The Counter-Intuitive Path to Developer Tool Growth: Why Graphite Keeps Their Waitlist While Having 2,000 Weekly Active Users

Most startups race to grow their user base as quickly as possible. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Tomas Reimers shared how Graphite, a code review platform for fast-moving teams, took the opposite approach – deliberately maintaining a waitlist despite strong demand.

The story begins in March 2020, when Tomas left Facebook to start Graphite with two college friends. Their initial focus wasn't even on code review. As Tomas explains, "We started actually at a different company entirely... I left, I was like, there's a lot of space to do this out in the world for other startups."

But sometimes the most compelling products emerge from solving your own problems. The team started building internal code review tools, drawing on their experience at Facebook. When Fabricator, another code review platform, announced its shutdown in summer 2021, everything changed. Facebook alumni started searching for alternatives, and Graphite had a solution ready.

"At the time, we're thinking maybe we open source it. Maybe we just write a white paper. We don't know what the right answer is, but let's see what the interest is," Tomas recalls. The response surprised them. Rather than wanting to self-host an open source solution, large companies were asking Graphite to host it for them.

They decided to run an experiment with 20 users in August 2021. "We ended up with 38 users because we had 38 people write into us and be like, I absolutely need this tool," says Tomas. By November, before their waitlist launch, they had grown to 68 users purely through word of mouth.

When they officially launched their waitlist on November 17, 2021, expectations were modest. "We were expecting 500 sign ups. We ended up with 3500," Tomas shares. The growth came from a single Hacker News post, demonstrating the power of finding the right distribution channel for your audience.

But rather than rushing to capitalize on this demand, Graphite took an unconventional approach. They maintained their waitlist, focusing instead on perfecting the product experience. As Tomas explains, "a user who you give the wrong first impression to is really hard to recover."

This careful approach to growth has paid off. Their engaged user base doesn't just use the product – they help improve it. "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. "They're like, 'hey, you guys did it wrong, but it's good. I fixed it for you.'"

Their go-to-market strategy reflects a deep understanding of developer psychology. Instead of traditional marketing, they focus on education. As Tomas puts it, "developers don't want to be sold to, they want to be taught." He suggests thinking like a professor: "come up with a syllabus for Code Review... Write that syllabus, write that content, and then start to share that."

This education-first approach extends to their monetization strategy. "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 think that's probably the place where it makes most sense to charge."

Today, with around 2,000 weekly active users, Graphite continues to maintain their waitlist. Their vision extends beyond just code review – they aim to bring the development speed and safety of big tech companies to everyone else. As Tomas describes 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 technical founders, Graphite's journey offers a compelling case study in prioritizing product experience over growth at all costs. By focusing on education over marketing, and quality over quantity, they've built something developers actually want to use – and improve.