Services as Code: Selling through vs. Selling to Developers | by Scott Raney | Memory Leak | Medium

Recently there has been a renewed focus on companies that build developer tools. This is natural for developers, as every entrepreneur starts by trying to solve problems they face themselves. Moreover, this is a trend with far-reaching benefits across every industry — better tools make developers more productive which makes it easier for companies to build really awesome products quickly. Services targeted at developers are a particularly powerful version of this trend — AWS and Heroku, for instance, have enabled countless startups to scale without having to worry about infrastructure, letting them focus on product instead. Conventional wisdom has long held that it’s hard to build a big, durable business selling developer tools. Reason being that there is a finite universe of developers with limited budget — and inclination — to spend on tooling. However, recent history has shown this simply isn’t the case. The explosion in the number of software developers coupled with new cloud-based

Recently there has been a renewed focus on companies that build developer tools. This is natural for developers, as every entrepreneur starts by trying to solve problems they face themselves. Moreover, this is a trend with far-reaching benefits across every industry — better tools make developers more productive which makes it easier for companies to build really awesome products quickly. Services targeted at developers are a particularly powerful version of this trend — AWS and Heroku, for instance, have enabled countless startups to scale without having to worry about infrastructure, letting