José Valim, creator of Elixir and founder of Dashbit, shares how he built one of the most loved programming languages by following curiosity over market trends.
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
Evil Martians is the go-to agency for early-stage developer tools startups: https://evilmartians.com/devtools
Links:
- Elixir: https://elixir-lang.org/
- Tidewave: https://tidewave.ai/
- Livebook: https://livebook.dev/
- José Valim on X: https://x.com/josevalim
- Evil Martians on X: https://x.com/evilmartians
- Victoria Melnikova on X: https://x.com/vmelnikova_en
