recruiting members. We explore how to set up the meetings, analyse feedback, and get the most value from the process. This episode i...

Matt Carey from AI Demo Days, shares his experience of organizing developer events in London and San Fransisco. He discusses the real costs involved and how creating fun, community-driven events makes all the difference - plus a spicy take on Hackathons! This episode is brought to you by WorkOS . If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features...

Gitpod has rebranded to Ona and shifted its focus to building AI tools for enterprise teams. This episode digs into why they made the leap, how they're standing out in a crowded AI space, and what it’s been like rethinking developer workflows from the ground up. We talk about dev environments, differentiating in the AI space, forward-deployed engineers and more. This episode is brought to you by W...

Creating docs that actually work means knowing what to write, how to write it, and where it belongs. In this episode, we break down the diataxis documentation framework—a simple but powerful system that splits docs into four clear types: tutorials, how-to guides, explanations, and reference. We look at examples of tools that have implemented diataxis to write their documentation with clarity and p...

Karen from Composio shares how developers are using MCP to connect tools like Slack, Notion, and Gmail with AI agents, growing from nearly zero to 100,000 users in 6 months. They capitalized on key moments when new AI tools, such as Grok versions and Claude releases, came out, creating examples and demos that resonated strongly across social media and got them retweeted by Elon Musk. Hear how the...

Lee Robinson helped Vercel grow to $200M+ in ARR and scaled the Next.js community to over 1.3 million active developers. I dive into his blog posts to uncover valuable insights and lessons about how he achieved this success, covering topics like docs, community building, developer education, marketing, and product development. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS . If you're thinking about sel...

Carter Rabasa, head of DevRel at Langflow, talks about organizing and participating in hackathons, how these events enable developers to break free from routine work, and how they can help accelerate tool 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. L...

Rita Kozlov is the VP of Developers and AI at Cloudflare. We talk about how Cloudflare focuses on building disruptive, efficient technologies like their Workers platform to gain long-term competitive advantages. They use their own developer platform to ship fast, and hire people who deeply care, with a culture of curiosity and transparency that drives continuous innovation. This episode is brought...

Matt Palmer from Replit shares how the company scaled to $100M in ARR from ~$10M in under a year. We talk about the importance of video for teaching the non-linear process of working with AI, the challenge of rewriting documentation for a broader audience using the Diátaxis framework, and how they support a diverse community of users navigating this new AI-driven development landscape. This episod...