Technical founders have a hard job.

Close your eyes, and pretend it's 2007. HackerNews was created 8 short months ago. Heroku just launched with a 4 paragraph blog post (they'll have 10,000 users within 6 months). There are only a handful of public companies with technical products. Just a few thousand people graduate every year with a CS degree. You get most of your information about Java from an email chain. AWS has a single digit product list. Life is good.  

Fast forward to today, and nothing is the same. There are 30+ public companies in developer tools and infrastructure. 100K+ kids graduated with a CS degree last year. 30% of last year's YC batches were technical companies. And over 1,000 technical startups working on technical problems have raised venture funding in the past decade. You used to be able to build an interesting product, and people would just try it. But today, not so. A new database launches every day. There are 25+ observability vendors, and double digit Apache projects just focused on data streaming (?). There are so many tools out there that people are drowning in them.

This of course doesn’t mean that it’s not worth starting a company, or that you’re doomed to float aimlessly in a sea of lookalikes. Great, new, enduring technical tools are built every month – just think about how much software in your team’s budget comes from companies that were created <5 years ago. What it does mean, though, is that getting your product to market today requires very different tactics and philosophies; and that the old modicum of “if you build it, they will try it” (or something like that) is no longer true. For better or worse, building a successful technical product has increasingly become less about product and engineering, and more about go-to-market: how you sell your product, market it, and build a world class team around it. So how do you stand out from the crowd?

Amplify has spent the past decade investing in technical founders building technical products for technical buyers. From Datadog to dbt, we've seen what it takes to go from nothing to having hordes of developers and data teams love you at every turn. Amplified is our attempt at bringing some of that experience to a broader audience; empowering technical founders to fly above the noise. All of the content here is free, and tailored at technical people turned founders, figuring out GTM for (probably) the first time. We cover highly practical topics that are top of mind for founders like:

Most of the content on Amplified is from our uniquely structured Build Team, who has decades of experience selling, marketing, and recruiting for world class technical companies. But we also feature contributions from the broader community of amazing founders and practitioners working on technical products. Interested in writing something? Get in touch here.

Technical founders have a hard job. The stakes have never been higher: software budgets are bigger than they've ever been, but the competition is stiff (and well funded). Good luck out there. We hope this helps.