Building Companies that Devs & DevOps Teams Love, And Avoiding Expensive Mistakes
Heavybit by Jesse Robbins · · Video · 20:00
Heavybit talk on the expensive mistakes developer-tools founders make, drawn from the ones I made building Chef from open source into an enterprise infrastructure company.
This Heavybit talk is the field guide I wish I had when I was starting Chef. The gap between building something technically impressive and building something teams adopt at scale is where most developer-tools companies die.
Most of the lessons here I learned by doing them wrong first: positioning, developer experience, pricing, the go-to-market traps that catch technical founders. Learn a dollar of lesson for every one you spend in failure.
This talk covers the expensive mistakes I made founding Chef and the patterns I keep seeing developer-tools founders repeat. The gap between building something technically impressive and building something teams adopt at scale is where most companies die. Great technology does not sell itself.
The lessons cover product positioning, developer experience, pricing, and the go-to-market traps that catch technical founders. I made most of these mistakes firsthand building Chef from an open-source project into an enterprise infrastructure company. Learn a dollar of lesson for every one you spend in failure.
