Building a developer social network with Steve Krouse from Val Town

Aug 29, 2023

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Steve Krouse is the founder of Val.town - a social website where you can write and run code.

Introduction to Val.Town's vision 0:00
- How long it took Github to make money on Steve
- Val Town is a social website where you can write and run javascript or typescript, run the code on servers, and see the results.
Knocking down friction points 2:12
- Val Town is making it so that programmers can create cool stuff without having to go through the pain of sending an email.
- Zapier for developers is another kind of tagline that has been seen other people that you've interviewed on this podcast.
Categorising use cases on the website. 4:45
- Val Town recently made a list of favourite use cases and categorised them on the website. The challenge is explaining to people what it is and what it can be used for.
- What can be made with Val.town section
How to get people to make cool things with your tool 15:51
- People hear about Val Town because other people are using it. The more people sign up, the more people are signing up for it.
- Val Town has a smaller number of people who are excited about it and use it a lot, but it's not a mythical product market fit.
- Every Thursday, the team is not allowed to work on the product. They all have to try and make Vals to go viral, which is a really fun creative day.
- The last one that went viral was hacker news follow, which was branded as an installable script.
How do you think about notifications? 24:30
- Val Town is perfect for programmatic customization of notification emails, so that installing those into your account will be part of the tutorial.
- Val is passionate about education, and it feels like that's a big challenge because there's lots of new stuff with val.
- Medium-term ambition, build a learn to code interactive course on top of Val Town. Long term ambition is to have hundreds or thousands of Learn to Code courses on Val Town, embedded in the product.
Future of coding meetups. 29:36
- An interview with Brian Dougie, early at Github, and how he helped with bootcamps and how to run code with Netlify.
- Future of coding meetup in london.
- Managing a community is a funny thing. The people who start and manage communities are often weird people.
Date Me Docs 35:33
- Some people are looking for a unique snowflake, while others are sensitive and don't want attention on their date me docs.
- The future of dating is a great exercise to go through to get clear in words about who you are and what you're looking for.

Links:
- Val Town - https://www.val.town/
- Steve's Twitter - https://twitter.com/stevekrouse