Built for Devs - See how developers really experience your product

Built for Devs is the result of productizing a service that drove the greatest results I've ever seen in my career.

I brought real developers in to screen record themselves naturally trying a client's dev tool—no scripts, no hand-holding. Just honest, unfiltered first experiences. Those recordings shaped findings reports that told founders exactly what was broken and what to fix. Red flags for what needed to be addressed first. Quick wins for low-effort opportunities. The full story of how developers experienced every stage of the product.

The results were unlike anything else I'd produced.

One client fixed a handful of friction points and hit Product Hunt #1 product of the day and week. Another completely pivoted their market using insights from 10 developer segments. The recordings alone kept roadmaps full for months.

The service was such a success that it became a platform—and then some.

Dev tool founders now get continuous journey tracking so they always know where developers slow down and disappear. Real developer evaluations matched to their exact ICP—screen recorded, unscripted, and incredibly revealing. And an AI engine that analyzes every data point including video, drafts findings reports richer than anything I could produce by hand, and recommends exactly what to fix.

Not a one-time audit. A living system that gets smarter over time. The more data it collects, the more precise the recommendations get. Founders stop guessing. They know exactly what's broken and exactly what to do about it.

Built for Devs is developer adoption intelligence for dev tools. It shows founders exactly where developers drop off, why they leave, and what to fix—continuously.

If you're a developer reading this—those screen recordings don't record themselves. Built for Devs pays developers to try dev tools. No meetings, no scripts, no hand-holding. Just your honest first experience with a product.

HOW IT WORKS
Built for Devs leverages a tracking script that captures the users entire journey—from first visit through interaction—tracking pageviews, clicks, form submissions, time spent, errors, rage clicks, and scroll behavior to measure the dev tools TTV (time to value). It uses that data to provide a fully-detailed developer journey with your touch points mapped to the right stage. It leverages everything that it learns to constantly provide recommendations for improvement.

When developers use the dev tools during an evaluation, the system processes three layers of data: a full transcript of what they say, video analysis revealing where they struggle or get confused, and interaction data captured by the tracking script that records navigation, clicks, and time spent. AI synthesizes these three layers into a findings report, identifying patterns in how developers approach problems and where their product could improve the experience.

Congrats on the launch! 🎉 The insight about user interviews being unreliable is spot on — people describe a smoothed-out version of what actually happened, not the real confusion. Screen recordings of unscripted first experiences are a completely different signal. About to launch OceanMind, an AI-powered breathwork iOS app, and the onboarding drop-off problem is exactly what keeps me up at night. Curious whether the platform works for mobile app onboarding too, or is it primarily focused on web-based dev tools and SDKs? The ICP-matched developer evaluation piece is the part I find most compelling — getting real first impressions from people who match your actual user before you’ve burned your launch day on guesswork.

I love the data-driven approach. Feedback to the team becomes easier to quantify and break down into work that shows actual results. Super helpful.

Congrats on the launch, looks helpful!

"you've watched the dashboards, developers still drop off, now you'll know why" is the most honest positioning in developer UX research I've seen - congrats on building this. would love to know if benchmarking against other dev tools is on the roadmap, that context would make prioritization so much easier.

this is briliant, but did not expect anything less

The gap between “it works on my machine” and actually giving devs a nice first-time experience is always the hardest to fix. This honestly feels like a cheat code to spot those small friction points that normal analytics just miss 😄

Great launch, team!!!

Go Tessa!

Looks great Tessa! Congrats on the launch 🚀

So excited to see this out there!