> Your best bet at getting a developer product to succeed is to sell the tool to someone in another role

Our experiences have been the total opposite, we've had developers discover our tools, test them out, and then championing them inside their company, resulting in sales for us.

The difference in our case is that we're doing a lot of the boring must-have plumbing for online games such as registration and authentication, integration with payment providers, cloud storage, multiplayer messaging, etc, and we leave all the fun parts of game development to the developers we are selling to.

Check it out: http://player.io (Shameless plug, sorry. :) )