Building What Developers Actually Want: Lessons Learned
summary
Concrete validation steps and market signals: interview 10–20 developers and keep going until nothing new appears, look for developers willing to change workflow or pay, spot repeated workarounds and cross‑community complaints, and notice when teams hire a full‑time engineer for the problem. Use market tools like SimilarWeb GitHub Trends Stack Overflow Insights Crunchbase and simple web scraping. Examples: feature‑flag pricing pain drives searches, Arcjet targets bot/billing issues, and niche reproducibility needs (MLops, robotics) reveal viable product slices.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction
- 5:24Developers building wrong things
- 8:41Engineering vs business mindset
- 12:57Signs a developer pain is worth solving
- 16:49Finding target developers
- 18:39Traps in dev tool building
- 21:45Market research tools
- 22:26Next steps to validate
- 23:30Validation framework
- 25:16What devs want from tools
- 26:04Q&A
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