This article is somewhat blogospam.<p>But it does raise a point that I wanted to mention. In many cases (and Windsoc is such a case) when you are trying to sell to developers, your competition isn't the developer's wish to "do it myself". Your actual competition is the plethora of open source tools that already do the thing that you're trying to sell.<p>Software development has changed, and those vendors trying to build a business selling libraries and toolkits are going to find it difficult to stay relevant.<p>Protip: If a search on <a href="http://ruby-toolbox.com/" rel="nofollow">http://ruby-toolbox.com/</a> turns up half a dozen gems that do the same thing that you're trying to sell, well, you're doing it wrong.
I like Yosef K's six criteria for deciding whether to adopt an external dependency: <a href="http://www.yosefk.com/blog/redundancy-vs-dependencies-which-is-worse.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.yosefk.com/blog/redundancy-vs-dependencies-which-...</a><p>It's not <i>only</i> that developers are always confident they can do things themselves (though that's common), but that me using your thing actively introduces a dependency for me. If that saves me a huge amount of work and your dependency doesn't seem too scary, that's still a win. But dependencies have a whole host of issues of their own: is this thing unwieldy, do I actually understand what it does, is it well documented, is it going to be around and maintained, if it's for-pay is that pricing going to stay stable, is the API going to be stable? Etc.
Selling to developers strikes me as mostly a bad idea. If you deal with non-technical people, being able to code up a solution to their problems, to save them pain and time, may seem like 'magic', and they'll love you for it, if you do things right.
This kind of comes out in this post, but the way I always look at the "I'll do it myself" argument is in terms of time. If you have a product that people known is easy to use (more on that in a second), you just say, look a license costs $100/yr or you could do this yourself and spend 10+ hours working through all the issues I've already solved. So if your time is worth $10/hr, go for it, otherwise I'm saving you a lot of your valuable time.<p>The only wrinkle to this is that you have convince people that your product actually does make their life easier/save them time. If they think they'll end up spending a lot of time understanding how to use it and integrating it, that's when people say, not worth it. For instance, you could be selling an awesome jQuery table plugin, but if it doesn't support some feature I need (say, a find as you type search box), I'm probably not going to use it because the time to build that feature onto your plugin might be longer than building my own.
I have the same exact issue here:<p><a href="http://www.devside.net/server/webdeveloper" rel="nofollow">http://www.devside.net/server/webdeveloper</a><p>How to convince the developer that the solution provided is ahead of what he/she can just put together...<p>It really is, but conveying that is difficult.<p>I imagine the questions are "Why would I buy what I can get for free?" and "I can probably do better myself?"<p>Both of the questions are false (other solutions are free only if your time is worthless + the solution is a product of 7+ years of improvements/iterations) but try to tell that to someone (who right at that moment thinks they know better).<p>Perhaps I should look into other market segments.
It sounds like your best market to pitch to would be startups. And if that's the case, it's a tough sell since they're usually very financially conservative, and they want things that will directly lead them to profit. Simple to use APIs is nice, but I don't know if it's a must-have for startup developers. Most of them want to quickly ship something to market.<p>If you're targeting the enterprise, keep in mind that developers who code for big companies aren't the ones making the buying decisions. If it's not free or open source, most will not have the initiative to pitch to upper management (they just want to get the least done in the least amt of time so they can go home to their families, and watch TV)