Scaling DevTools

Andy is the cofounder of DeepTrace, an AI reliability platform that helps engineering teams investigate incidents and fix problems in production. In this conversation, Andy shares how a team of technical founders learned sales, got their first 10 customers, and approached go-to-market with the same mindset they used for engineering. We discuss outbound volume, messaging, targeting, sales tooling, paid ads, sales calls, pricing, trials, and the thinking behind DeepTraceLinks:Andy's LinkedinDeeptrace

Stefano Verna and Matteo Giaccone from DatoCMS share how their side project in a web agency turned into a €6.5M ARR company with a 13-person remote team. We talk about building sustainable, bootstrapped businesses, instead of the all-or-nothing VC approach, and about their 6-week shipping cycles, prioritizing simplicity, and building trust with customers.Links: •. Dato CMS •. Matteo's Linkedin •. Stefano's X

Ahmad Sadeddin is the founder and CEO of Corgea. Corgea provides the security tools to find, triage, and fix insecure code. Ahmad shares:- Why you don't need to raise much to find PMF - stay lean: you should surprise people with how few people you are.- What is a small amount to raise? And what team size do you need? - Pivoting during YC and how Corgea found their first customers and the signs of Product Market Fit- The journey to Product Market Fit never stops- How Corgea worked towards Product Market FitThis episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.Links:Ahmad Sadeddin https://www.linkedin.com/in/asadeddin/Corgea https://corgea.com/The Fatal Pinch by Paul Graham https://paulgraham.com/pinch.html

David Hsu is the founder of Retool, the low-code platform for building internal tools used by companies like Amazon, Airbnb, and the US Army. David recounts building Retool's first version in weeks with just three components, early outreach failures, shifting to "tomorrow's developers," and LLM use cases.This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. Links: • Retool • David's Linkedin

Louis Knight-Webb is the co-founder of Vibe Kanban, an open-source tool for orchestrating AI coding agents. After years of building for enterprise legacy code, Louis pivoted and saw his new project explode to over 20,000 GitHub stars in just a few months. We talk about the "startup university" of the last five years, why he walked away from 6-figure enterprise deals to find true founder-market fit, and why he thinks most people are wrong about AI-generated pull requests.This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.Links: • Vibe Kanban • Louis' Linkedin

This episode breaks down an article by Jason Cohen, founder of WP Engine and SmartBear, outlining his step-by-step roadmap from idea to product-market fit (PMF) for startups, especially DevTools. His 8 step roadmap provides insights on personal fit, market validation, customer interviews, building an SLC (simple, lovable, complete) MVP, sales focus, retention, prioritization, and founder psychology, drawing from Cohen's unicorn success and pitfalls to avoid.Links: • Jason Cohen • WP Engine • Smart Bear • Jason Cohen's articleThis episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

This episode breaks down Marc Andreessen's 2007 article on why market matters most in startups, plus some great wisdom from Michael Seibel on spotting real PMF through explosive growth and customer pull.Links: • Marc Andreessen's article • Michael Seibel's post • Product Market Fit collapseThis episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

This episode is with Christopher Burns, the creator of c15t and founder of consent.io, an open-source, developer-first, ethical provider of privacy infrastructure. Chris explains why most cookie banners are not compliant, and if the EU is going to come after you for it. We talk about how he found product market fit and grew the company, and we also debate London vs SF for startups.Links: • Chris' Linkedin • c15t • ConsentThis episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs

This is the story of how Amazon Web Services - arguably the most successful developer tool of all time - got started. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Adam Frankl has been the first Marketing VP at three dev-facing unicorns. He returns to the podcast, to reveal the things that DevTool startups must get right in the early days, in order to be successful. We also discuss Jack's experience implementing Technical Advisory Boards (TABs) with a new startup, and the hurdles startups face with outreach, sustaining member enthusiasm across calls, and the art of framing the problem correctly. Adam shares ongoing AI experiments to streamline TAB insights and stories that hook developers.​This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.Links: • Adam's Linkedin • The Developer Facing Startup

Kyle Cheung, co-founder of Greybeam, shares how his team built a tool that reduces Snowflake costs by 70-95%, without migration, drawing from multiple pivots over two years. The discussion covers their quirky marketing tactics and advice on fundraising as storytelling.This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.Links: • Kyle's Linkedin • Greybeam

In this episode, Matt Klein (Bitdrift, Envoy) reflects on building EC2 in the early days of AWS, the reality behind AWS’s origins, and what Amazon’s customer obsession looks like from the inside. He then dives into creating Envoy at Lyft, the challenges of open source at scale, and spinning Bitdrift out of Lyft to focus on mobile observability. He shares how to meet developers where they are and what it takes to find product market fit. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.Links: • Matt's Linkedin • Bitdrift

Will Stewart is the CEO and co-founder of Northflank, the developer platform. He shares how a teenage gaming side project turned into a self-service developer platform that runs complex workloads on Kubernetes across any cloud. He talks about meeting his co-founder online, fundraising and hiring remotely and why they took years to launch. He offers some interesting insights on dealing with bugs, product vision and changelogs.This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. Links: • Northflank • Will's Linkedin

In Shawn "swyx" Wang's third appearance on the podcast, we talk about his recent interview with Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan about AI in biomedical research, and the goal to understand and eventually eradicate all diseases. We also talk about how DevRel is unbelievable back, the challenges of uphill DevRel, the dynamics of the current AI investment bubble, and the new projects he is working on.This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. Links: • Uphill DevRel article • DevRel is unbelievably back article • Particle/wave duality article • The Economics of Superstars • AI Engineer conference videos • Swyx's Linkedin

Vincent D. Warmerdam from Marimo shares how they grew their YouTube channel for their Python notebook, using regular Shorts to reach thousands of new viewers each week. He talks about the importance of being genuinely excited about what you’re building and how consistent, authentic content can help both founders and creators connect with their audience. He gives practical advice and real-world insights for anyone interested in DevRel or growing a DevTool channel.This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.Links: • Vincent's blog • Vincent's X • Marimo

Rik Haandrikman talks about sales incentives and growth at RevenueCat, and their creative approach to conferences. He explains why their sales team focuses on helping customers evaluate the product in their own way, how aligning incentives shapes company culture and how they make the most out of rare, compelling events.This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. Links: • RevenueCat jobs • Rik's article • Rik's X • RevenueCat's X

The episode features Baseten CEO and cofounder Tuhin, who shares Baseten’s journey from a small team in the pre-GenAI era to scaling rapidly and raising $150M in Series D funding. The discussion delves into building robust inference infrastructure for AI applications, navigating market shifts, and developing tools that prioritize speed, developer experience, and customer feedback loops.This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.Links: • Baseten • Tuhin's Linkedin

In this episode, Angelo Saraceno from Railway shares his experience balancing the technical challenges of building a developer-focused product with the realities of enterprise sales. They discuss how understanding customer needs beyond just features is crucial to growing a startup sustainably. Whether you're a founder or developer, this conversation offers valuable insights into turning good products into successful businesses without losing sight of the bigger picture.This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. Links: • Railway • Railway's blog • John McMahon's book • Angelo's Slack automation article • Angelo's website • Angelo's Linkedin

Guy Zerega led sales and marketing at Stack Overflow, where he once hired me.Now he leads sales at Cyborg - they offer end-to-end encrypted inference data. This is a 101 on what matters in sales; especially to developers.This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.Links: • Guy's Linkedin • Guy's new startup, Cyborg

Victor, VP of Marketing at Strapi, walks us through how AI can be used in content creation—what tools work, what to watch out for, and how you can try some of these techniques yourself. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.Links: • Victor's X • Victor's Linkedin • Strapi • GrowthX • Kapa • Octolens • Semrush

Ben Dicken is a developer educator at PlanetScale, he's an incredible writer and teacher, who's made some amazing technical articles that developers actually love reading. We get into his reasons for working so hard on these articles, his process, and how he makes content that genuinely helps engineers understand complex ideas.This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.Links: • Ben's X • B-trees and database indexes article • IO devices and latency article

In this episode, we explore Adam Frankl's concept of a Technical Advisory Board, and how it helps DevTools founders learn directly from potential users. I share personal experience organizing one-on-one interviews to find out real customer problems and gives tips for recruiting members. We explore how to set up the meetings, analyse feedback, and get the most value from the process.This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.Links: • The first tab call • How to recruit TAB members • After the first set of TAB calls • Adam's Linkedin • Adam's book

Matt Carey from AI Demo Days, shares his experience of organizing developer events in London and San Fransisco. He discusses the real costs involved and how creating fun, community-driven events makes all the difference - plus a spicy take on Hackathons!This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.Links: • AI Demo Days • Matt Carey's links

Gitpod has rebranded to Ona and shifted its focus to building AI tools for enterprise teams. This episode digs into why they made the leap, how they're standing out in a crowded AI space, and what it’s been like rethinking developer workflows from the ground up. We talk about dev environments, differentiating in the AI space, forward-deployed engineers and more. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.Links: • Ona • Christian's X • Matthew's X

Creating docs that actually work means knowing what to write, how to write it, and where it belongs. In this episode, we break down the diataxis documentation framework—a simple but powerful system that splits docs into four clear types: tutorials, how-to guides, explanations, and reference. We look at examples of tools that have implemented diataxis to write their documentation with clarity and purpose.This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.Links: • Diataxis • Sequin • Layercode • Logdy

Karen from Composio shares how developers are using MCP to connect tools like Slack, Notion, and Gmail with AI agents, growing from nearly zero to 100,000 users in 6 months. They capitalized on key moments when new AI tools, such as Grok versions and Claude releases, came out, creating examples and demos that resonated strongly across social media and got them retweeted by Elon Musk. Hear how the team learns to use these tools better over time, helping each new release work smarter than the last.This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.Links: • Composio • Composio's X • Karan's X • Launch Video

Lee Robinson helped Vercel grow to $200M+ in ARR and scaled the Next.js community to over 1.3 million active developers. I dive into his blog posts to uncover valuable insights and lessons about how he achieved this success, covering topics like docs, community building, developer education, marketing, and product development.This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.Links: • Lee Robinson's blog • Lee Robinson's X • Peter Yang's interview • swyx's interview • Gonto on Scaling DevTools • Developer Marketing CommunityP.s. this is a new style of episode, let me know what you think.

Carter Rabasa, head of DevRel at Langflow, talks about organizing and participating in hackathons, how these events enable developers to break free from routine work, and how they can help accelerate tool development.This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.Links: • Carter's X • Carter's LinkedIn • Cascadia AI Hackathon (and Luma) • AI Tinkerers • Bolt Virtual Hackathon

Rita Kozlov is the VP of Developers and AI at Cloudflare. We talk about how Cloudflare focuses on building disruptive, efficient technologies like their Workers platform to gain long-term competitive advantages. They use their own developer platform to ship fast, and hire people who deeply care, with a culture of curiosity and transparency that drives continuous innovation.This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. Links:Rita’s X Rita’s LinkedInCloudflareswyx article on cloudflare Stratechery article on Cloudflare's disruption

Matt Palmer from Replit shares how the company scaled to $100M in ARR from ~$10M in under a year. We talk about the importance of video for teaching the non-linear process of working with AI, the challenge of rewriting documentation for a broader audience using the Diátaxis framework, and how they support a diverse community of users navigating this new AI-driven development landscape.This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. Links:ReplitReplit Agent documentationDiátaxis documentation frameworkMatt's YouTubeMatt's XReplit's Youtube

Logan Kilpatrick shares how DeepMind's organizational changes helped their resurgance in AI. What needs to happen to reach 100m developers. And why the next six months are more exciting than ever.This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. Links:Google DeepMind Logan Kilpatrick Logan Kilpatrick podcast NotebookLM Gemini CLI Veo

Sam Lambert is the CEO of PlanetScale - a cloud database provider.Sam shares:- Why dropping the free tier was one of PlanetScale's best decisions. But is not for every startup.- People solving serious problems appreciate serious content and if you can create meaningful content, that's a big advantage.- CEOs should be transparent and collaborative but assertive. Don't let your company die while enacting someone else's decision - Express hard-to-convey-benefits via your customers’ experiencesThis episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. Links:- Sam's Twitter- Sam's LinkedIn - PlanetScale - PlanetScale Postgres - Caching blog post - Ted Nyman - Snowflake - Vitess

Sam Bhagwat is the CEO of Mastra - a typescript AI agents framework. Sam is also the cofounder of Gatsby, the popular React framework that was acquired by Netlfiy. Sam shares what he learned building Gatsby and how they're applying those lessons to Mastra. Why they're building in TypeScript, not Python. Why 20% of their users are in Japan. And why they're distributing 1,500 physical books per week on AI agents. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. Links:- Mastra - Sam Bhagwat - Gatsby - Principles of Building AI Agents

This is the first time I'm turning the mic around. This is the story of StreamPot. A DevTool I launched about a year ago.It was just acquired by ittybit so I thought I'd bring ittybit's founder Paul on to basically interview me about what went right and what went wrong.Hopefully you enjoy learning a bit more about the guy usually asking the questions.This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. Links:- Jack Bridger- StreamPot - StreamPot GitHub- Announcement - Paul Anthony Williams - ittybit- FFmpeg - Hetzner

Paul Copplestone is the CEO of Supabase, the Postgres development platform. He talks about the discipline needed to cross the enterprise chasm without isolating your original community. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. Links:- Paul's LinkedIn - Paul's X - Paul's website- Supabase - Enterprise Sales vs Product-led Growth - Friction logs - Ant Wilson - Multigres: Vitess for Postgres

Quinn Favret is the founder of Tavus. They do AI video research and products. They saved a Scaling DevTools episodes with their lipsync feature. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. https://workos.com/Links:- Tavus - Tavus lipsync API - Quinn Favret - Scaling DevTools episode saved by Tavus

Andrew Filev is the founder of Zencoder. Zencoder is building AI coding agents. In this episode, we explore the evolution from simple code completion AI to more sophisticated software engineering agents. While tools like GitHub Copilot revolutionized code suggestions, the next frontier involves AI agents that can handle complex engineering tasks and collaborate with each other through emerging protocols.The discussion dives into agent-to-agent protocols, which enable AI systems to work together autonomously on software development tasks. This advancement suggests a future where AI agents could manage entire development workflows, from requirements gathering to testing and deployment. We also touch on the importance of using slower summer periods strategically - making it an ideal time for engineering teams to evaluate their tooling, processes, and prepare for upcoming development cycles.This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. Links- Zencoder - Andrew Filev - Wrike- Powered by Claude- Vercel- Perplexity AI - Scale AI

In this episode we talk about Wordware, programming with LLMs, and what it now means to be a developer. Robert and Filip explain how they're building tools that let non-engineers create AI workflows, why the definition of 'developer' is changing in the AI era, and their vision for background agents that automate your work while you focus on creative tasks.Links:- Wordware - Wordware Sauna Waitlist - Wordware is hiring - Filip Kozera - Robert Chandler This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. P.s. thanks to Oana Olteanu for making it happen

Tony Holdstock-Brown is the CEO and founder of Inngest, a tool to run AI and backend workflows at scale.This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. Links:- Inngest - Tony's (inactive) LinkedIn - Traction book Note: the studio lost video footage about 20 minutes in. Sorry about that. Audio is fine though.

Utpal Nadiger is the cofounder of Digger.dev. Digger built a popular open source IaC orchestration tool. Their new product Infrabase is an AI DevOps agent that scans IaC code in your pull requests.We talk about SF, resiliency and pivoting.Links:Utpal Digger Tavus (lipsync)This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. Why/how we lipsynced: The (amazing) studio accidentally had Utpal's camera switched off for the first 20 minutes. So I lipsynced the audio onto the latter part of the video. You can probably notice if you look closely. And also his gestures don't always look congruent because of the lipsyncing. But overall, incredible tech from Tavus - much better than a blank screen in my opinion!

Steve Ruiz is the founder of tldraw - a whiteboard SDK / infinite canvas SDK. We talk creativity, taste and obsession. And marketing to developers.This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. Links:Steve Ruiztldraw

Luke Harries leads growth at ElevenLabs. ElevenLabs builds incredible AI voice models. Luke dives into why launches matter so much, the origin story of ElevenLabs and why a hackathon can change your life.Links:Luke Harries ElevenLabs This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. P.s. I used Eleven Labs without any edits for the transcript/subtitles.

Elston Baretto is the founder of Tiiny.host - the simplest place to put your work online. In this episode we talk about how Elston has been able to grow Tiiny to 70,000+ sign ups per month with content marketing. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. Links:- Tiiny.host - Elston Baretto - Ramen Club - Charlie Ward - Sabba - Veed

Eric Allam is the cofounder of Trigger.dev. Trigger gives you open source background jobs. We talk about how Trigger iterated different versions until landing on something developers really want. And now the growth is crazy. And also, I use Trigger and it's genuinely a great product.This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. Links:Eric Allam Trigger Trigger Open Source project