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Why Community-Led Growth Isn’t for Everyone: Lessons from Xano’s 40,000+ Developer Base

Most founders building developer tools follow a familiar playbook: create a product for developers, by developers. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Xano’s story reveals a different path – one that started with a failed startup and led to pioneering a new category of “citizen developer-led software creation.”

The journey began with a fundamental constraint that plagues tech companies: engineering resources are either too expensive, unavailable, or focused on core roadmap items. But while others saw this as just another market reality, Prakash Chandran saw it as an opportunity to reshape how enterprise software gets built.

Creating a New Category

“We serve a market called the Citizen developer,” Prakash explained. “You can think of them as like a product owner of some sort that is a systems thinker, but doesn’t know the syntax of software creation.” This insight came from personal experience – Prakash’s first startup failed largely due to engineering constraints.

Rather than building yet another no-code tool, Xano focused specifically on backend development. “We’re not trying to boil the ocean and build a complete product,” Prakash noted. “But in this new world, just like today, people have custom development stacks, they’re going to have no code stacks because they’re going to be opinionated on what tools they want to use.”

The Education-First Growth Strategy

Instead of rushing to market, Xano took a measured approach focused on education. “Very early on we have, especially being the type of tool that we are, we’ve made it really easy and accessible for people to find us and find success using the product by producing YouTube content,” Prakash shared. They maintained a consistent cadence of one to three videos per week, creating what Prakash calls a “honeypot of value.”

This strategy paid off. While many no-code tools struggle to gain developer trust, Xano built credibility through consistent education and transparency. The result? A community of over 40,000 developers who see Xano not as a compromise, but as a legitimate tool for building scalable software.

Cracking the Enterprise Code

The real test came when Xano began moving upmarket. “It’s like a cultural objection that I think we have to overcome in that some CIOs and people within IT will say no code, no way,” Prakash explained. Rather than trying to convert skeptics through traditional enterprise marketing, Xano let their community do the talking.

They implemented the Sean Ellis product-market fit survey to understand their users deeply. This data-driven approach helped them refine their messaging around what enterprise customers really cared about: scalability, security, and compliance. But perhaps more importantly, it helped them understand where traditional no-code marketing falls short.

“For better or for worse, I’m not like a huge G2 subscriber, but there’s a lot of organizations that go there to basically compare one tool against the other,” Prakash noted. This insight led to a strategic focus on peer reviews and social proof, particularly valuable for enterprise buyers who need third-party validation.

Building for Scale

Looking ahead, Xano isn’t just trying to make software development easier – they’re trying to fundamentally change who can create enterprise-grade software. “There are effectively 27 million developers in the world today of 8 billion people. That’s less than half a percent of people to create software that all of us use,” Prakash explained.

Their mission? “To empower the world to create scalable, world class software.” But Prakash emphasizes the words “scalable” and “world class” because they’re building for enterprises, not just MVPs. It’s a bold vision that challenges the traditional notion that serious software can only be built by traditional developers.

For founders building dev tools or enterprise software, Xano’s journey offers a valuable lesson: sometimes the biggest opportunities lie not in building better tools for existing developers, but in expanding who can be a developer in the first place.