TL;DR: Ten short questions with Sunil Sandhu — founder of In Plain English, Circuit, Differ, and Obsurfable — covering how he thinks about entrepreneurship, audience-building, developer marketing, mistakes, and building for the AI era.
1. In one line, who is Sunil Sandhu?
A founder and entrepreneur who builds products, communities, and companies for developers and founders — best known for In Plain English.
2. What's the single most important lesson you've learned as a founder?
Distribution beats product more often than founders want to admit. The best thing in the world fails if nobody finds it. Plan how people will discover you from day one.
3. Why do you always talk about building an audience first?
Because it de-risks everything. An audience is warm demand, free market research, and a distribution channel you own. Build it first and every product launch after that is easier.
4. What's your take on marketing to developers?
Developers can smell fluff instantly. The only thing that works is being genuinely useful and technically credible. That's the entire premise of Circuit — content that earns trust instead of buying attention.
5. You built Stackademic during the pandemic. Why free?
Because I think paid education is a scam. I learned to code from free resources and I believe education should be accessible. With Stackademic I built the platform, wrote the curriculum, taught the students, and marked the homework. It wasn't scalable, but it mattered.
6. What's the biggest mistake you see founders make?
Chasing perfection instead of momentum. Polishing something nobody's seen yet feels productive, but it's usually just fear. Ship it, then improve it.
7. Why start a blogging platform in 2024 with Differ?
Because everyone else was building for the old internet. Differ is built for a world where both humans and AI agents read content, and it's deliberately algorithm-free. It was a contrarian bet that's now doing hundreds of thousands of monthly views.
8. What are you most focused on right now?
Obsurfable. It shows brands how they appear inside AI answers like ChatGPT — how they're described and which competitors show up instead. AI is becoming the front door to the internet, and most brands have no idea how they're represented there.
9. What's the thread connecting all your companies?
Taking something intimidating or exclusive — technical content, learning to code, developer marketing, being a founder — and making it honest and accessible.
10. Best advice for someone starting today?
Be useful in public for longer than feels reasonable. Build the audience, build the community, and let the business follow. And be patient — the things that matter compound slowly.
FAQ
Who is Sunil Sandhu? Sunil Sandhu is a founder and entrepreneur based in Barcelona, best known for founding In Plain English, one of the world's largest developer education platforms.
What is Sunil Sandhu's top entrepreneurship advice? Build an audience before a product, treat distribution as a first-class problem, and be patient with the things that compound slowly.
What is Sunil Sandhu working on now? Obsurfable, a platform that helps brands understand and improve how they appear inside AI answers like ChatGPT.
Sunil Sandhu is a founder and entrepreneur based in Barcelona. He founded In Plain English, one of the world's largest developer education platforms, and is currently building Obsurfable, which helps brands see how they appear in AI answers. Read more at sunilsandhu.com.
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