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Comment by mannyv | Hacker News Reader

The important point here is that he got funding first, and it sounds like at least half a million because he didn't talk about begging angels for money or running out of runway.

He was able to hire someone fast.

You won't be this good/lucky.

In the traditional non-traditional startup you need a salesperson and engineering to be free, because money. I suppose with dev tools you can get rid of the salesperson because you're selling tools to individuals? Which is more risk, but if it works then go for it.

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The part where I begged for funding is another story: https://blog.tooljet.com/raising-vc-funding-for-open-source-...

Also the link to HN launch that helped a lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27421408

It’s perhaps worth highlighting how much of an outlier your experience was - having a social circle to intro investors, inbound interest, and closing a $1.5M institutional seed round within two weeks is a highly atypical trajectory for solo founders with negligible traction.

> having a social circle to intro investors

> with negligible traction

Disagreeing to these two points. The traction from HN & ProductHunt launch was good that ToolJet got 1000+ stars on GitHub in under 8 hours. The intros were made mostly by great open-source founders who were totally strangers at the time who discovered the project mostly from HN.

"GitHub stars", like "the number of downloads", is a weak signal, rarely meaningful in traction talks unless there's nothing more substantial to discuss. Traction indicators for a low-code platform would be revenue, number of paid users, number of apps deployed/updated with ToolJet, number of different people using ToolJet apps, the volume of data captured/processed per week, etc.

for 1.5m, any signal is important to build a story. all of the things you list are important, but typically only in later stages.

Interesting that you used ProductHunt. I looked at their site and couldn't figure out if anyone actually paid attention to it. I suppose for tech journalists and investors it's a better place to find interesting stuff than PR newswire?

FYI, the Tutorial link in the footer of the tooljet site seems to be dead: https://docs.tooljet.com/docs/intro

Thanks for noticing, fixing in some time.

FYI, people believe that dev tools don't make money, but atlassian, pagerduty, zendesk, etc show that there is a market.

And most tools kind of suck.

A market exists, yes.

But that market size overall is small, and the number of players is large.

The entire dev tools market is consistently estimated at around 5 billion right now, and only 11-12 billion 5 years from now. The CAGR is about 13-14%.

ML, which appeared out of nowhere, is estimated at ~15-20 billion right now, and 100-200 billion in 5 years. The CAGR is ~40% right now.

(The estimates vary on whether they think CAGR slows down or not, etc, hence the variation 5 years from now).

In one of these markets, you need to be a big fish in a small pond, but you'd have to take out established players to do it.

In the other, you at least might stand a chance of building something new that takes over as the market grows 10x.

In the o

As a note, if you're in a startup you have no idea how far ahead of most developers you are.

I keep forgetting that most developers throw their stuff over the wall to IT and probably don't have a ci pipeline, do IaC, , and probably don't deploy their own microservices or understand the AWS stack. They probably have a 60% chance they use source control instead of just copying folders and changing the folder name. They don't do logging or security. They scale by buying bigger instances. Docker is their current tech boner instead of puppet.

Although pathetic, it is an opportunity.

This is true, but most of those devs are in that situation because they want to be. They have less than zero interest in taking on more. Often these people also value job security/stability above advancement/novelty. Many of them also do coding only while at work, and if they will learn a new skill/tech it will be because their employer is paying them to. Often this group will not follow any tech news/blogs/anything and isn't even reachable.

In short it's a pretty tough group to market to.

To be clear, I'm not making a value judgment on this. If those people are happy with life, that's great! That's mostly the point IMHO.

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