Anthropic partners with Colt Steele, LaunchDarkly breaks into CI, Vercel's experiment

"Devtools Weekly" by Hypeburner tracks the business of developer tools. I'm your editor, Hashim Warren.

This week I'm experimenting with a slightly different format. I will give you less news items, and more background and commentary.

Please hit "reply" and tell me if you like this approach for Hypeburner better.

Let's get into it...

Hot Product Launch

AI research company, Anthropic rolled out a new training course, taught by the most popular coding instructor in the world, Colt Steele.

According to Udemy, Steele has had over 1.7 million students, and his courses have been reviewed over 500k times. Steele's OpenAI API course has 20k students alone.

So it's smart for Anthropic's Developer Relations team to use not just a proven teacher, but someone who owns a relationship with a large audience of developers.

Six years ago, Firefox made a similar deal with coding teacher Wes Bos to help promote the browser's development features. Bos was commissioned to make a free course on CSS Grid, and during the course he exclusively used Firefox's devtools to inspect his CSS. At the time I remarked on how smart this promotion was.

More companies should imitate Anthropic and Firefox and use popular coding teachers to help get traction for their developer focused products.

Enterprise Watch 🏆

Every week I hunt for go-to-market actions that may win enterprise customers for a developer tool.

This week LaunchDarkly gets the 🏆 for the rollout of Release Guardian, "which enables teams to uncover and automatically remediate software performance problems before they become customer issues".

This new feature further expands LaunchDarkly from just "feature flag management" to becoming a suite that includes continuous integration.

That is a much smarter strategy than rolling out endless incremental improvements of the core feature set, and fighting for new customers. My guess is LaunchDarkly created Release Guardian to help them win a larger share of wallet within the enterprise orgs they already serve.

Product Launches

✨ Front-end platform, Netlify released private connectivity, which "helps to secure the connection between your private systems (databases, CMS, internal APIs) and Netlify’s build and functions environment."

This easily could be been awarded "Enterprise Watch" this week. Why? Private connections are a key need for security sensitive companies, and table stakes for large cloud services, like AWS, GCP, and Azure.

✨Another front-end platform, Vercel released bytecode caching in edge functions, which can "reduce startup latency for large applications, resulting in up to 27% faster cold starts".

Vercel warns that this is an experimental feature. I love the rapid innovation here, but I'm not a fan of public announcements of any feature that's not fully baked. Nextjs developers are already complaining about feature overwhelm, so it may have been wiser to release this experiment internally, to a cohort of current customers, until it's ready for GA.

If your company is looking to grow users and revenue using SEO, PPC, and content marketing, consider booking me for a free go-to-market consultation. Hit reply on this email, and let's talk. - Hashim Warren, Hypeburner.