Unvalidated Ideas #048

[ ✅ Free | Premium ]

Here's a fresh idea you can take out there and validate.

Developer Survey Company (🗒Raw Notes)

Developers may be terrible customers, but developer-facing companies really need to know how they think.

Companies need to figure out what makes developers choose products, what they currently use and what they like for the future. It's really difficult -- companies usually have to do things that don't scale, treat developers extremely well and offer incentives to some of the highest paid employees in the world, just for a chance.

Most software companies these days have Developer Relations ("DevRel") teams whose entire job is to get in front of developers and showcase their product.

These teams are sales teams in disguise -- they can be revenue drivers but aren't recognized as such or paid with a commission.

Knowing what developers like means knowing what tools they love and use. The tools they love and use will be purchased by companies they work for. Knowing what makes a developer choose product X over product Y, and this is valuable to all companies in the industry.

While most developers don't make purchasing decisions for "enterprise" tools, they do make purchasing decisions for smaller tools, that may often have per-seat costs that scale up. Being in the pipeline and catching a percentage of these startup costs would be lucrative.

This is a really boring idea. It's not exciting -- but it's a no-brainer for developer focused companies to purchase anything that can make adoption/Go To Market ("GTM") easier.

With enough of a direct line to developers, calling on developers for individualized surveys (with payoffs for them like hosting credits etc) is super easy -- the fabled "win-win".

What was in this week's uncut edition?

Like being teased? I hope so, because here's what was in the uncut edition this week:

Ideas:

• Competitor████████
• LLM Prompt█████████
• Developer Survey Company

Bonus:

• Businesses that depends on China are increasingly questionable... Or are they?

Don't forget, there's always money in the banana stand 3x more in the uncut edition.

Thanks for reading!

If you liked this letter feel free to criticize, comment on, remix, and share these ideas with your fellow builders and entrepreneurs!

If email isn't your style, you can also get ideas 🐦 tweet by tweet.

Check out the archive for access to editions that have been previously released.

Victor (victor@unvalidatedideas.com)

Interested in advertising on Unvalidated Ideas? Get in touch.