7 Counter-Intuitive Go-to-Market Lessons from Graphite’s Developer Tools Journey

7 Counter-Intuitive Go-to-Market Lessons from Graphite’s Developer Tools Journey

Developer tools are notoriously difficult to market and sell. Yet in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Tomas Reimers shared how Graphite grew to 2,000 weekly active users with minimal marketing spend. Here are the key go-to-market lessons from their journey:

1. Sometimes Your Best Product Comes From Solving Internal Problems Graphite’s success started with solving their own pain points. As Tomas explains, “We started actually at a different company entirely… worked on mobile, infra at Facebook. I left, I was like, there’s a lot of space to do this out in the world for other startups.” While building their original product, they created internal code review tools. When a competitor shut down, they discovered their internal tooling was exactly what other companies needed.
2. Let Market Pull Guide Your Strategy Rather than pushing a product onto the market, Graphite let customer demand shape their direction. “At the time, we’re thinking maybe we open source it. Maybe we just write a white paper,” Tomas recalls. But their potential customers had different ideas, specifically requesting a hosted solution. This willingness to listen rather than impose their vision proved crucial.
3. Control Growth to Perfect the Experience Counter to conventional startup wisdom, Graphite maintained a waitlist despite strong demand. Their initial experiment with 20 users grew to 38 because, as Tomas shares, “we had 38 people write into us and be like, I absolutely need this tool.” When they launched their waitlist, they received 3,500 signups instead of the expected 500. Yet they still maintained controlled access, recognizing that “a user who you give the wrong first impression to is really hard to recover.”
4. Education Trumps Marketing for Developer Tools Graphite’s approach to developer marketing reflects a crucial insight. “Developers don’t want to be sold to, they want to be taught,” Tomas explains. He suggests thinking like a professor: “if you want to really get your name out there, what you should do is you should come up with a syllabus for Code Review… Write that syllabus, write that content, and then start to share that.”
5. Split Your Value Proposition Between Users and Buyers Their monetization strategy acknowledges the different needs of individual developers versus organizations. As Tomas puts it, “We solve company problems and we solve individual problems. We want to solve the individual problems for free because they’re frustrating… We want to solve the company problems as well. But we think that’s probably the place where it makes most sense to charge.”
6. Turn Users Into Product Partners Instead of treating user feedback as a burden, Graphite embraces it as product development fuel. “We have users who have written Chrome extensions to edit our site to be exactly what they want, and then they send us that Chrome extension,” Tomas shares. This level of engagement helps validate their approach while improving the product.
7. Build for Long-Term Category Leadership Rather than focusing on short-term growth, Graphite aims to fundamentally improve software development. As Tomas describes their vision: “What we really want to do is we want to bring the speed that these big companies can iterate and develop with and the safety and quality that they get from that too… and provide that to everyone.”

These lessons challenge conventional wisdom about growing B2B software companies. While many startups chase rapid growth and massive user numbers, Graphite’s success suggests that controlled growth, deep user engagement, and education-first marketing can be a more sustainable path to building developer tools. Their journey shows that sometimes the best way to grow faster is to deliberately grow slower – but better.