When you are successful, more and more developers use your products and

serve as indicators that your product is solving a real problem. Those

developers can be your first hook into larger deals with organizations

where those developers work.

First, you need to be solving an actual problem that developers recognize

is an issue for them that they themselves would not want to solve. This is

a high bar that non-technical founders often take for granted when

pitching their product.

</p><p>

Is the problem your product solves... actually a problem worth solving?

Second, you need to be able to properly

<a href="/blog/explain-products-developers.html">articulate the problem that you solve</a>

to developers. That is an unexpectedly large challenge if no one on

the founding team of your tech startup is a developer themselves.

</p><p>

That link contains the slides and a loose transcript to another talk

that provides some guidance around telling your product's story

to developers.

Third, even at an early stage you should have some understanding of

your own business model. The business model should include a working

hypothesis for both the cost of customer acquisition (CAC) and lifetime

value of a customer (LTV). Also, does the revenue derived from your

customers match a standard distribution or a power law distribution?