Key insights for devtool founders:
- Build for yourself first - José’s “selfish” approach of creating tools he actually wants to use led to authentic adoption and marketing. When you can explain genuine technical trade-offs instead of chasing trends, developers listen.
- Decentralize early - Without Google/Apple-level resources, Elixir succeeded by empowering the community to own different domains (web, ML, embedded) rather than centralizing control.
- Make pivotal technical bets - Targeting the battle-tested Erlang VM and enabling the Phoenix framework were key architectural decisions that paid off long-term.
- Marketing = explaining trade-offs - Skip the sales pitch. Show developers exactly what they get and what they give up. José’s rule: “If all we have is opinions, I prefer mine.”
- Enable ecosystem growth - Dashbit’s consulting reveals adoption friction points, which feed back into language improvements and new open-source projects.
Current focus: José is building Tidewave, exploring higher-level AI development tools that understand web frameworks, not just code.
Companies using Elixir: Discord, Remote, Supabase, Fly.io, Apple, Toyota, BBC, PepsiCo, Mozilla
