Neill | Plug.Dev

The adoption of developer tools has changed, a lot. It hasn't been led by ads, or private forums. It’s been led by creators that code, the ones teaching, sharing, and influencing what tools developers choose to adopt and why. I wrote a deep dive on Creator-Led Growth for Devtools. What it is, why it matters, and how to put it into practice. Including some examples of CLG by Devtools like @clerk @neondatabase and @snyksec Here’s our @plugdotdev playbook for CLG: plug.dev/companyblog

@thorwebdev Incredible setup 👌✨

We're building a physical AI Studio here in NYC to bring you tutorials, behind the scenes, and dev/builder collaborations! ✨🎬 Whom would you like to see joining me in the studio?

We’re opening up the Plug.Dev Influencer Playbook for Devtools 🤓 Dev Influencers, especially on YouTube, aren’t just about awareness. When you partner the right way, they can drive full-funnel developer marketing: from awareness through to conversion and retention via educational content that transitions to Devtool advocacy. Everyday, the @plugdotdev team works with world class Devtools like Supabase, Clerk, and Snyk to run influencer campaigns. We’ve seen what works, what flops, and what scales. The playbook we've put together breaks down what we’ve learned, and how to grow from one-off campaign hits into compounding programs. Inside includes: • How to scale from one-off campaigns to compounding programs • Which content formats drive full-funnel, from buzz to long-tail education • How influencers teach, build trust, and drive product adoption, not just views The Dev Influencer Playbook: plug.dev/blog/influence… Hit me up with any questions or feedback, happy reading! 👋

@0thernet @zocomputer Love it.. congrats guys 👏🚀

today we're announcing @zocomputer. when we came up with the idea – giving everyone a personal server, powered by AI – it sounded crazy. but now, even my mom has a server of her own. and it's making her life better. she thinks of Zo as her personal assistant. she texts it to manage her busy schedule, using all the context from her notes and files. she no longer needs me for tech support. she also uses Zo as her intelligent workspace – she asks it to organize her files, edit documents, and do deep research. with Zo's help, she can run code from her graduate students and explore the data herself. (my mom's a biologist and runs a research lab. hi mom) Zo has given my mom a real feeling of agency – she can do so much more with her computer. we want everyone to have that same feeling. we want people to fall in love with making stuff for themselves. in the future we're building, we'll own our data, craft our own tools, and create personal APIs. owning an intelligent cloud computer will be just like owning a smartphone. and the internet will feel much more alive. THIS ONE'S FOR YOU MOM ❤️ special thank you to @modal, @pydantic AI, and @steeldotdev for being great partners leading up to this launch. and thank you @cursor_ai for being my sword 🗡️ and thank you to everyone who believed in us. a small handful: @southpkcommons, @adityaag, @chrisbest, @rauchg, @immad, @shreyas, @MattHartman, @lessin, @gokulr, @sabrinahahn, @iqramband, @whoisnnamdi, @guruchahal, @mikemarg_, @gaybrick, @SJCizmar, @magdovitz, @anneleeskates, @henloitsjoyce, @sugarjammi, @vibethinker, @aaronmakhoffman, @Sunfield__

@alexdanilowicz @Standard_Cap Video editing on point 👨‍🍳👌

Announcing Magic Patterns 2.0 and our $6M Series A led by @Standard_Cap Since our first launch in 2023, we’ve grown profitably, hit $1M ARR with no employees, and quietly built an AI design tool loved by PMs, designers, and website builders. 1,500+ product teams use us to go from idea to production every day, prompting features to life with their existing styles. Free to try with a new brand look.

@alexdanilowicz @Standard_Cap Big congratulations @alexdanilowicz 👏

@MerrillLutsky Congrats guys 👏

Yes the .com was expensive, but this experience makes it worth every penny

@shl If I remember, you moved across from notion to slack for everything. Running through how you guys work now via slack would be a great vid 👌 years ago you did a notion one, it was great!

Replacing Slack with email and text for the month of November

Gm

@evanowen Nice one, congrats guys 👏🚀

A few years ago Glue started as a wish for an alternative to the chaos of Slack. Now it’s a full platform with multiplayer, MCP-powered agentic AI and we just announced our $20M Series A funding. We have big plans for this investment, with a clear vision for how agentic AI will massively change how teams get work done—with more focus and less distraction. We're excited to help build this future together. Thank you to @AbstractVC, as well as @chapterone, @hack_vc, Goldcrest, and @craft_ventures. Plus the whole team at @GlueAI who have been dedicated since day one 🏆

Product devs..👋 We're hiring ✨

@fmerian merci bien ma fellow rural devtool geek! ✌️

@NeillGernon keep up the great work, Neill! looking forward to what's next

This month, Plug.Dev turns two 🎉 What started as a simple idea has grown into the default creator partner platform for Devtools like Clerk, Browserbase, Neon, and Snyk. ✨ 2025 has been an inflection point: - More than doubled revenue vs 2024 - Doubled again between Jan–Aug - On track to more than double before year’s end New customers are adding recurring revenue and profit margins are rising. Clear validation that our model of platform + community + expert + AI is scaling. We’re now a core team of six. Added a Head of Ops, refining business & program ops. Invested more in our AI ops. Brought on a Senior Engineer for scaling the platform & building the next category of GTM features. Two years in, the lesson is clear: coders adopt tools through creators, communities & trusted content, not just traditional marketing motions. Plug exists to make that shift scalable, helping devtools turn creator partnerships into long-term programs rather than one-off experiments. Plug was built with and for the creator community and our growth has been a byproduct of their trust. Without outbound sales, referral programs, or traditional marketing, most of our momentum has come through word of mouth in the creator ecosystem. Today, Plug is home to the largest community of Creators That Code, with hundreds of dev influencers across YouTube, X, and beyond. They’ve shaped how we work, fueled our customer growth, and continue to be at the heart of everything we do. That’s why we published the Creators That Code blog (plug.dev/creatorblog), to put a name and framework around the movement they’ve driven. We were, are, and will continue to be creator-led. I’m proud of what we’ve built in just two years, grateful for the team behind it, appreciative for the support from the creator community and even more excited for what’s ahead @plugdotdev 🚀 Learn more about the Plug.Dev team: plug.dev/aboutus 🤗

@Clearpreso Ah me auld haunt 👌 miss the morning dips. @genemurphy would watch and clap from afar and he fed the seagulls👏 good times!

The 'Cove

@bentossell @FactoryAI Noice... Congrats Ben 👏

📣 Some news I’m excited to join @FactoryAI as Head of Dev Rel I shared the full story in bens bites this morning. Tldr; - Started in tech working at Product Hunt (2015) - Built stuff with no-code tools - No one signed up for any ‘startup’ I launched - Started Makerpad - a company to teach ‘no-code building’ (2018/2019) - Sold it to Zapier (2021) - Started (the first) daily AI newsletter (2023) - Started an AI fund I cannot code. My whole career was banging the drum that you don’t need to learn to code to start a company and make money. I proved that with Makerpad - the amount of people to this day that said it helped them start a business, make money or get a job is truly special. AI came along and I felt like I was right on my message, wrong on the format (not drag ’n’ drop tools). AI has changed a lot for me. I’ve become more technical by just being curious. Getting ahead of myself with AI coding tools then learning backwards (whats a dependency, wtf are linters, how do i use GitHub etc). I still can’t code, but I understand a lot of the stack now. So I’m coming out of retirement - an exited founder turned investor often stays there - the comfortable life. But I’m 35, not 75. I like testing myself, I like meaty challenges. It’s time for me to get back to operating and teaching again. You’ll notice I’ve been talking about Factory a bit (I invested back in 2023). It’s a team and mission that I’ve watched grow (tremendously) in that time and my conviction along with it. The team is doing incredible things with AI, they believe in an agent-native future with coding tools across the browser, cli, slack, linear and more. We have a BIG launch soon 👀. The newsletter will stay as is. I will cover the entire industry and I’ll share stuff I’m working on, just as before. If you want to be more technically-able, I want to talk with you, help you and learn from you. I will also still be investing from Ben’s Bites Fund II - I focus on AI developer tools and infrastructure - I’ll continue to invest in this community. If you’re an LP or founder - DM/email me! I want to thank Keshav, Shanice and Adam for sticking with me and helping this newsletter run. I couldn’t do everything I do without them. Looking back at my career all the dots make a beautiful connected arc. But from the start there’s not a chance I’d think I’d ever be here, shipping code, using a terminal, working closely with developers and now teaching others. From not technical at all, to technical non-technical member of technical staff.

Around 3 years ago, I ran the first @posthog dev influencer campaign, it was an experiment... aaand it flopped. I missed the ICP, picked the wrong creators, and chose content formats that didn’t fit. With no rules in place, the whole thing felt more like ads than education, and worst of all, not enough content even made it live. Thanks for letting me be your guinea pig, @posthog (@james406 + Charles) 🙏 Sorry it was sh*t, but I learned a lot. That failed campaign contributed to the foundation for Plug.Dev What I realized wasn’t just that creators mattered... it was how broken the process was. Back then, I was cold DM-ing creators, stuck in endless back-and-forth comms, chasing invoices and payments one by one, throwing UTMs in email threads, and drafting legal contracts manually. It was messy, slow, and not scalable. Fast forward to today: we now run creator programs for the world’s leading DevTool brands... now with a platform that fixes all those pain points and a specialist team to support scaling programs: ICP-matched creators, streamlined outreach and bookings, one invoice for everything, built-in UTMs and analytics, and contracts handled from the start. That early flop showed me exactly what was broken, and those learnings helped inform priorities whilst building Plug.dev ... so yeah, cheers posthog 🦔🙏

@Meech_Ward Congrats @Meech_Ward 👏 remember you signing up to plug.dev early on and I was loving your youtube content. Best of luck with the new gig 👌

I have joined Supabase as a DevRel Engineer! What should my first YouTube video be?

Being part of this community is such an unfair advantage. Join the fun! mktto.dev

@JohnONolan @Ghost Incredible.. inspiring @JohnONolan 👏

We've now generated over $136M from free, open source software with @Ghost 📈 $36M in revenue from managed hosting $100M in platform revenue for indie publishers The ecosystem is growing really quickly at this point, and really excited about where things are heading next. For a while it felt like the entire web was moving toward big centralized platforms — but as subscription businesses grow larger we consistently see that people want to run their own platform and have full control. Extremely bullish on publishers using Ghost, but also the future of open, shared infrastructure more broadly. It's taken 12 years to get to this point as a bootstrapped non-profit org with no outside funding, but the position we're in now is pretty remarkable: Other platforms have hundreds of millions of dollars in VC debt to repay, and shareholders to enrich. We don't. We can just keep reinvesting 100% of what we make into improving the product. That's going to create some really interesting asymmetric market dynamics over the next few years.