by growthape on 2/28/15, 10:40 AM with 2 comments
by smt88 on 2/28/15, 10:56 AM
Why? They're smart, inquisitive, and have money. In very few industries do you get all three of those things.
Most importantly, great developers are also lazy. Someone who pathologically tries to automate things hates doing tedious work, and profiling, reading logs, and setting up alert systems is tedious, mindless work.
In fact, when developers find something that seems like it could be tedious or repetitive, they'll generally Google a solution, rather than just doing it. That makes it much easier to market something to them.
New Relic simply identified a need for this nearly-perfect market, and they weren't "schlep blind"[1]. If you don't know why it's a schlep, try scaling a system like theirs. It's a nightmare.
Edit: If you don't believe devs are a great market, look at some of the other meteoric rises in recent years: Stripe and Slack. They did something that many other companies had already been doing, but they did it in a much more developer-friendly way.