What I Learned From My First 50 User Interviews as a Solo DevOps SaaS Founder

I have now done 50 user interviews for Step2Dev, a unified DevOps platform I am building solo.

Here is everything I learned, including the things that surprised me.

## Interview Structure

Each interview was 30 minutes. I asked 5 questions:

1. Walk me through a typical deployment day
2. What part of that day frustrates you most?
3. How many tools do you have open when you deploy?
4. What would need to be true for you to consolidate to fewer tools?
5. If you could remove one step from your workflow entirely, what would it be?

## Finding 1: The Number of Tools Is Not the Problem

Everyone expected me to ask about tool overload. But when I probed deeper, the problem was not having too many tools. It was the manual coordination between tools.

Engineers were fine with Terraform. Fine with GitHub Actions. Fine with CloudWatch.

They were not fine with manually connecting them at every step.

## Finding 2: New Project Setup Is Universally Painful

49 out of 50 engineers said setting up a new project from scratch was among their most painful regular tasks.

Not because they did not know how. Because they had to do the same thing from scratch every time.

Nobody had a truly reusable setup. Everyone had scripts that were "mostly" reusable but needed significant tweaking.

## Finding 3: Multi-Account Management Is an Unsolved Problem

Engineers managing 3+ AWS accounts described the experience in similar ways: "I constantly forget which account I am in," "I have made changes to the wrong account more than once," "I keep a sticky note with account IDs."

No tool they were using gave them a clean, unified view across all accounts.

## Finding 4: Monitoring Setup Always Gets Deprioritized

Every engineer I interviewed admitted that monitoring setup on new services was the most commonly skipped step in their deployment process.

Not because it was unimportant. Because it was manual, time-consuming, and could always be done "later."

Later was often never, until an incident forced it.

## Finding 5: Junior Engineers Are Afraid of Infrastructure

In startups with mixed teams, junior engineers consistently reported fear of touching infrastructure. The blast radius of a mistake felt too high. The onboarding process was too undocumented.

This is a product opportunity: make infrastructure safe enough that non-specialists can contribute.

## What I Am Building Based on This

These findings directly drove the Step2Dev roadmap. New project setup that is genuinely reusable. Multi-account management from a unified dashboard. Automated monitoring on deployment. An interface that makes infrastructure less intimidating.

I am building in public at step2dev.com. If you want to join my beta list, drop a comment.

What did I miss? What would you add to this list?