All episodes/Topics

Bootstrapping

Building a profitable DevTool without venture capital.

36:13Episode 153

Studying Lee Robinson, Cursor's new VP of Developer experience

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 selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Links:
   •  Lee Robinson's blog
   •  Lee Robinson's X
   •  Peter Yang's interview
   •  swyx's interview
   •  Gonto on Scaling DevTools
   •  Developer Marketing Community

P.s. this is a new style of episode, let me know what you think. 
66:48Episode 140

Shipping 22 products to find the true product - Utpal from Digger.dev

Utpal Nadiger is the cofounder of Digger.dev. Digger built a popular open source IaC orchestration tool. Their new product Infrabase is an AI DevOps agent that scans IaC code in your pull requests.

We talk about SF, resiliency and pivoting.

Links:
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.


Why/how we lipsynced: 
The  (amazing) studio accidentally had Utpal's camera switched off for the first 20 minutes. So I lipsynced the audio onto the latter part of the video. You can probably notice if you look closely. And also his gestures don't always look congruent because of the lipsyncing. But overall, incredible tech from Tavus - much better than a blank screen in my opinion!
43:52Episode 135

Kyle Galbraith from Depot: how they hit $1M+ ARR with three people

Kyle is the cofounder of Depot.  Depot accelerates your Docker image builds and GitHub Actions workflows.

Kyle shares how Depot were able to grow to $1M ARR and beyond with a very lean team.

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:
45:08Episode 132

Raycast founder Thomas Paul Mann - quality, YC and AI

Thomas Paul Mann is the cofounder of Raycast. I use Raycast every day as a replacement for Spotlight. For me, shortcuts are the most useful feature. I put curl requests I commonly use as well as random things like email snippets. It's a massive time saver and really well built.

Raycast is a genuinely well built product so Thomas talks quality, getting feedback and how they ship features. 

We also talk about their unique YC experience and how they've been building AI into Raycast. 

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:
52:57Episode 122

Jacob Eiting - CEO of RevenueCat: Extreme dogfooding

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:
38:35Episode 121

Taylor Otwell - founder of Laravel

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: 
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.  
42:18Episode 108

John O'Nolan, Founder of Ghost - the Open Source blogging tool making $7.2m ARR

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John O'Nolan is the Founder and CEO of Ghost.org. Ghost is an open source blog & newsletter platform. We use them for the Scaling DevTools' blog.

Note: this episode was recorded on 17th October 2024.

We talk about:
  • How to communicate the benefits of Open Source to non-developers
  • How Ghost manages to align open source and money making
  • John's thoughts on the Automattic/Wordpress drama
  • Advantages and disadvantages of VC funding and open source
  • What would John do with VC dollars
Resources:
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.
34:37Episode 93

Always be dogfooding, with Andrew Lisowski of devtools.fm

Andrew Lisowski is the cohost of devtools.fm. 

In this episode we talk about why Andrew started devtools.fm and what he's learned along the way. 
  • Life as an open source maintainer.
  • How the JavaScript ecosystem is different to other developer ecosystems.
  • The importance of dogfooding.
  • The power of DHH.
  • Why obsessing over one problem eventually leads to great results
  • Should DevTools start podcasts and how?
Links:
50:28Episode 83

Bootstrapping Flagsmith to $3m ARR

Ben Rometsch is the founder of Flagsmith. Flagsmith is a Feature Flag & Remote Config Service that recently reached $3m ARR.

Ben candidly shares exactly how they started, how they got enterprise customers and how they worked with Polychrome to take Flagsmith to the next level.

Links:
  • Ben's Twitter https://x.com/dabeeeenster
  • Flagsmith https://www.flagsmith.com/
  • Polychrome https://polychrome.com/
This episode is sponsored 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.
41:57Episode 79

3 BILLION searches per month without VC funding - Jason Bosco from Typesense

Jason Bosco is the founder of Typesense.
Typesense is the Open Source alternative to Algolia.
Typesense is a batteries-included Search API.

We discuss how Jason built Typesense to be a hugely successful company without VC funding.
We talk about what revenue-funding means and why it should be considered as a viable option for founders.

This episode is sponsored 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:
- Jason's Twitter: https://twitter.com/jasonbosco
- Typesense https://typesense.org/ 
30:52Episode 62

A bootstrapper's story with Julien Danjou, founder of Mergify

Julien Danjou is the founder of Mergify - a tool that helps merge code safer and faster. 

Summary (auto-generated):
  • How do you split your time between work and marketing? 0:00
    • Julian splits 50% of his time between building the product and the other 50% doing marketing and bringing people to the product.
    • Julian talks about mergerfi.
  • Where do you start with product development? 1:23
    • The goal is to solve a problem for an engineer. They co-founded Mirchi Fi with Mary and wrote their own tool.
    • The role of time is a lot of time.
    • The importance of doing demos and showing the product around to the team, and how that has changed over time.
    • How the product is simple and there are a lot of viable options around it, but it's hard to think about all the tiny details.
  • How did they get started? 5:08
    • They both started with a full-time job and moved from a platform to get up. They felt naked without any of their tools. They wanted to build their own tools.
    • They found a first rate customer, pitch.com, and then found more startups willing to use a merge request tool.
    • One of the challenges of being a bootstrapped company is that they only have two hours per week to work on the tool.
    • It is easy to not get good at making decisions when you can do everything, but in air quotes, do everything.
  • How long did it take to write the first dashboard? 10:07
    • Before people started using it internally, they did most of the grunt work of writing the first version. The first version was a mvp.
    • The first dashboard they wrote was like HTML and the bootstrap framework, which was pretty bad, but it was good enough.
    • The first version of the product is the only thing that is going to be out in front of users or customers.
    • The importance of being an entrepreneur-minded person.
    • When they found the first customers, they decided not to build a company right away, but to focus on building a few hours a week into bots.
    • The real trap.
  • Marketing and getting the word out. 16:00
    • The root problem is that nobody knows about you because you are not doing marketing. You have to go with the event if you have a competitor or inspire something.
    • It is easy to build the things for a year or so, especially when you are a developer.
    • Not everything works, but what works well is open source projects. For example, amazon is using lodgify on their open source project.
    • One of their biggest customers was using one of the engineer's projects on github.com, and they talk to their manager about it.
  • Marketing and marketing budget. 20:30
    • Marketing is a lot of different channels that they can use, and they have tried almost everything to see if it works, and if it doesn't work, they try to future-harm.
    • They try to provide value for free to open source users and projects and are happy to do that.
    • Adding value in open source is about saving time and giving time to most open source projects using a merge tool.
    • If a company is new to open source, they need a tool to help them with a workflow tool, marketing, etc.
  • How did you find out about rescue? 25:36
    • The number of people using rescue is small. There are very small projects with just one or two people mentioning it to project being run by 50 or 100 person behind.
    • The main goal is to actually work on the open source projects, not start a new one.
    • Redhat was working on an open source project with Eddie when they started. Redhat is a great leverage for building a company.
    • One takeaway for a dev tool founder, be strict about splitting 50% of your time between building the product and doing the fun stuff.

30:43Episode 39

Developer marketplaces with Robin Warren, founder of Corrello & Blue Cat Reports

What we cover
  • The early days of Corrello
  • The advantages of marketplaces
Where to hear from Robin
23:08Episode 30

Playing the long game with Ed Freyfogle - founder of the OpenCage Geocoding API

Ed Freyfogle is the Co-founder of OpenCage. The OpenCage Geocoding API provides worldwide, reverse (latitude/longitude to text) and forward (text to latitude/longitude) geocoding based on open data via a REST API.

What we cover
  • Introduction to OpenCage
  • Transparency is key
  • Competition and learning
  • Developer mind tricks
  • Bootstrapping OpenCage
  • Playing the long game
  • Measuring conversion
  • Enthusiasts
Where to hear from Ed
24:07Episode 29

Bootstrapping a SaaS boilerplate to $25k MRR with Kyle Gawley from Gravity

Kyle Gawley is the Founder of Gravity. Gravity help founders build SaaS products at warp speed.

What we cover
  • Introduction to Gravity
  • The journey so far
  • Why trust is important
  • Creating and building trust
  • Marketing approach for Gravity
  • Specific problem to solve
  • Tips for SEO
  • Selling to developers badly (things to stay away from!)
  • The future of Gravity
Where to hear from Kyle
14:58Episode 11

Marketing seeds that led to $5k MRR with Tiiny.host

Phil is the founder of Tiiny.host. Tiiny.host is a web hosting application that allows you to simply host & share your web project. 

What we cover
(00:28): What has growth been like at tiiny.host?
(04:44): Why does the world need a new hosting provider?
(10:50): How did you decide to position tiiny.host?

Where to hear from Phil
20:16Episode 3

Bootstrapping DevTools with Michael Christofides

Michael Christofides is the co-founder of pgMustard, a Postgres tool that speeds up your journey from knowing which query is a problem to working out what can be done about it. The aim of pgMustard is to build a small, sustainable business that is the best at what it does. pgMustard recently celebrated their 100th subscriber - so they are well on their way! Michael also consults, talks at conferences and writes about Postgres performance.

What we cover
(00:41): Could you tell us a bit about where pgMustard is right now and what your focuses are at the moment? 
(01:22): Could you tell us a bit about what you're currently doing in terms of growth and, what's keeping you up at night at the moment with pgMustard? 
(02:47): One of the things that I’ve noticed when I go to the pgMustard website, is that you’re very ethical. There’s no small print, everything is as kind as it could be. Is that something you’ve consciously gone after? 
(04:22): Let's say some founders are considering this. Has there been any tangible benefits that could persuade them to become whiter than white?
(06:52): You have previously worked as a Head of Customer Success at a big, what could be described as a DevTools, startup GoCardless. Do you think this is where some of your approach came from?
(09:42): Stepping back from pgMustard, what has and hasn't worked in terms of growth?
(14:09): Are there any kind of general lessons that you would give to maybe yourself starting again? Or another DevTools founder?
(19:54): How can people learn more about you and about pgMustard?

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