Code to Market

A short one. Two objects and one argument. The spoon: Granola mailed someone a very good spoon with a little note, and it got tweeted. Hank thinks that is what great swag looks like: send the accessory, not the namesake, and make it the thing someone photographs. Gonto calls it "explanation swag", and then, as a Granola user, says he does not buy the love-and-care story unless it shows u...

Two questions this week. Is being secretive better marketing than being loud? And what does a devtool have to change now that its users are agents? Also Gonto's bed, which is not made, whatever he tells you. Ox Alpha showed up on OpenRouter, OpenCode and Hermes with no name on it, free to everyone, and Twitter spent a week guessing who built it. There was a Polymarket. Gonto thinks it was the...

Come to the dev marketing meetup: https://ctm.fm/meetup-2026 Gonto and Hank catch up on what they have each been building with agents, and announce the first Code to Market meetup, in San Francisco on September 30.Hank's is small and useful: before an advisory call about email, he had Claude Code read every note he has ever taken on the subject and hand back a call outline built from his own b...

The stack episode. Hank and Gonto go tool by tool through what they actually run for clients and their own projects in 2026, and what they think is on the way out. Email: Resend for transactional and fast scrappy outbound, Loops for marketing flows (triggers, branching, an MCP your agent can drive), and AgentMail for giving an AI assistant its own inbox with its own permissions. CRM: HubSpot is th...

Salesforce bought Contentful, and we think it says everything about where the CMS is headed. Hank's case: the CMS cured "marketers can't ship without engineers," but the cure became its own disease, no creativity and every page looking the same. Now that every marketer effectively has an engineer on call, agent-first editing wins. Gonto explains why he invested in Flint and why t...

Hank shares his screen and Gonto brings the takes. We tear down manifolds.run (an enrichment tool with an ASCII torus, success-based pricing, and copy that undersells how good it is) and Cognition's all-text relaunch, where Devin and Windsurf hide behind one manifesto page. Then we grade our own podcast site two years in. The second half is what a marketer can ship solo with Claude Code: the n...

If you sell big pretzels and juices then you setup shop at the mall, right? Same thing, but devtools & AI infra marketers have to be at the AIE World Fair in SF. Another episode of Hank sharing the work he did while Gonto was on vacation haha

Episode 50 is all about practical AI use cases for marketers. Hank shares the first AI-powered marketing tool he's built that actually changed how his team works: a Slack bot that analyzes event and customer data, identifies high-value segments, and launches personalized email campaigns in minutes. The result? More replies, more insights, and more ticket sales. Gonto explains how he's usin...

Plus GitHub is losing trust and thoughts on side events billboards.

Cursor quietly racks up 8M+ views with dev content on Facebook, while everyone else is still stuck posting for Twitter clout. Meanwhile, teams are rapidly building internal AI tools, keeping systems of record but replacing everything else with CLIs, prompts, and lightweight apps. The real shift isn’t SaaS dying, it’s interfaces changing, and most companies are behind (so you still have plenty of t...

Executives overreacting publicly can backfire, especially when intent is misunderstood, while thoughtful follow-ups and apologies can actually strengthen perception. Replit’s polished launch shows that high production alone isn’t enough, and the real missed opportunity is in how companies “land” launches through follow-up distribution. Meanwhile, Cloudflare continues to dominate the narrative with...

Which side benefitted more from Cloudflare’s “slop fork” of Next.js and the attention war with Vercel. Also, Raycast’s standout Glaze launch, Resend’s smart migration tooling, clever partner marketing plays that turn product moments into distribution, a bold live demo lesson from Laravel, and a deep dive into AI agents replacing operational work.

Episode 45 of Code to Market covers three very different marketing lessons from the dev world:• A bizarre launch from Taalas that broke some “best practices” on Twitter… and still pulled 4M views.• The HubSpot / OpenCode drama, where Dharmesh Shah forked an open-source project and the maintainers may have fumbled a massive partnership opportunity.• How companies should respond when infrastructure...

Claude took a direct shot at OpenAI before the Super Bowl. OpenAI responded with an essay (weak!). We break down why the best marketing rattles competitors into reacting, what Claude got right with counter-positioning, why Sam’s response made it worse, and what B2B companies can learn from Salesforce x MrBeast. Plus: how to “surf the wave” when something like OpenClaw blows up without shipping a m...

A $260 DIY CMS sparked debate on Twitter last month. Hank and Gonto break down Lee Robinson’s (Cursor) post, Sanity’s response, and why both sides actually won from a marketing perspective. They dig into the gap between CMS theory and real-world practice, the rise of vibe coding, and why DevRel’s real job is expanding imagination. Then Hank brings backfield notes from AWS Re:Invent with a rapid-fi...

Most sales & marketing people hate my email drafts. Because I'm not writing for them; I write for developers. I crafted & tested these drafts for the last decade specifically to get enterprise pipeline from developers in product signup funnels at Vercel, GitLab, Neo4j, & Laravel (plus several startups I've advised). And these emails beat every challenger's drafts for ten ye...

In Episode 40, we break down two big announcements this week and why one absolutely outperformed the other. Cloudflare’s Replicate acquisition vs. RunLayer’s launch and fundraise: clarity, positioning, what’s-in-it-for-me, and how a single quote-tweet can reshape a narrative. Then we dive into Kalshi and PolyMarket’s “news as growth” strategy and how devtools can copy it using zero-click content a...

A startup spent half its preseed on a Nordic sauna office and turned it into pure rage bait. We break down why attention without a real product or halfway decent website is a waste, and how to time fundraise announcements so they actually help you. Then we get into technical SDRs and GTM engineers, how to source and comp them, and why the future of selling devtools looks a lot more like sales engi...

From AI-generated badges to algorithm-killing YouTube settings, Vercel’s events were full of lessons. We talk about the rise of dual-event strategies, why practice still matters, and how conferences became brand design in motion.

Ramp nailed it. Clay made a polarizing play. Cluely is failing. Branding is the sum of your campaigns and positioning and critical to both getting the right attention and keeping it. From Ramp’s genius Office stunt to Clay’s risky joint-roller bit, it’s all about knowing your audience and going all in when the idea is right.

Framework turned one broke developer’s tweet into millions of impressions in a masterclass in generous marketing. From there, Hank and Gonto dive into why DevRel never really died, how influencer fatigue is pushing everything back in-house, and why AI companies are stuck launching everything twice.

A fast tour of “zags” that earn attention and still drive understanding. We break down PostHog’s playful desktop motif, PlanetScale’s crisp text-first launch page, why Tempo’s eye candy misses the mark, and a scrappy direct mail play from Browserbase. We close with hiring tactics to separate real operators from smooth talkers.

editors note: this was recorded a few weeks before rauchg's real drama with his Israel tweet... we might get to that (subscribe!) Hank and Gonto break down a week of developer-world drama, from DHH’s RailsWorld keynote and his “Merchants of Complexity” crusade to Vercel’s Twitter battles with Cloudflare and Levels.io. They unpack why DHH’s mix of authenticity, conviction, and controversy still wor...

Why ignoring best practices works, and why launches only matter if the product sticks. Paul Klein IV, CEO of Browserbase, on growing with launch videos, planes over OpenAI, no dark mode, and red CTA buttons.

What does a second-time founder consider ESSENTIAL for taking his product to market and running his startup, Browserbase?