Adam Frankl on why 2025 is the best year ever to build a developer tool startup

Dev Propulsion Labs

Join us for an incredible conversation with Adam Frankl - author, advisor, investor, and the final boss of development marketing. In this episode, we dive deep into the biggest challenges facing developer tool startups in 2025 and how to overcome them.

On the AI boom opportunity:

2025 has gotta be the best year ever for starting a developer tool startup because there is so much chaos, and that's what makes this exciting.

The #1 mistake founders make:

Problem not product. Become an expert on the problem. Talk about the problem. Write about the problem... Too many founders they wanna talk about the product. They want to demo the product... And quite frankly, no one is interested.

Why you need to be obsessed:

You have to pick a problem that the problem also picks you. It's the type of problem that you just can't sleep at night because you're thinking about it... You know when the problem is the right problem because it seizes a hold of your brain.

The social media strategy that works:

Your mechanistic goal is you wanna be posting about this problem every day. Because you want to be the authority on this problem. Authority author, it's the same root. To be an authority, you have to write.

On enterprise sales in 2025:

Budgets are being cleared for AI investments, and this is astonishing... top executives are basically clearing budget line items say we're gonna invest in AI.

Why San Francisco matters:

The reason you come to Silicon Valley is the best customers are here. And you're not gonna be closing these tech 100 companies if you are in Tokyo or Lisbon.

The game-changing AI workflow:

Make a recording. Make a transcript... And then use an LLM to anonymize but consolidate transcripts. And that can be extraordinarily powerful.

Links:

- Adam's book: "Developer Facing Startup" (Amazon #1 bestseller): https://www.amazon.com/Developer-Facing-Startup-market-developer-facing/dp/B0D4KGHQML

- Alchemist Accelerator: https://www.alchemistaccelerator.com/

- Evil Martians on X: https://x.com/evilmartians

- Victoria Melnikova on X: https://x.com/vmelnikova_en

Evil Martians is the go-to agency for early-stage developer tools startups: https://evilmartians.com/devtools

#DeveloperTools #StartupMarketing #AI #Enterprise #SanFrancisco #DevTools