Practical lessons from founders and operators, delivered once a week.
One email a week with specific things you can use to grow your DevTool.
Past issues
15 editions
This week I released the 120th episode and here are four lessons that really stood out and changed the way I think about DevTools startups: 1. Be an expert on the problem, not the solution (via Adam F
Read issue →In December, Prisma - an ORM for Node.js and TypeScript - had 3,300+ open issues. And Prisma acknowledged things weren't great with how they handled these issues: "we’ve faced challenges in governance
Read issue →Is DevRel over? Is it more needed than ever? Or, is it somewhere in between? This week I interviewed "Danger" Keith Casey from Pangea. Previously at elite DevTools, Okta, ngrok and Twilio Keith wrote
Read issue →I love a good pivot story. This is how Bloop pivoted to find a problem that companies are spending $100s-of-millions to solve. Bloop - YC and early customers Bloop was founded in January 2021 by Louis
Read issue →For the last couple months I've been doing Adam Frankl's Developer Facing Startup course with my own project: StreamPot. It's a 12 week course. Adam delivers content and then gives assignments. You al
Read issue →When I worked as a salaried developer I didn't even check my inbox. It's hard to email developers. Angelo from Railway started experimenting with sales emails: We got a 0.3% response rate for custome
Read issue →It's easy to copy. Copying is a shortcut. I do it all the time. But the trouble is, if we just copy, we are boring. And no one cares. This week's episode is with Greptile founder Daksh Gupta. He cau
Read issue →This week we have two episodes (Black Friday deal woo!) Samuel Colvin - the creator of Pydantic - the most popular data validation library for Python. Used by basically everyone (Anthropic, OpenAI, M
Read issue →There are more and more Open Source DevTools startups. I’ve interviewed dozens. But I am still confused about open source licenses. So I decided to ask questions to two people who actually understand
Read issue →John O'Nolan is the founder of Ghost, a publishing platform that's grown to $7.2M+ in revenue while tearing up the startup playbook. John was once WordPress.org's VP of Design (a voluntary role) and h
Read issue →I just hit 100 episodes of Scaling DevTools. It feels symbolic for me because of this Mr Beast quote I read early on. "If you are just getting started on YouTube, do not expect to pull any type of vie
Read issue →One of the things I get asked a lot is "How do open source projects make money"? And this week I chatted with Vlad Matsiiako from Infisical - an open source secrets management tool. So I decided to de
Read issue →This is my first newsletter for a while, hello! I just interviewed DevCycle - they made a huge pivot even though they had a big set of customers. What I admire most about them is that they are doing f
Read issue →Josh Twist - the founder of Zuplo, an API Management tool aiming to give you a Stripe-like API experience out-the-box. The API Management tools space is pretty interesting, so this week we're covering
Read issue →Last year I set a goal to "build non-time-dependent product & hit $5k MRR" I finished on $0 MRR. To call it a f**k up would be far too generous. A f**k up requires you to actually leave the starting b
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