Consumer products have had growth hackers for many years optimizing every part of the onboarding funnel. Dev tools should do the same. Getting started shouldn't be an afterthought after you built the product. Getting started is the product!
And I mean this to the point where I think it's worth restructuring your entire product to enable fast onboarding. Get rid of mandatory config. Make it absurdly easy to set up API tokens. Remove all the friction. Make it possible for users to use your product on their laptop in a couple of minutes, tops.
Recent articles
- Highlights from my appearance on the Data Renegades podcast with CL Kao and Dori Wilson - 26th November 2025
- Claude Opus 4.5, and why evaluating new LLMs is increasingly difficult - 24th November 2025
- sqlite-utils 4.0a1 has several (minor) backwards incompatible changes - 24th November 2025