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Okteto.com (YC W19) Founder Interview Highlights

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00:00 And then Ramiro, I am one of the founders of Octeto, the company, and also one of the maintainers of Octeto, the open source project.

00:07 It's a CLI tool that lets you launch your dev environment in Kubernetes and then gives you things like code synchronization, remote debugging.

00:17 It feels like your local machine.

00:18 You write some code and then you see the changes immediately.

00:24 then you see the changes immediately, but because they are applied to your dev environment in Kubernetes, you're not consuming local resources and things look a lot more like production.

00:30 From talking to Octeto customers and serving them so far, what would you say makes a great

00:35 developer experience and how does it relate to open source as well? Yeah.

00:38 When we started Octeto, like dev experience and onboarding wasn't really like a top of mind.

00:45 For us, we're very focused on like, hey, I want to write code.

00:48 And I want to have a fast, you know, inner loop.

00:51 Now my dev environment is codified on a file, which means that, and it's automated, which means that any developer can just run one command or with our commercial product, click a button in the UI.

01:03 And they're completely on board,

01:05 giving developers a great experience. It was no longer just solve a problem, it solved a problem

01:10 in a way that is easy to use, that is easy to understand. I mean, I think Docker was kind of

01:17 the first, in my opinion, one of the very first open source projects that really made this a core

01:23 part of their mission. And now it's super exciting to see all this great open source projects that really made this a core part of their mission. And now it's super exciting to see all this, all this great open source projects,

01:28 um, Supabase, PIG, one of the things I wish I could go back and do is like be

01:35 even more, build this for like even more specific audience, more specific you are

01:41 in what you're solving, especially when you're going commercial, the easier it is to find an audience to really understand what they need

01:49 and to make sure that you're serving them and you're prioritizing what matters for that specific

01:55 persona. The smaller you start, I think the easier it is to find those super fans at the

02:04 beginning. Because if you solve a problem well for like 20 people

02:06 and they're going to go and start your repo

02:09 and tell their friends and tweet about it

02:12 or write blog posts and tutorials about it,

02:14 that's how you build.

02:15 Like that's kind of when you see your adoption

02:17 and your popularity climb like crazy.

02:20 Really important.

02:21 So clarity on who you're building for

02:23 and who you're not building for

02:24 helps you find your audience faster,

02:28 helps you prioritize.

02:29 I should add,

02:30 you probably introduced a tighter loop

02:31 in terms of monetization,

02:33 how you can go about generating revenue

02:34 out of your solution.

02:36 Make sure this is a problem

02:37 that's big enough for people

02:39 to pay money to solve.

02:41 Because a lot of problems are important,

02:44 but people are not willing to pay money to solve it.

02:46 And that to me is one of those,

02:48 once you unlock that,

02:49 it's like,

02:50 and sometimes it's a matter of like,

02:52 how you phrase it,

02:53 how you position the problem,

02:55 how do you explain it to different people?

02:58 That to me is very important.

03:00 And number three,

03:01 which was the hardest lesson for me to learn,

03:03 especially if you're going to like commercial software, is the person who uses your software is most likely not the person who's going to buy it.

03:13 And understanding that difference changes everything because then you understand the buyer and the user.

03:21 What do each of them care about?

03:23 The sooner you can kind of figure this out,

03:25 the more likely that you're going to be successful.

03:27 I think it's a great time to start a commercial open source company.

03:31 And for those who have open source projects,

03:34 to think about ways that you can quit your job

03:38 and find a way that you can work full time

03:41 on that problem space that your open source project solves.

03:46 That to me is like, it's a huge privilege and it's a lot of fun.

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