[amelius]

> The best startups are ones that have solved a pain point you yourself have experience.

Yet there is zero money in writing development tools :(

[personjerry]

Have you heard of companies like Atlassian and Gitlab?

[nostrademons]

Jetbrains, Rational, Perforce, MySQL, GitHub, Trello, StackOverflow, Joyent, Powershell, etc as well.

The tricky part is that to monetize, you either need to master enterprise sales (which means that the product will take on some PHB-pleasing features that developers despise so they can get through procurement departments), or you need to be acquired by a big company looking to round out their developer tools offerings.

[amelius]

Those companies are running platforms. Not really a fair comparison.

Besides, I'm not literally saying there is no money in development tools. I'm saying that it's a difficult market.

[AznHisoka]

almost everything is a difficult market these days. at least with developers, you know where they hang out. try marketing a SaaS to farmers or construction companies online.

[Chris2048]

Is GitLab well funded?

[scrollaway]

There's money in saving other people money. And in this industry, time is very, very valuable; thus there is money in saving other people time.

If you write development tools that save other people time, there is plenty of money in that.

[booleandilemma]

Visual Studio Professional 2017 is $499.

[jetti]

Embarcadero would disagree with you.