Graphite’s Developer Education Playbook: Why Teaching Trumps Traditional Marketing

Graphite’s Developer Education Playbook: Why Teaching Trumps Traditional Marketing

Marketing to developers requires a fundamentally different approach. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Tomas Reimers shared how Graphite’s education-first strategy helped them build a thriving developer community with minimal marketing spend.

The Core Insight Graphite’s entire marketing philosophy stems from a simple but powerful observation. As Tomas explains, “developers don’t want to be sold to, they want to be taught.” This insight shaped their entire go-to-market strategy.

The Professor’s Approach Instead of traditional marketing tactics, Tomas suggests thinking like an educator: “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. Pretend you’re a college professor… Write that syllabus, write that content, and then start to share that.”

Organic Growth Through Education This education-first approach proved remarkably effective. With just two Hacker News posts and zero traditional marketing spend, Graphite built a waitlist of 3,500 developers. “All of our growth has been organic or word of mouth,” Tomas notes, highlighting how genuine value creation trumps promotional tactics.

Building Trust Through Transparency Their commitment to education extends to how they handle technical challenges. “Listen, here’s the technical challenge we have when working with GitHub or we’re working with some technology. We’re welcome to brainstorm with you on ways to solve this, but this is what we’re facing,” Tomas explains. This transparency helps build trust with their technical audience.

From Users to Partners The education-focused approach has transformed their user relationships. As Tomas describes it, “one of the success modes for companies that work with us is that they just view us as another team… And they really come to us like, ‘hey, these are the problems we have. How can we solve them?'”

A Two-Sided Value Proposition Their educational approach extends to their business model. “We solve company problems and we solve individual problems,” Tomas explains. “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.”

The Power of User Education The depth of user engagement proves the effectiveness of their approach. “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 user investment demonstrates how education creates not just users, but partners in product development.

Looking Ahead Their vision extends beyond just teaching code review. As Tomas puts it, “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.”

For B2B founders targeting developers, Graphite’s experience offers a clear lesson: skip the marketing playbook and start writing the syllabus. When you focus on making developers better at their jobs, they’ll do your marketing for you.

The success of this approach is evident in their growth from 68 initial users to 2,000 weekly active users, achieved without traditional marketing campaigns. By positioning themselves as educators rather than vendors, Graphite has built something more valuable than a user base – they’ve built a community of engaged developers who actively contribute to the product’s evolution.