The starting point
A Series A developer-tools company with a product engineers liked once they found it. The problem was the finding. When engineers asked AI models which tools to use for their kind of infrastructure work, none of the five models we tested named this company.
The places those models drew on were clear from the audit: long Reddit threads in communities like r/devops and r/sysadmin, where practitioners compare tools and argue about trade-offs. The company had never appeared in them.
What we did
A month of saying nothing about themselves
Engineers can smell a vendor from the first sentence, and these communities are quick to call it out. So for the first four weeks, the accounts we worked with didn't mention the product at all.
They answered questions: debugging advice, configuration trade-offs, honest takes on approaches that had nothing to do with the client. Every account was real and disclosed, every contribution followed the subreddit's rules, and every answer had to be useful on its own.
Letting it come up on its own
Standing in a community is earned the slow way. By the time the product was relevant to a question, the people answering had a history of being helpful, and the mention read as a recommendation rather than an advert.
In week seven, the product came up in a thread without anyone on our side raising it. A user who had tried it recommended it to someone else. That thread is still cited today.
What changed
- Models naming them went from none of five to three of five, for the same questions asked on day one.
- 460 more threads mention them than at the baseline, most of them written by users rather than by us.
By the numbers
| Measure | Day one | Month 3 | Month 5 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Models naming them (out of 5) | 0 | 1 | 3 |
| Threads mentioning them | 0 | 120 | 460 |
| Answers posted by our accounts | 0 | 1,800 | 4,900 |
| Product mentions by our accounts | 0 | 40 | 96 |
| Product mentions by users | 0 | 210 | 1,140 |
By month five, users were mentioning the product more than ten times as often as we were.
The thread that's still cited
In week seven, someone in r/devops asked for a lightweight way to manage configuration drift across a few hundred servers. A user who had tried the product recommended it, with a clear note about where it fell short. The thread reached 3,900 upvotes and 1,240 comments, and two of the three models that now name the company cite it directly.
Timeline
- Weeks 1–4: answering unrelated questions in r/devops, r/sysadmin and three smaller communities. No product mentions.
- Week 7: first unprompted mention by a user.
- Month 3: the first model starts naming them.
- Month 5: three of five.
In their words
"I was nervous about a month of posting nothing about us. In hindsight it was the most important month of the whole thing."
Co-founder, Infrastructure tooling
What made it work
The client accepted a first month with nothing to show for it. In technical communities, credibility is the whole product, and it can't be rushed. The patience is what made the later mentions believable.