2 builders who never spoke to each other

Become the default inside one platform's community

Anchor to a single stack or platform and hold the position of the obvious choice there, so when attention floods the category it lands on you rather than on the newcomers. A closed, fully managed product can still build a developer following this way, despite the standing advice that open source is the only route in.

The method

1. 01

   Own the position of the obvious best choice within one platform's community; category-wide hype then flows to you instead of to the newcomers.

2. 02

   You can build a developer audience for a fully managed product without open-sourcing it, despite the prevailing advice that open source is the only route to a technical community.

What it returned

• Zue credits a strong revenue year to the surge of attention on SaaS boilerplates combined with Pegasus still being the clear best option for Django, and worries about holding that edge as copycats multiply.

• Pinecone combined a new category, a developer audience and product-led growth on a closed, managed product, and hundreds of thousands of developers used it.

Sources

• The retro is dead, long live the retro!Cory Zue · coryzue.com · Last Month · 2024-03-01
• After four years at Pinecone, I'm back to consultingGreg Kogan · gkogan.co · The mission at Pinecone · 2024-10-01