The DevTools Ceiling: Great as Open Source, and a Terrible Business
dx.tips
dx.tips
We're perhaps in a different space (time travel debugging for C/C++/Java/Rust/Go/Python) so we have quite narrow focus versus, say, JetBrains or GitHub who are providing much larger portions of the developer's tooling (everything a modern IDE does / CI / project workflows).
Tooling can be difficult - people sometimes expect it to be free (and, often, open source). They also struggle to justify spending on stuff that makes developers more productive. Almost everybody will say that want that, almost everybody has difficulty quantifying it to take to their budget holders.
But it's still a good business - we make money doing technically fascinating work while changing other developer's day-to-day lives for the better all the time. We have a unique technology that companies hundreds or thousands of times our size our envious of (and pay us for access to). It's not a bad deal!
> No, I was sad because around about the halfway mark he starts going into the title topic: “Can DevTools Get to $1B ARR?” and (the host) Tim Chen agrees and says basically only Hashicorp, GitHub, and now Vercel “made it”, and everyone else has had disappointing, middling outcomes. (I might add GitLab, Sentry, JetBrains, Atlassian, presumably Linear, but yeah it’s a short list). Entire markets were savaged in that conversation - all API tooling — Kong ($2b), Postman (valued $6b, now $3b), kaput, B grade, thanks for playing.
Now, I think this is true in a way: it shows that dev tools businesses (in general) are underappreciated. You're less likely to get change-your-life-rich off them (bearing in mind that most start-ups fail, so the typical case is always "not rich").
But I also think it's a very all-or-nothing take. You don't have to make $1B ARR to make a dent in the problems you want to solve, or to make money or to employ a team of brilliant people. It depends what your win condition is.