What are you excited about building? List out the steps required to bring this to everyone in the world who needs it.
Existing developers are bloated, boring, and unorganized.
At DevKit, we are bundling and improving essential developer tools. These tools will allow individual developers to accomplish more and will empower engineering teams to the next level. Day-to-day activities like API testing, DB interactions, and wrangling operations will become a breeze.
Steps to accomplish this:
Development:
- Build simple utilities to help developers - Done
Product: https://getdevkit.com
Validated with Product Hunt launch, got ~100 upvotes and we were the 6th product of the day.
Metrics: 600 MAUs and 100 WAUs
Paid version launching by 31 March
Build a desktop app that bundles complex tools that full-stack engineers use besides their IDE
There will be 3 major tools:
a) API Client: Think Postman but simpler, with AI-powered features, larger and better public APIs collections, and pre-made production-ready APIs. We will soon be on track to reduce public APIs testing time by 90% and private APIs testing time by 70%.
b) DB Client: Think pgAdmin but for all major databases. Almost none of the existing GUI DB Clients are good. People resort to using one of the existing subpar tools or just the CLI.
c) Modern Terminal: Think fig.io but cheaper and well-integrated with other tools in our bundle. The terminal hasn’t gone under much innovation in the last 10 years. It is one of the most heavily used tools after IDEs. Hence, we want to transform its experience with autocomplete, AI-powered suggestions, and sophisticated tools like
API Client - v1 will be released by 31 March
DB Client - v1 will be released by 21 April
Modern Terminal - v1 will be released by 15 May
Build better dev tools chrome extensions and a suite of them. I believe the developer tools chrome extensions space is still at a nascent stage and ripe for disruption because the space has the least competition, innovation, and rapid iteration happening.
- JSON Viewer Chrome Extension - v1 will be released by 31 March
Marketing:
Nowadays, distribution is at least as important as the product. We are planning these steps to build distribution.
- Organize regular developer meetups (first in India and then worldwide) to build a strong developer community that can become our active testers, ambassadors, and our word-of-mouth marketing channel. We have organized two such events within my city Faridabad.
- 1st meetup had 5-6 attendees, the 2nd meetup had 25-30 attendees, and for the 3rd one, we are targeting 50 attendees. As of this moment, I am on a trip to 4 cities and will conduct mini-meetups for developers in each city. Next month, we are conducting two other meetups in two different cities.
- Invest time and resources in social media and content marketing. We produce our content but we also have partnered with multiple YT channels to get more content to grow faster.
Hiring:
- Great work can’t be done alone. Hence, we started building a team in mid-November 2022. Now, we have 10 interns on the team and an ex-Amazon Engineer as a full-time Software Engineer. We need to hire one or two more full-time teammates. Hiring a great person takes time and we need to continuously experiment with different sources like friends and friends of friends, AngelList, and LinkedIn.
- We need to shift to an in-person team ASAP. It’s much more fun and productive to work in person. Remote work is great but I think at least for an early-stage startup, every day is critical and hence having an in-person team can be beneficial.
Some of the steps are sequential. Some will happen parallelly. I love developers and developer tools. YC says that a startup is at least a 5-year commitment. I have been programming as a hobby and a profession for a total of about 8 years now. I can see myself spending another 30-40 years obsessively active in this space and spending the next 5-10 years building and growing DevKit is a piece of cake and just the idea of it gives me butterflies and goosebumps.
It’s such a privilege to get to work on this and I am trying to give back to the community as much as I can by doing things like sharing educational content, investing a lot of time in the growth of the interns in our team, organizing physical developer meetups, and mentoring students.
I believe with a developer-centric approach, obsession over DX, powering DevTools with AI, insane hard work, and smart work we will become a big player in the DevTools market in the next 5 years.
Share something that you find beautiful. Tell us why it is beautiful to you
Share links to content OR describe the thing you find beautiful.
The medium of video is something I find magical and beautiful. Especially in the form of movies and TV shows. A video can inspire action. A video can be life-changing. A video can inspire a revolution. A video can do a lot of wild things, could be a positive event or a negative one.
One of my friends who was an extreme introvert became a totally different person after watching the movie Into The Wild. He realized a lot of things and learned that he needed to live life differently. He is an extreme extrovert and inspires me.
I kinda binge-watched SuperPumped (the Uber documentary) this year and it was one of the sources that gave me motivation, courage, and energy to quit my cushy remote job and go full-time into my startup.
I personally believe that good media should be an essential part of every person’s life. Even watching most of the soap operas is a good thing to do because watching soap operas is a great way to learn about a new culture/sub-culture, know about the finer details, and have a lot of fun.
Any piece of entertainment can also become edutainment if you put in some effort to appreciate, breakdown, and reverse-engineer the aesthetics, dialogues, and presentation of the content. Every piece of media has something unique about it and can be a source of fun and learning.
I would recommend everyone to spend just a couple of hours each week consuming some long-form media that they find interesting. A couple of hours will be enough to get you a good experience and you will still have enough time to work on your side projects or startup :D
Look at the values on our website (livetheresidency.com) Which of these do you connect most with and why?
If you do not align strongly with any value, what's missing?
Foundational Needs First: Having suffered deadly diseases like tuberculosis twice and having been sick over and over and making family and friends worried, I realized the biggest two priorities in life should be family and health. Family loves you unconditionally and no matter how many times you screw up, they are the ones who bear all the cost of time and money to take care of you, nurture you, and love you. Family and good health are all you need in life, everything else is extra. Good health is the most underrated productivity hack, going sick just destroys momentum and makes you lose so much time that could have been better spent with family or working on a fun project.
Build with Friends: The strongest and most active teammates on my startup’s team have been my friends whom I onboarded. They push me, motivate me, and inspire me to do more every day. I am having the time of my life building DevKit with me. Even throughout school, I had a rival (Ridham Bhagat) with who I enjoyed competing and building projects together with.
Who would you be the most excited to find out was in your cohort? Very briefly, why?
If you know this person, please include their email address, or social profile links as appropriate.
I will be most excited to meet Ishaan from edden.ai in the cohort. He is an amazing founder and human being. Our bromance game is strong (I can share tons of screenshots for proof xD). He taught me a lot of growth hacks and explained all tricks and details about his previous startups and the current one. His entrepreneurial journey is astounding to me.
He has built and run multiple products in the past. His current startup is his probably the 3th or 4th one. He inspires me. He and his co-founder (Nihal) are great in sales. They can quickly build a product and can go crazy about doing sales calls.
I still have so much to learn from him. I haven’t met him IRL yet. If we both get selected, meeting for the first time in the States directly would be a pretty interesting moment.