Graphite’s Path to 2,000 Weekly Active Users: When One Hacker News Post Beats a Marketing Budget

The conventional wisdom is that you need a significant marketing budget to grow a B2B startup. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Tomas Reimers revealed how Graphite achieved remarkable growth with just two Hacker News posts and a deep understanding of their developer community.

The Accidental Growth Engine The story begins with a simple experiment. “We’ll take 20 people, we’ll put them onto this platform we have internally,” Tomas recalls. But demand exceeded their modest plans: “We ended up with 38 users because we had 38 people write into us and be like, ‘I absolutely need this tool.'”

Word of Mouth Takes Over Before their official waitlist launch, organic growth had already taken hold. “The number grew to 68 before our waitlist launch in November, organically, just people would be like, hey, my coworker saw what I had and wants to be on it,” Tomas shares. They weren’t actively promoting the product – users were doing it for them.

The Power of One Post Then came their watershed moment. “We launched our waitlist November 17 of 2021. And what we ended up with, we were expecting 500 sign ups. We ended up with 3500,” Tomas reveals. The source? A single Hacker News post. The response was so overwhelming that “that evening, none of us slept because what happened, I remember just the amount of traction we got online was crazy.”

Beyond Traditional Marketing Instead of following up with paid marketing, Graphite focused on education. “Developers don’t want to be sold to, they want to be taught,” Tomas explains. This insight shaped their entire approach to growth, leading them to create educational content rather than marketing materials.

Building Trust Through Transparency Their growth strategy centered on authentic engagement. “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 shares, describing their approach to user communication.

The Community Effect This transparency fostered deep user engagement. “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 notes. Users weren’t just using the product – they were helping improve it.

Controlled Growth for Quality Despite the strong demand, Graphite maintained their waitlist. “For us, at least at the scale that we’re at, growth is not the major concern,” Tomas explains. “Instead it’s more like education and adoption of okay, pretend someone does sign up. Do they understand our workflow? Do they understand our tool? How do they react to it?”

Today, with approximately 2,000 weekly active users, Graphite’s experience challenges conventional growth wisdom. Their success suggests that for developer tools, authentic community engagement and education can be more effective than traditional marketing spend.

The key lesson for B2B founders? Sometimes the best marketing strategy is no marketing strategy at all – just a deep understanding of your users and a commitment to solving their problems in an authentic way.