Paul Bakaus

tl;dr: Devs notice every detail. Take your cues from Stripe and GitHub, and keep your design clean and functional to drive adoption that sticks. Design ALWAYS matters. But it matters even more when you’re building a product for devs (speaking from experience here). Whether you’re a developer yourself or just dev-adjacent, you know that nothing gets past these folks. In their eyes, the devil’s in the details, and they’re constantly on the lookout for even the slightest sign to validate their inherent skepticism. Animations, subtle fade-ins and fade-outs, iconography, typography — you name it. These aren't just aesthetics; they're the unspoken language of a tool’s usability. In that way, design is the ultimate double-edged sword. Done right, these kinds of features have the power to oh-so-subtly tell the developer, “Look at how seamless I am to use.” Done wrong, they can create a frustration so powerful it leaves them running for the hills. So, how do you get it right? What I’ve learned from building both ScraperAPI and TLDR is that the easiest way to nail your design strategy is to follow the lead of the best examples. My two personal favorites? Stripe and​​ Github. When they hit the market over a decade ago, they set a new standard for the type of design developers have come to expect. For Stripe, the real showstopper wasn’t just the clean and intuitive dashboard we all know and love. It was things like clear, readable docs and all the little micro-interactions (think button and form field hover effects) that made the interface feel responsive and interactive. For Github, it was also a series of subtle features that made the developer experience smoother — like color-coded syntax highlighting or how merging a pull request would trigger a satisfying (yet not distracting) animation to emphasize the action. And while those are still the gold standard, there’s a whole new generation of companies on the cutting edge of dev design: - Resend - Vercel - Linear - Replicate - render.com So if you’re still in the early stages (or in a re-design phase), don’t be afraid to poke around the market to see which kinds of features are sticking and which aren’t. While us devs are particular, we’re also quite predictable in terms of what we do and don’t like (Hint: save your GIFs and confetti animations for another audience 😉).

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Yesterday, my team at Vareto announced the first-ever multiplayer modeling platform for Finance. 😍 Now that I can finally speak publicly about what we've been working on, the first thing I want to share is a screenshot from a live multiplayer session we did internally at the company. One of the interesting things about building enterprise software as a startup is that we're still too small to *need* our own product. So instead of doing what our customers do--expense budgeting, headcount planning, etc.--we use Vareto's multiplayer modeling to forecast fun things like total pet spend. Yep, that's right. We had 40 people go into a Vareto model and enter in bottom-up inputs for how much they expect to spend on their cats and dogs this year. 😂 While this isn't very useful--especially since many people entered in clearly exaggerated numbers--sessions like this helped prove that our new 2.0 platform can handle even "extreme" usage situations. (In reality, even if some enterprise customers have thousands of users in Vareto, only a handful are ever likely to be in the same model page at the same exact time given granular data permissions.) You can see more useful, realistic ways that finance and business teams can use Vareto multiplayer here: https://lnkd.in/gV9gqKwz

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Hey everybody, I just wanted to check in to let you know that now is not the time to check out for the summer. I'm starting a new YouTube series on Impact Sprints. Impact Sprints are relatively simple AI Automations that full-time and fractional executives can use to make an immediate impact. It's hard to plan for the future when you don't know what's currently available. Impact Sprints represent just a starting point that you can use to get your feet wet. As with any new process or procedure there's always room for optimizations. Be sure to let me know what you think when the first episode arrives later this week. #ai #aicontent #aiautomation #youtube #impactsprints

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I've returned to writing and sharing my insights, now on Substack! 📚✨ If you're interested in product development and compelling startup stories, be sure to check out my new Substack. The upside? It's going to be very opinionated and inspiring. The downside? It might push your thinking. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/dZnUgJj5 Stay tuned and feel free to subscribe. #Tech #ProductDevelopment #TechTrends #StartupStories #Substack

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To celebrate Cal.com, Inc.'s newest launch on @ProductHunt today, I sat with Peer Richelsen to discuss how building Platform and Atoms is a full-circle moment + more 🚀 In this ep, we covered:  ✊🏻 Open vs. Closed and why OSS will win 💡 The importance of IP in a post-AI world 🔥 How premium products can be built using OSS 🤑 How to approach enterprise sales as a 1x founder 🙏🏼 The impact of Y Combinator on Peer as a founder PS: I'm a tiny investor in Cal.com and a big believer in Peer and the team! If you are into OSS, support the launch here: https://lnkd.in/e_CaE_KQ Links to the ep 👇🏼 🔗 Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/eBUv5E9q 🔗 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/epngcvFU ❤️ Sponsor Corner ❤️ Big shoutout to acquire.com for making this episode happen! Acquire is the best online marketplace (I can vouch for this) to buy/sell startups, and I know many founders who have sold their businesses there. If you're looking to wind down your business and cash in some of your founder chips, check them out - https://lnkd.in/gM5VZBFC Andrew Gazdecki and the team are always on the hunt to find ways to help more founders through Acquire 🫡 Lastly, if you are a listener and have been enjoying the episodes, please take a minute to drop your rating on the podcast: https://lnkd.in/eaaw-tJk I appreciate you for giving your attention and time 🙏🏼

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This is awesome Velt (YC W22). I love this. When we built our last SAAS product, we had a small feedback widget on the platform that was one of the most used features of the platform. Customers love to give you feedback and Velt (YC W22) is taking it to whole new level. Great product. Anybody who is building SAAS should consider embedding this in their platform to simplify customer feedback.

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🚀 August 2024 Emplifi Product Release: Expanding TikTok Ads Support, Enhanced Reviews Analysis, and More! 🚀 🗓️ Release Date: August 21, 2024 Hey everyone! I'm excited to share some impactful updates we've just rolled out at Emplifi to elevate your ad management, community insights, and more! 🎯 Dashboard, Content, Paid - TikTok Ads Support Expanded! We’ve expanded support for TikTok ads across the Dashboard, Content, and Paid Analytics modules. Now, you can easily monitor and analyze your TikTok ads (including Pangle and Global App Bundle) right within Emplifi. Whether it's filtering by ad type or campaign objective, you’ve got the tools to optimize your strategy. ⭐ Community & Care - Google Business Reviews: New Widgets and Filters! We’ve added a new Dashboard widget for Community and Care reporting—Average review rating. Plus, you can now filter and break down Google Business Reviews data by star rating for deeper insights. Manage and analyze your brand's reputation with greater precision! 🔍 Care - Filter Cases by Message Type! In Care, you can now filter cases by message type (comments, posts, DMs, mentions, etc.) directly from the case views. This makes it easier to manage and prioritize different types of customer interactions. ⚠️ IMPORTANT: Facebook Metric Deprecation in September 2024 Heads up! Several Facebook metrics will be deprecated on September 16, 2024. This will impact multiple areas of the Emplifi platform, so make sure to check out our guide on how to prepare and mitigate these changes. These updates are designed to help you stay ahead in managing ads, reviews, and customer interactions. Check out the full release notes here: https://lnkd.in/eYEg9_5r #SocialMedia #DigitalMarketing #CustomerExperience

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"Probably the worst decision that I made as CEO of Loudcloud was to take ona. 10-year lease with a $30M letter of credit. We leased the space right before the dot-com crash. Rents dropped 10-fold in Menlo Park... worse yet, due to the recession, we couldn't hire so the space we already had was sufficient and we never ended up moving into the new building. So I basically lost $30M for nothing." This is from Ben Horowitz's recent interview with Big Think. Even a quarter century ago the typical office lease construct is misaligned with how a company needs to operate. Our industry could get away with this when office spaces had a monopoly on how and where work got done, but those days are dead. As global markets are crashing, we'll be looking at another disruptive cycle for businesses which will create more cost cutting pressure and the first thing to go when they roll will be inflexible leases. CRE needs to develop new offerings and fast. https://lnkd.in/ePuZgzkU

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If anyone is in North County San Diego, on Thursday May 2nd, we will be hosting a tech entrepreneur and investor meet up at 5:30pm. We’ll have a couple speakers, one of which is a fin-tech start-up raising a round, followed up by a presentation on the state of the stock & crypto market. We host these events quarterly and usually get a lot of founders and investors to attend. If anyone is interested, please message me and I can send you the details. LaunchPad San Diego #startups #startupincubator #entrepreneur #investing #crypto #meetup

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🔮 What's the future of developer platforms? ☠ Or the death knell for open core companies? Get the answers (and more) from Ethan Kurzweil; longtime partner at Bessemer Venture Partners and soon-to-be founder of a new, early stage venture firm. In his time at Bessemer Ethan invested in Launchdarkly, Twilio, PagerDuty, Intercom, Twitch, SendGrid, HashiCorp and npm. He's seen it all, you won't want to miss his takes on what's next and what isn't going to work. I'm sharing our closing lightning round questions here, but the full interview (which is much juicer) can be found at calyx.substack.com. ⚡Lightning round questions!⚡ *What's the developer platform that you respect most?* 🔶 Zapier. It's the ultimate democratizer of development for 4,000 different esoteric use cases and some not so esoteric use cases. And they built it in a way to allow anyone to use it. *Who is a developer GTM leader you respect?* 👨 Adam FitzGerald at HashiCorp. Disclaimer - he’s a Bessemer operating advisor. He is the best thinker to help companies structure developer evangelism programs at scale. *Unpopular opinion re: dev tools?*  💼 That a lot of dev tools shouldn't be businesses. Many should be free or part of a larger developer platform offering. The difference between tool and platform can make a big difference as to whether you have a sustainable business. *How do you feel like you’re able to uniquely work with developer-first companies?* ⚾ I’ll keep it to one for the lightning round: I’ve gotten lots of experience with false signals. If you’re a founder working on a startup sometimes you’ll respond to a false signal and it’s hard to go back and unwind those choices—we have lots of experience with developer platforms and can help founders avoid those pitfalls. Disclaimer: Ethan would never use emojis like this. He actually...doesn't use emojis!? I've just added them in an attempt to improve readability on LinkedIn... enjoy!

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Congrats Irvin Zhan for getting the #1 spot on ProductHunt today with Subframe * The team has been working on subframe for ~2 years * Irvin was an engineering manager at Airkit.ai and has been an early employee at several startups * Subframe is pre-seed * Browse hundreds of beautiful, designer-approved templates to kickstart your designs * Refine your designs by drag-and-dropping in Subframe’s visual editor using real components, not mockups * Export your designs to high-quality React/Tailwind code by copy and pasting Subframe is unlike existing tools out there in that: * We help you build your actual product, not just marketing pages. You can create screens like dashboards, settings pages, chat bots, and more. * Our editor is easy and intuitive for non-designers. We are an alternative to Figma that gives you guardrails like choosing colors, which takes the guesswork of “making things look good”. * We work within your codebase. After you build something on Subframe, the UI code you copy/paste is all yours. You can hook it up to your custom business logic, without any lock-in. Hard work pays off! View it on producthunt: https://lnkd.in/dndJGaud

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Can someone show me a GL design that is better than this mockup? WIP of some stuff that's coming soon in Doss. Still need to put together the pivot table report builder, account/entry filtering + sorting. Major considerations: 1. Where do you put totals? Forcing them below every account seems heavy-handed and often overloads information. 2. How do you handle grouping and nesting of accounts and sub-accounts? 3. Thoughts on sub-ledgers? #erp #accounting #finance #fico #netsuite #doss #controller #ledger #quickbooks

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We're proposing a Community-Driven Idea Protection System: A public platform where creators log their innovative ideas with timestamps and development intentions. Each entry includes a brief description, planned milestones, and a 6-12 month timeline. Community members can follow projects, offer feedback, and verify progress. This creates a network of witnesses and supporters. If someone develops a logged idea without permission, the community can easily verify the original creator and timeline. This system relies on social accountability and transparency rather than legal mechanisms, making it lightweight and accessible. What do you think? How could we improve this to better serve creators while maintaining openness in innovation?

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It had been far too long since I last caught up with Andrew Lau, CEO & Co-Founder of Jellyfish, to get the latest on the company. We also discuss the results from their State of Engineering Management Report. In this video, we chat about: * Details about Jellyfish * Customer examples & use cases * Finding from their State of Engineering Management Report * The culture at Jellyfish * Why Jellyfish should be on your radar for your career

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Early stage fundraising is convincing enough people with credibly + resources to believe that you're onto something big. Remember it is a bi-directional discovery process. And more often than not, a lot of people with not enough credibility or not enough resources will give you their opinion. If everyone was a believer, you wouldn't have a shot at 100x-ing your company. It's a feature not a bug. Remember that. If you're not careful that can drain energy. Incredibly important trap to avoid.

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🌸 Exciting Spring 2024 Product Updates! 🌸 Super proud of our team for all of their incredible work! A few highlights! 📍 New communities in North Dakota & San Francisco ✨ Improved location-sharing & directions 🚩 Report conditions & hazards in-app 🎉 Personalized onboarding 📊 Easy access to challenge reports for staff Check out our blog for more details: Spring 2024 Product Updates. #OutdoorRecreation #ParkManagement #SpringUpdates #VisitorExperience #OuterSpatial

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Tumblr is launching its “Communities” feature in open beta, the Tumblr Labs division has announced. The feature offers a dedicated space for users to connect with others on different topics, outside of Tumblr’s main dashboard. The open beta comes six months after Communities launched in closed beta and represents a shift in focus for the social platform under its new parent company Automattic, the makers of WordPress, Tumblr’s Communities are “semi-private” spaces that have their own moderators, rules, and privacy settings. The feature is somewhat similar to subreddits on Reddit, Inc. and Communities on X (formerly) both of which are now training grounds for AI. Tumblr began testing Communities after it heard from users that they wanted better ways to connect with other people who share similar interests. With this new feature, users would no longer have to search to find blogs that focus on a given topic to find content they’re interested in, and could instead join a community. #tumblr #community #socialmedia #product #tech https://lnkd.in/gUGGNtDT

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