[encoderer]

we do a lot of cron-related seo and for years the airplane guys have been buying ads on tons of cron-related terms including our own brand, with the pitch “ditch your cron jobs for airplane”.

Sigh. It truly sucks for the devs that took them up on that pitch. Meanwhile cron is still working fine.

In their defense, dev tools businesses are hard. We’ve navigated it by staying lean with very efficient go to market, but the traditional VC scale-up is very hard to pull off.

[HEGalloway]

> dev tools businesses are hard

I understand why dev tools business are hard, i'm just curious as to what makes them hard? I know one of the things that make it a difficult sell is that devs don't buy much but what else?

[RyanHamilton]

1. You are trying to sell software to someone that often loves writing software themselves. 2. You often can't convince them that they could NOT recreate your product easily. They will pick a tiny subset of functionality and say "oh I whipped up this demo that does 90% of what we need last week". 3. They don't care about the maintenance cost of self-written. In some cases that's their job security. 4. Even if it makes them 50% more productive, their hours or pay won't change.

This is why the "best" products are often in boring areas OR have a unique platform advantage. Think of paypal/stripe.

[gbear605]

Another big factor is that devs know that startups can (and, as in this case, will) go out of business, so they’d rather go with an FOSS offering that can’t just disappear with two months to transition off of the platform.