It’s 2025, and there are a lot of developer tools out there. And yet into this crowded ocean, founders must wade. How do you stand out from the crowd on a day when 10 other developer tools might also be launching? How do you show the world that you’re different than the double-digit alternatives developers are already thinking of when they hear about you?
These are tough questions with complicated answers (if they even exist). Every startup is different; who can really say how you should launch? That’s why instead of telling you how to launch, I thought I might try telling you how not to launch. So here is how not to launch your developer tool.
(1) Don’t spend time thinking about your goals
The first step to poorly launching your developer tool is to make sure you don’t spend the requisite time thinking about what the point of the launch is in the first place.
Many founders think they have to launch because, well, that’s what everyone does (what percentage of launches only happen because a founder saw a competitor launch?). I’ve seen launches actually happen from start to finish without a single intentional discussion about whether we’re after awareness and traffic, or early design partners, or self-serve signups, or anything else. And when the founders (and the team) have different ideas about what they’re trying to achieve with a launch, every piece of the launch gets harder to agree on and coordinate.
Different goals necessitate different approaches to measuring whether the launch even worked or not. Want to drive awareness? You’re probably thinking mostly about traffic, and your CTA might be something generic like “get in touch.” You might aim at a big splash and a highly produced video intro. Want to drive qualified signups? Your website will probably want to be more product focused, and you need to be thinking about what information you're asking for at signup to determine if these people are relevant or not.
If you and your team don’t start from the same place, this will all be a mess. The kind of mess that is great if you’re trying to not launch your developer tool!
(2) Don’t worry about timing, just get your product out there
Another great way to launch your developer tool badly is to launch without a good idea of why you’re launching now.
Every company journey is different, but in B2B developer tools, I tend to see a fairly standardized progression:
- Build minimum viable product based on founders’ personal experience
- Reach out to network and find early adopters to get feedback
- Make adjustments and gain confidence that there’s something real here
- Launch to the rest of the world
- …profit?
A great way to mess up your launch is to skip steps 2 and 3 and go straight to launch. Without having done the work to get the product in front of those early design partners (or whatever you want to call them) you’ll have no data to say that the product you built is actually useful enough that someone might pay for it. The messaging for your launch, the features you’ve chosen to focus on, and the audience you’re going after will be complete guesses, and then broadcast to the entire world.
The opposite problem can happen too – you can launch too late! There was a lot of money raised from 2019-2021, and many startups (perhaps yours, dear reader) found themselves with 3,4,5, or even more years of runway. With so much time to tinker — a tinkering that was sometimes completely detached from conversations with real or potential customers — some startups waited and waited to launch until the product was perfect…but by then, someone else had beaten them to the punch.
So whether it’s going to be too early or too late, not worrying about timing is a great way to unsuccessfully launch your developer tool.
(3) Don’t worry about storytelling
The third – and perhaps most important – step to not launching your developer tool is to ignore storytelling. Don’t worry about what problem you’re solving for your customer and why they care about it, just talk about whatever streaming format you’re replacing and how building it on top of cloud storage allows you to avoid interzone bandwidth costs as long as you’re willing to compromise on latency.
You’ve been months and months deep in building your product, and are probably anchored on whatever feature you’ve built most recently. All of your first hires, and your cofounders, are probably software engineers doing the exact same. So it’s very, very hard to pull yourself out of that mindset and ask yourself the big questions that your eventual buyers will be thinking about. It’s even harder to combine your problem space, your audience, and your product into a compelling story (like this one) that would get even the uneducated reader excited.
Luckily, you don’t need to do these things if you want your launch to go badly!
(4) Focus all of your time and effort on launch day
A great way to not launch your developer tool is to put all of your eggs into one launch day basket. The (sad) reality is that the internet (and the world) is a very random place, and what the colloquial distribution gods decide goes viral on a given day can be, well, up to a bit of whimsy. You can do everything right, write a killer blog post, create a splendid website, get some roaring demo apps ready, and make your documentation spiffy as a whistle…and then get no traffic.
This is why founders who make the most of launches tend to reframe their launch as less of a one-time, critical, life-changing event, and more of something akin to…the first day of the rest of your company’s life. Putting together a post-launch plan of what content you’ll be creating, what events you’re going to run, partnerships you’re pursuing, feature launches you’ll blast, all to continue the momentum of your launch…I would avoid these things if you want to launch your developer tool poorly.
(5) Organize a HackerNews voting ring
Don’t want to launch your developer tool? You should consider organizing a HackerNews voting ring and asking your coworkers and friends to upvote your post. Voting rings are explicitly against the HackerNews guidelines and are the #1 reason that something gets taken off the front page. They also don’t really seem to work. In other words, they’re a great way to tank your chances of getting to the front page! Closed source product launches almost never make it anyway.
This is actually a good opportunity to proffer another great tip for how to not launch your developer tool: don’t bother to understand the channels you’re going after! Instead of researching where developers (or even better, your specific target audience) find content and learn about new tools, and the rules, both written and unwritten, about how those platforms work, you should just post your content wherever, and wait to see what happens. Producing content and then thinking about distribution is a surefire way to make sure it goes nowhere.
Twitter (X) is a great example. Casual onlookers will observe that tweets from B2B corporate accounts almost never get any play in their feed (outside of ads, of course). And equally rare is an account with no following and no previous tweets having a launch tweet go viral. So if you want a bad launch, you should definitely avoid investing in these platforms, posting a diversity of content, and building an audience over time.
(6) Spend tons of time trying to get upvotes on ProductHunt
The most tactical, and final, piece of advice I can give founders who don’t want a solid launch for their developer tool is to focus on ProductHunt. ProductHunt is an amazing place to spend tons of time getting your family and friends and coworkers to upvote your product, only to eventually realize that commercial developers do not visit that site or buy products they found on it. If vapid, symbolic accolades like “#1 Product of the Day” are more important to you than acquiring actual customers, I cannot recommend this site enough!
Lest readers think, “oh Justin, I’m not that naive, I’m spending my time on more adult things like getting PR!” I’m going to have to stop you right there. In most cases, when it comes to developers, PR and press is just ProductHunt for adults. Developers do not read PR Newswire, nor do they learn about new tools through embargoed exclusives. It’s probably worth spending a little time on pitching TechCrunch, but even that doesn’t work for everyone. So I can strongly recommend a primary focus on PR – especially hiring a traditional PR firm – if you want to unsuccessfully launch your developer tool!
“Follow these rules you'll have mad bread to break up”
– Christopher George Latore Wallace (The Notorious B.I.G.)