Hey guys, head of engineering at Layer here. If you actually try to go down the road of building a platform for other developers then you are very quickly going to discover that you need to build a bunch of other stuff totally separate from the core messaging service. You are going to need solutions for getting data in/out, dashboards, billing systems, sample code -- on and on. Plus you have to provide an SLA to close any meaningful business. And you'll need a pro sales team to get those opportunities interested and through the funnel. We are 35 people and I could easily keep another 5 engineers fully loaded to attack the roadmap as aggressively as we'd like. And we've been at this for 2 years. There's a lot of surface area and you need to be very good on both technical and sales dimensions to make a platform play work.

My best advice for you is to either find a unique value prop in the consumer space where you can perhaps gain a foothold and access virality or focus on finding a nice home for your engineering team and technology. I've seen a lot of advice here about how you should start consulting to create runway. This is terrible advice and you should face reality. Nobody is going to build an app and a business on top of a messaging platform that is a part time project of a handful of developers without any runway. It's just not a rational business decision and nobody who is capable of paying you real money would make that call. You are in a market with existing well funded players that are rapidly evolving their product and addressing that market through sales and marketing. You either have to build something that you can give away for free and generate traction that you can raise money against or you need to focus on selling the core assets that you do have: the people and the tech. You may want to reconsider releasing that code if you want a shot at an aquihire outcome. Best of luck.