I’ve been looking at a number of devtools and AI tools launched over the last 12–18 months, and a pattern keeps repeating: - Strong product, clear technical value - Early users from friends / Twitter / communities - Then things stall when it comes to converting paying users

Things that seem less effective than expected: - Content that ranks but doesn’t convert - Community posting that generates discussion but no revenue - “Build in public” without a clear path to payment

Things that might be working, but inconsistently: - Integrations / ecosystems - Very narrow ICP + outbound - Founder-led sales lasting far longer than planned

For founders actively shipping devtools today: - What’s actually getting you your first 10–50 paying users? - What looked promising but turned out to be a dead end? - If you were starting again in 2026, where would you focus first?

Curious what’s working now, not what sounds good in theory.

The stall you're describing is the difference between users who think your tool is clever and users who have a problem painful enough to pay for solving it.

The most consistent pattern I've seen work: solve a problem developers already know they have, in a workflow they already use daily. Not "you should care about X" but "you already care about X and it's annoying - here's a faster way."

The dead ends are usually targeting problems developers don't feel yet. You can have a technically superior testing framework, but if the team's current setup "works fine" (even if it's objectively worse), there's no urgency to switch.

The narrow ICP approach works when it's narrow enough that you can actually list the companies. Not "Series A SaaS companies" but "these specific 30 companies using this exact tech stack with this known pain point." At that scale you can do real research on each one and outbound becomes viable.

The integrations play is interesting - it works when you're solving a gap in an ecosystem people are already bought into. Building a better Slack bot is hard. Building a tool that makes Datadog + PagerDuty work better together has a clearer value prop to people already paying for both.

One thing that seems underrated: finding where your ICP already hangs out and being genuinely helpful there without selling anything. Not "build in public" as content strategy, but actually solving problems in public. The conversion comes from "oh, the person who helped me with that gnarly bug has a product" not from announcement posts.