Hello World
I’m really excited to share that Amit Jotwani and I are starting a new venture to help companies grow by offering tools and services that enhance DX. In this venture, known as HelloDX, our North Star is to reduce the friction that developers face with their tooling, allowing them to focus on tackling the challenges at hand. Before diving into how we will accomplish this vision, I want to quickly introduce who we are.
The Team behind HelloDX
A much younger Amit and Kunal.
Myself on the left and Amit Jotwani on the right
Amit and I have known each other for over a decade, working together at both small and large SaaS companies that serve developers and address their challenges. We’ve supported developers across different verticals at companies like SendGrid, Mashery, Intel, Clarifai, Retool, Auth0 & more. Most recently, we both worked at Amazon focusing on reducing friction for developers using our products. Amit concentrated on enhancing developer tooling and experience for the Alexa Voice product, while I worked at Amazon Web Services (AWS), improving developer experience across our portfolio of modern application services.
Throughout the last 10+ years that we’ve worked together, we’ve had many discussions on developer experience and its importance as a lever for growth. We’ve honed best practices from seeing what works and what doesn’t, from working at small SaaS companies through their IPOs to being part of one of the largest developer-focused companies in the world.
Fun fact: In 2016, I randomly moved into the apartment right across from Amit and his wife in the same building, without any idea that they lived there. It's truly a small world.
Why Now
One of the things Amit and I realized around the time we both left Amazon was that the developer landscape was changing in unprecedented ways. Generative AI was, and still is, having a profound effect on many industries, but developers in particular, are gaining significant leverage over other knowledge workers. We noticed a pattern emerging where developers were becoming more efficient, and the software development life cycle was becoming more streamlined, significantly reducing the time spent on writing and debugging code. Additionally, code quality improved—not because developers blindly followed the output of these LLMs, but because these tools helped them write cleaner code and turned coding into a more educational experience. Interestingly, these LLMs also assist with creative problem-solving by suggesting multiple approaches to a problem.
With all of these additional capabilities being introduced we’ve also seen new pain points emerge as well.
“Sub-optimal experiences where developers get outdated/hallucinated code or instances where LLMs have no awareness of services that might assist a developer to tackle the challenges they are facing to name a few.”
“Developer tooling organizations want to better position themselves on these LLMs to optimize how they are mentioned and utilized.”
There is a lot of work to be done, but we strongly believe that improving the developer experience and showcasing how your tool best solves a challenge are at the core of this effort. In the future, we will continue to create more products and services to help with better placement and utilization of LLMs to improve DX.
First Product
Our first product is a comprehensive friction report known as DebugDX. We will evaluate your services and tools across multiple developer experience dimensions based on your product’s use cases and provide actionable feedback on areas for improvement to help retain and grow your user base. Most companies overlook that retention is a key pillar of product-led growth (PLG). In this report, we’ll also suggest creative experiments for increasing developer acquisition and give guidance throughout.
We’re breaking this down into two packages to make pricing transparent and simple. Amit’s post goes more into detail on this so please check that out. But overall you can see some of the different dimensions that we cover in the bullet points below.
- Usability and Integration
- Ease of Use: Learning curve, setup, and configuration
- LLM Friendliness: SEO optimization for language models
- Integrations and Extensibility: Compatibility with other tools, languages, and frameworks
- Integration Tools: Tools like IDE plugins, browser extensions, CI/CD integrations, etc.
- SDKs and Libraries: Availability and quality of software development kits and libraries
- Documentation and Technical Content: Quality and comprehensiveness of documentation and tutorials
- Performance and Reliability
- Speed, efficiency, scalability, stability, uptime, etc.
- Developer Support and Innovation
- Support and Community: Quality of customer support and community engagement
- Product Insights: Feature suggestions and prioritizations
- Developer Marketing Experiments: Innovative strategies to attract and retain developers
This list is not exhaustive but gives an example of the lens we will use to examine your product. Our feedback will be based on our extensive experience in identifying what works and what doesn’t.
Get Started
If this resonates with you and you want to take advantage of the experience Amit and I have built up, reach out to us with the challenges you’re facing. We want to build a relationship with you and help. The process starts with a quick introductory call with Amit and myself to assess your needs. We will then create a customized action plan with impactful steps for growth. Finally, we’ll schedule a kickoff call to walk through the process with your entire team. We look forward to working with you!