Journey into the Developer Activity Rabbit Hole
Learnings from the early experiments to find that right problem
Since we started exploring this in February 2024, we have crossed out a lot of domains are ill-fit to enter before reaching this point. Learned a lot of core-founder skills, built stronger networks, understood processes better. Wanted to highlight this one-time:
Tech Recruiting:
Time Spent: 2 months
Revenue generated: $1000
Genuine Problem: Yes
Product: not built, just experimental scraping/email automations
Reason to Pivot: Tough to find a repeatable need as the job requirements change every-time to built a meaningful product. Recruiters are technical to be good design partners.IMDB for developers:
Time Spent: 3 weeks
Revenue Generated: $0
Genuine Problem: No
Product: POC repository recommendation website. Didn’t see frequent enough usage.Leadgen for DevTools:
Time spent: 2 months
Revenue Generated: ~$3k
Genuine Problem: Yes
Product: Automated CSV delivery.Reasons to Pivot: Values didn’t align with sending mass emails. Didn’t see people sufficiently technical to define find-grained filtering criterias to determine intent.
Intent Based Leadgen for Devtools
Time Spent: 3 months
Revenue Generated: <$500
Genuine Problem: Yes
Product: Dashboard to view leads from other open-source repositories, filter and export the same. People onboarded, using it.
Reasons to Pivot: Can foresee leads not being sufficient as the companies scale, see a lot of SDR Agents using LLMs that I would have to compete with that are too easy to create. Did consider extensions (deciding the content to send in email, automatic/docs/tutorial from code), similar problems has too easy for people to create, no clean scale for the product.
This has made me very confident on doing rapid discovery, better at validating genuine problems from people with capacity to pay and building rapid prototypes to onboard customers. We have been able to remain frugal through out this journey, burning less than $30k.