Consumerization of technology and the developer
How developers are starting to become more like consumers
The vision of a developer has changed a lot in the last 5 years - gone is the pocket-protector stereotype of the out-of-touch programmer, and what has replaced it is a minimalist, free-thinking, free-roaming technologist out to solve the world’s biggest problems.
And along the way, the way people buy and sell to the developer audience has changed as well. Tools with friendly and snarky copy pushing transparency of offerings abound. And they’re all pushing on the same thing: being the cool kid at the table, offering the easiest to implement solution at the lowest possible price.
And this is good for the world in general - mainly because it lowers the cost of development overall. Creating websites is easier because we have tools like Wordpress, Node.js, Stripe, et al. But it also means that the money that these start-up can attract is less and less. I’m not going to argue whether that is a good or bad thing by the way.
What is more interesting to me is how developers are really starting to act more like consumers - that is: fickle and fleeting. Without sounding like an old man, I’m simply shocked at the number of technologies that are invented, adopted and then dumped, and the speed in which this happens. Ruby on Rails was a hot technology - now I can only conclude that losers code in it - everyone else has moved onto Node.js. Braintree was the most developer-friendly payment platform, but now it seems to me that Stripe has taken that crown. MongoDB was great to develop with, until it wasn’t. Crittercism was hot until Hockey Stick came out.
The best example I’ve found of this new marketing trend is New Relic. New Relic has a cool, interesting product - and when I look at the marketing and then look at the people behind the company, it is clear to me that their messaging and brand are very, well, “studied” - they are targeting the hipster developer and they are, at their core, not very hipster.Nothing wrong with that - that is what marketing is about. But what I think it speaks to is the idea that the developer audience is becoming a brand-centric audience where the products are somewhat undifferentiated thus marketing works on creating the right “feeling”. This is, of course, what consumer marketing is all about.
Loyalty is fleeting. Switching costs are low - or relatively low. Every component of the development stack has been taken apart by a separate offering. This deconstruction of the stack is great for development. Hell, the most recent example is Segment.io - a start-up that abstracts the javascript include file so that you can easily switch between providers of analytics services.
Thus, I think it will be hard for any company that makes developer-centric tools to make a lot of money. I think most are capped at a few million before it is time to start looking for the exit. And once that exit happens, expect the audience/users to disappear as well as the coolness cools.
You can spot these companies a mile away - because they have a customer list that is, well, a list of other hot startups. No one is listing Aetna in their “Happy Customers” blob because they don’t attract that kind of developer.
But here’s the dirty secret of the software game - there are very few broad developer opportunities where you can sell SaaS and make hundreds of millions of dollars. And those areas are very hotly contested. To make the big bucks, you have to sell to the enterprise. And while the way they buy is changing, you’d be shocked at how much is hasn’t changed. It’s built on relationships and hard-to-measure marketing and sales contacts. If you’re building a developer tool based on love and you intend to actually build a company, remember that and plan/build accordingly.
