About
Not another blog about how startups should grow.
First Principles is a collection of practical lessons from companies that have actually built things. See what a company did. Understand why it worked. Learn how to do something similar.
Harness published a comparison with Jenkins because customers needed material to help make internal purchasing decisions. Here’s the article. Here’s the lesson. Here’s how to make one for your product.
Competitive content is an important pillar of modern B2B demand generation.
That distinction guides every page. Templates are free and ungated—this should feel like a useful publication, not a lead-generation funnel.
Who writes this
Himanshu Saxena
I write and talk about engineering leadership and AI adoption.
My background is in psychology, which turns out to be unusually useful for the part of technical leadership nobody trains you for: how people decide, how teams avoid the obvious conversation, and why the same incident keeps happening in a different costume.
Before this I spent almost a decade doing GTM for DevTools companies — three taken from zero to one and one to about five, plus pre-seed to Series B consulting, cumulatively $5M+ in revenue.
My work
- Founding Director, Centre for Applied AI and Governanceappliedaigovernance.org
- Podcast, newsletter and tech publicationdiaryofacto.org
Questions about a playbook, a template, or a company that belongs on this list? The best way to reach me is LinkedIn.
Running GTM for a DevTools company and want a second pair of eyes on it? I take on a small number of consulting engagements — positioning, launch, pricing, and the developer-facing material that supports them.