DevTools Brew #3: Learnings from Gitlab's $500M ARR, DevEx Principles, Sentry CTO Interview...
Welcome to all the new members who joined us this week!
My name is Morgan Perry, co-founder of Qovery, and this is DevTools Brew newsletter, a weekly roundup of the latest trends and insights in the infrastructure and devtools industry.
To receive it in your inbox each week, subscribe here!
Welcome to the DevTools Brew #3!
In this edition, we will explore:
💸 The Latest Funding Rounds in the Devtools & Infrastructure industry
📈 Learnings from Gitlab's $500,000,000 ARR milestone
💻 DevEx Principles
🧵 Open-source Alternatives to Popular SaaS
⭐ Star History Weekly Pick
🎤 A Podcast interview with David Cramer, Cofounder & CTO of the Open source Unicorn Sentry
⚡ Quick Link
I hope you enjoy this sneak peek, and look forward to sharing more insights with you soon.
Let's dive in!
💸 Latest Funding Rounds
This week's devtools startups fundraising has been off the charts, with more funding rounds closed compared to the last weeks.
Dylibso, a startup that helps developers take WebAssembly to production announced a $6.6M Seed funding round.
Daily.dev is like Reddit meets Stack Overflow. The company just raised $11M in Seed funding.
Britive, which helps secure public clouds, raised $20.5M in a Series B funding round.
Vue Storefront, a platform that is building “frontend-as-a-service”, has closed $20M in a Serie A+ round.
Clerk, a startup building a simplified identity tool purpose-built for React applications, announced a $15M Series A led by Madrona.
Dragonfly, a startup developing a ‘drop-in’ replacement for Redis, raised $21M.
Dope Security, a cybersecurity company that provides endpoint-based web and cloud security, nabs a $16M Series A round led by GV.
Sifflet, a data observability platform aimed at helping businesses build trust in their data, closed $12.7M in a Series A funding round led by EQT Ventures.
Aembit, a security startup focusing on helping DevOps and security teams manage how federated workloads talk to each other, announced a $16.6M Seed funding round
emma, an enterprise multi-cloud management application, raised a $2.3M Seed round.
📈 Learnings from GitLab at $500,000,000 in ARR
GitLab is one of the top "hero companies" in the tech industry. They recently crossed a massive milestone of $500,000,000 in ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue), with a jaw-dropping 58% growth rate. But surprisingly, despite their impressive results, they're worried about revenue for the next 12 months, which could be a sign for everyone to be more conservative.
Here are the top 5 keytakeways from Gitlab's $500,000,000 ARR milestone:
Almost 700 of GitLab's 7,000 customers pay $100k or more: GitLab has remained committed to its free tier and smaller customers, but its $100k+ deals have fueled its massive growth.
GitLab has a less than six-month customer payback period with a claimed 427% ROI: In this age of increased budget scrutiny, it's interesting to see GitLab's upfront commitment to calling out its payback period and ROI.
GitLab has a 133% NRR (Net Revenue Retention), which is up from 130% at $400m ARR: This figure indicates that top-tier NRR can last beyond $500,000,000 in revenue, and even beyond.
GitLab is increasing its $19 per month per user Premium plan to $29 per month per user, or +50%: GitLab is the latest in a string of SaaS leaders to raise prices, from Slack to HubSpot to Zoom and more.
If growth does slow materially in the coming 12 months, it will be the first time ever: GitLab has grown at top-tier rates since its launch, and if growth slows down in the next 12 months, it will be the first real bump in growth.
All in all, GitLab's success story is an inspiring one, and it'll be interesting to see how they navigate the next 12 months. Whatever happens, we can expect to see continued strong growth for GitLab and more interesting developments in the tech industry.
Read the full story here, published on Saastr blog.
💻 DevEx Principles
Over the past 15 years shipping products for Heroku, GitHub, and Vercel, Kathy Korevec learned a lot about what developers need to succeed. In a mini-series of 5 articles, she documented the principles she use to build developer tools. For example, in part 1, Kathy highlights how crucial it is to reduce context switching since even interruptions from one's own tools can have a negative impact on productivity (emphazing that developers primarily use four interfaces, namely an IDE, a console, a DVCS, and documentation). Kathy also advises building products within these existing interfaces rather than creating a separate website, which can break the developer's flow. In parts 2 to 5, Kathy stresses the importance of automating tasks that can be automated, optimizing for time to code, being dependable, and not burying the lead.
Here are the key takeaways from Part 1:
Minimizing switching contexts is crucial to building excellent tools for developers. Developers interface with four main tools: an IDE, a console, a DVCS, and documentation. When they need to use tools, build systems, a library or framework, or external documentation outside these four primary interfaces, their flow can be easily broken. Therefore, the more powerful you can make existing tools, the more effective you'll make the developer.
Developers know their tools best and are likelier to stay in the flow when using them efficiently. Therefore, it's important to respect their time and not make them jump through hoops to use your product. Even minor context shifts are productivity poison. Interruptions matter even when it’s your tools that are doing it.
Automation is king. Any task that can be run in the background should be automated. This can free up developers' time and reduce the number of context switches they have to make.
Optimize for TTC (time to code). Developers need to see code running in order to test, get feedback, and ship. Just as artists need to see paint on canvas in order to keep creating, developers need to see code in action to keep developing.
Be dependable. Breaking changes can be disruptive, and people's services depend on your services. Therefore, it's important to be mindful of breaking changes and strive to maintain backward compatibility whenever possible. Don’t bury the lede, show me what is possible and why it matters. Don’t hide pricing, don’t use convoluted marketing language, and don’t hide the documentation.
The article goes into more detail about each of these principles. Still, the overarching theme is that building great developer tools requires an understanding of how developers work and what they need to succeed. Kathy also notes that the use of AI and automation is likely to become increasingly important in the future of software development and that it's an exciting time to build developer tools.
I recommend visiting Kathy PM newsletter by Kathy Korevec to read her key principles for Developer Experience.
🧵 Open-source Alternatives to Popular SaaS
As I was going through different Twitter discussions, I had fun putting together a handpicked collection of the top open-source alternatives to popular SaaS products:
Algolia ➝ Meilisearch
Retool ➝ Appsmith
Contentful ➝ Strapi
Auth0 ➝ SuperTokensio
Calendly ➝ Cal.com
Google Analytics ➝ Plausible
Segment ➝ JITSU
Rewardful ➝ Reflio
Bitly ➝ Dub.sh
Shopify ➝ Medusa
WorkOS ➝ BoxyHQ
Notion ➝ AppFlowy
Firebase ➝ Supabase
Airtable ➝ Nocodb
Postman ➝ Hoppscotch
LaunchDarkl ➝ Unleash
Courier/Onesignal ➝ Novu
Zendesk ➝ Chatwoot
Snowflake ➝ Hydra
Stripe ➝ Lago
Fivetran ➝ Airbyte
Amplitude ➝ Posthog
Typeform ➝ Typebot
Heroku ➝ Coolify
Here is an extensive list of 400+ open source alternatives to popular proprietary SaaS options
⭐ Star History Weekly Pick
The Star History Weekly Pick is:
Nango, “Get OAuth tokens for APIs - fast & secure.”
⭐️ 2.4K stars reached
Github: https://github.com/NangoHQ/nango
🎤 A Podcast interview with David Cramer, Cofounder & CTO of the Open source Unicorn Sentry
David Cramer is the Co-Founder & CTO of Sentry, the open-source error tracking and performance monitoring unicorn company used by over 3.5M developers and 85K organizations.
The company's most popular open-source project, also called sentry, has over 31K stars and lets users monitor and fix crashes in real time. The server is in Python, but it contains a full API for sending events from any language, in any app.
Sentry has raised $217M from investors including Accel, NEA, and Bond.
In this episode, we talk with David about starting Sentry before open-source business models were mainstream, how he's adapted as a leader holding the CEO and CTO seats at different points in time, and his candid advice to open-source founders (particularly first-time founders) starting out today.
🎙️Full episode here!
⚡ Quick Link
GitHub Copilot gets a new ChatGPT-like assistant to help developers write and fix code
GitHub has released an updated version of its AI-assisted coding system GitHub Copilot X. The new update includes OpenAI’s GPT-4 model and a comprehensive chat feature. The chatbot is designed to recognize and explain code, suggest modifications, and fix bugs. Copilot X can accept voice commands and answer questions from voice-based queries. It is currently only available on Microsoft's Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code apps, but GitHub plans to expand it to other IDEs in the future.
It’s already over! If you have any comments or feedback, Let’s talk about this together on LinkedIn or on Twitter.
Thanks for reading,
Morgan
Please share DevTools Brew with your friends, and subscribe