Developers don’t buy narratives. They evaluate code.
After spending over two decades working alongside engineering teams and developer-first products,
I’ve watched the same pattern repeat itself: companies spend heavily trying to ‘market’
to developers, and developers quietly ignore them.
Meanwhile, a different kind of company wins without looking like it’s trying.
While CMOs pour millions into LinkedIn ads and gated whitepapers aimed at engineers, some
of the most valuable B2B companies in the world grew by making traditional
marketing feel unnecessary.
- Stripe reported net revenue of $5.1B in 2024, processing $1.4 trillion in payments (+38% YoY)
and sits at a $91.5B valuation in early 2025.
- Figma generated $249.6M in Q2 2025 revenue (+41% YoY), with 11,906 paying customers that are more than $10K ARR and 1,119 customers at over $100K ARR. Today it has a $1B in annual revenue and went IPO in July 2025.
- Vercel surpassed an estimated $200 million in ARR by mid-2025, following a $250 million Series E at a $3.25B valuation.
None of these companies won developer mindshare through traditional campaigns.
They won by turning the product itself into the message. The harder you “market” to developers, the faster they route around you.
The winners don’t outspend competitors.
They out-experience them.
Why Traditional Marketing Triggers Developer Allergies
Here's what I've learned from watching this dance for over two decades: developers aren't just another B2B cohort. They're a culture with its own immune system, one that's been trained to detect and reject marketing BS at the protocol level.
Developers are professionally skeptical. Their day job is finding edge cases, debugging failures, and questioning assumptions. When they encounter traditional marketing grandiosity and ambiguous superlatives, their response is swift rejection.
- The Hype Detector: Developers live in a world where "revolutionary" frameworks emerge weekly, then die quietly. They've learned to ignore superlatives and focus on specifications. Try selling them a "game-changing solution" and watch their eyes glaze over.
- The Technical BS Filter: Promise them a "cutting-edge AI solution" and they'll immediately ask about training data, model architecture, and latency benchmarks. Vague promises get filtered out instantly. They want GitHub repositories, not glossy marketing material.
- The Peer Review Instinct: Developers trust code reviews over sales pitches. They want to see the source code, not the marketing copy. GitHub stars matter more than marketing budgets. Stack Overflow discussions carry more weight than case studies.
If your first touchpoint feels like friction, you're already losing. That's why big-budget developer campaigns flop: they're built on attention tactics instead of adoption logic.
The Anti-Marketing Playbook
The smartest developer-first companies don't run marketing campaigns in the traditional sense. They build systems where the product, documentation, and community carry the weight of persuasion. It doesn't look like marketing, but it works better than most campaigns ever could.
1. Documentation as Brand Experience
For Stripe, documentation was never just instructions, it was a manifesto. Every line of their API docs communicated simplicity, reliability, and respect for a developer's time. It set a standard: "We've solved the complexity so you can focus on building."
That tone turned documentation into brand experience. Good docs explain. Great docs persuade without sounding persuasive. When developers bookmark your docs, you've won their trust.
2. Product as the Marketing
The best developer products are their own pitch decks. Stripe spread through a copy-paste snippet that simply worked, the moment developers saw money moving in minutes, trust was earned. Figma won not through ad spend but by letting teams collaborate in-browser, for free, at a time when file-sharing fatigue was at its peak. The first time a designer opened their browser and realized they could collaborate live without sending files back and forth sold the product more effectively than any campaign could. When a product
removes friction instantly, adoption accelerates on its own.
3. Community as Distribution
Developers trust peers more than pitches, and successful companies lean into that truth. Postman transformed from an API tool into a shared workspace where developers trade collections and best practices. Vercel invests in open-source contributors, giving them insider status and amplifying their voices.
These aren't community "programs", they are distribution strategies. The result: users don’t just consume the product, they spread it. Word of mouth isn’t a byproduct, it’s the growth engine.
Case Study: Figma's Stealth Conquest
Figma's rise demonstrates the anti-marketing playbook at work. They didn't rely on campaigns or aggressive acquisition tactics. They let documentation, product, and community do the heavy lifting.
▪ Product as the Marketing: Figma's breakthrough wasn't an ad, it was the first time a designer realized they could collaborate live
without version control hell. That single experience sold the product more effectively than any campaign could.
▪ Documentation as Brand Experience: Figma's early technical guides weren't positioned as "marketing content." They were transparent
walkthroughs of real features in real workflows. By focusing on clarity and usability, they signaled that Figma wasn't another bloated enterprise tool, it was built for speed and collaboration.
▪ Community as Distribution: Figma cultivated a space where designers and developers could share files, plugins, and workflows. The Figma Community platform turned users into distributors, showcasing versatility without running ads. Designers invited colleagues, teams invited entire organizations, and adoption spread bottom-up.
The result: Figma grew from $4M ARR in 2018 to $1B revenue in 2025. Adobe’s $20B acquisition attempt wasn’t just about revenue, it
was about mindshare. Proof that Figma had rewritten the rules of B2B growth.
The Universal Marketing Metric: Trust
Every brand is chasing the same outcome: trust. For consumer brands, trust comes from consistency, the taste you expect, the logo you recognize. For developers, it works differently. They don't grant trust because your brand is visible; they grant it because your product proves itself in their hands.
The Stealth Adoption Pattern
Developer trust is built through what I call the "stealth adoption pattern." A developer tests your API on a weekend, finds it seamless, mentions it in a standup, and a few months later it's quietly running in production handling millions of calls. No campaigns. No ad impressions. Just proof of use.
This organic pattern makes traditional campaigns feel hollow. Developers aren't persuaded by billboards; they're persuaded by the experience of trying, testing, and trusting.
The Compounding Effect of Trust
Once trust takes root in a developer ecosystem, it spreads exponentially. One satisfied engineer tells five others, those five tell twenty-five. The network effect isn't driven by impressions, it's driven by conviction. When Adobe wanted to spend $20B trying to acquire Figma, they weren't just buying a tool. They were trying to buy developer trust, the same compounding force that powered Stripe, Postman, and Supabase.
Trust isn't a soft metric. It's the growth engine.
Your Move: From Campaign to Code
The companies mastering anti-marketing create virtuous cycles:
- Build genuinely useful tools that solve real developer problems
- Obsess over developer experience in ways that feel invisible but essential
- Make adoption frictionless with transparent pricing, credit card sign-up, and start building
- Let satisfied users become your sales force through authentic word-of-mouth
- Reinvest marketing budgets into product development and community building
This approach doesn't scale linearly, it scales exponentially. But it requires patience and genuine commitment to developer experience over short-term metrics.
The Diagnostic Questions
If you're building for developers, ask yourself:
▪ Does your homepage lead with features or with code? Does your website not only promote the product features but also link to easy-to-understand pricing, documentation and source code (if open source)?
▪ Do your case studies read like marketing copy or technical deep-dives? Surface-level success stories get ignored.
▪ Would a developer recommend your tool based on the product alone? If you need sales calls to close deals, your product isn't speaking for itself.
▪ Does your marketing team feedback customer concerns into your API design? If they can't debug alongside engineers, they can't build trust.
The Future of B2B Marketing
Here's what keeps me fascinated: this isn't just a developer phenomenon anymore. Every buyer is becoming more sophisticated, more skeptical, and more immune to traditional marketing tactics. Procurement teams now research tools on GitHub. CTOs read technical documentation before they'll take sales calls. Even non-technical buyers expect product-led experiences.
The companies mastering anti-marketing today are building the blueprint for tomorrow's B2B success. The future belongs to companies brave enough to throw out the marketing manual and build something customers actually want to talk about.
The best developer marketing doesn't feel like marketing at all. It feels like one builder sharing something genuinely useful with another.
And in a world where attention is the scarcest resource, that authenticity isn't just refreshing,it's revolutionary.