Dev tools

Developer tools are uniquely viral and uniquely brutal. Devs find your product on GitHub or Hacker News, give you 30 seconds before they bounce, and tell two hundred peers if you nail it or twenty if you don't. The playbooks below show how indie founders launched into this audience without a personal following — open-sourcing the core and charging for hosting, writing the docs as the marketing, posting in /r/programming with a working demo not a pitch. You'll notice almost none of them paid for traffic. Most started with one technical blog post that ranked, or one Show HN that landed on the front page, or one library that got starred. Distribution is earned by being genuinely useful to people who can read code. Don't reach for paid ads here — they won't save a tool that devs don't want.