The prototype worked.
A close friend had built a cloud development environment called Raku. I thought the idea had legs.
The product made portable development environments using Docker containers. My rough description was a simpler but more advanced Heroku for development. It was not another generic cloud-hosting pitch. The interesting part was helping developers get a working environment without rebuilding everything on a laptop.
That problem was familiar.
At Shutterstock, I had spent years working on repeatable infrastructure and better local development. Engineers lost real time when everybody's setup was different. A product that made those environments portable could solve something teams already felt.
I started shopping the idea to people whose opinions I trusted.
My note to my friend was direct. I would help develop it, look at funding, and figure out my role if a few things went well. We could get creative about time if the opportunity was large enough.
First, we needed to size the market.
The technology could be clever and still fail if the audience was too small or the problem was not painful enough.
Who actually needed this? New developers? Students? Startup teams? Larger companies trying to standardize environments? “Developers” was not a market answer by itself.
This was the part of startup work I liked. Take a product that already does something. Explain it without hiding behind the technology. Find the group with a painful enough problem to care.
There was no company announcement and no promise that I was leaving Shutterstock. There was a working prototype, a close friend, and a problem I understood.
That was enough to keep going.