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Erik Sundberg

Developer Tools at Signal · Stockholm, Sweden

I was the first engineer at a developer tools startup in Stockholm that got acquired by a company you've heard of in 2023. I won't say which one because the acquisition agreement has a clause about public commentary, and I'd rather keep writing than hire a lawyer.

What I can say: we built a CI/CD product that went from zero to $6M ARR in three years. I wrote most of the initial codebase, then hired the team that replaced me, then moved into a hybrid eng/product role where I spent half my time talking to users and half my time arguing about pricing with our CEO. The pricing arguments were more important than any code I wrote. We changed our pricing model three times. Each change was more impactful than any feature launch.

That experience made me obsessed with the business side of developer tools. There's a fascinating tension in the space: developers hate being sold to, they're skeptical of marketing, and they have strong opinions about pricing. But they also adopt tools faster than any other buyer persona and they evangelize the things they love. Building a business on top of that psychology is one of the hardest and most interesting problems in SaaS.

After the acquisition, I took a year off. I traveled. I read a lot of S-1 filings. I wrote a series of deep dives into developer tool pricing models: how Vercel, Supabase, PlanetScale, and others structure their plans, where the margin is, and where the churn hides. Those pieces got passed around in enough Slack channels that Signal asked me to write for them.

I now split my time between writing and angel investing in early-stage dev tools companies. I'm based in Stockholm but spend a lot of time in London and San Francisco.

I ski, I cook, and I have a possibly irrational conviction that usage-based pricing will eat the world.

Articles by Erik Sundberg (32)