Marketing lessons from OpenAI, Retool and Stripe

Krithika Muthukumar has the strongest developer marketing track record imaginable; in this post we get her insights, opinions and hot takes on all things marketing.

Krithika has an extremely special lens into developer marketing. She worked at Stripe for almost 9 years, starting as their first marketing hire. Their core audience was—and is!—developers. She went on to run marketing and developer experience at Retool and today she is VP of Marketing at OpenAI. She is one of the most articulate people I know and this interview is full of gold. To say she is an expert in developer marketing is an understatement! I’m thrilled to be featuring her today.

My hope is that anyone reading this will come away with a sense of the fundamental developer marketing best practices and the ability to apply them. I also have to point out that Krithka hasn’t just done developer marketing - she’s also run B2B and B2C marketing in her career and her remit at OpenAI includes all three disciplines! 

We’ll cover the following:

• How to build a strong developer brand, you can tell from her track record that Krithika clearly has unique insights here

• The role of a marketing leader and how to hire a winning team at a developer platform company

• What makes a strong developer product marketer, or product marketer in general!

• How Krithika effectively juggles B2C, B2B and B2D marketing in her role at OpenAI

• The developer brands that Krithika sees breaking out

And much more - it’s a great read, enjoy!

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Marketing has so many different disciplines: comms, brand, demand gen, product marketing etc. When you're building out the marketing team at a company with a lot of focus on developers, what do you hire first? 

I advise startups and often find that people are looking for a panacea, a silver bullet answer, here. And the reality is, as a marketing leader your number one job is actually diagnostician. You have to come in and understand a bunch of axes such as - are you primarily PLG or sales led? Inbound or outbound? 

My go-to, if pressed, would always be product marketing, especially for technical products. But, let’s look at my last three roles:

• At Stripe, we were an inbound shop. Funny anecdote: I turned on a contact sales form very early on in my time at Stripe and had to turn the form off because there was so much inbound demand - it overwhelmed us! You might think that's a good problem to have, but it's still a problem. There was a lot to do in terms of lead scoring, lead routing, hiring sales people, and putting out a lot more self-serve content so that we could deflect sales conversations. 

• At Retool, we had found product-market fit and the question was how to create consistent, predictable growth engines. As a result, my first leadership hire was in growth and demand gen and we built up seven or eight engines to predictably generate and accelerate pipeline.  

• At OpenAI, we’ve been at the forefront of every major AI development. But, the market is now frothy and moving at super speed - so the question is, how can we stand out? How can we really differentiate from the noise in the market? We build our strategy answering these questions. 

Ok let’s talk product marketing - what are your product marketing fundamentals? How does a really great developer product marketer think?

This may be a controversial answer, but I think a great developer product marketer thinks in the same way that any good product marketer thinks, and there's three rough buckets of work that they need to think of as part of their remit: 

1. Pre go-to-market. How do you do market research, customer research, and user research? I want to see strong competitive analysis and pricing analysis. All of this information should be brought by the product marketer back into the product development cycle so that you go to market with the right product in the first place.

2. Go-to-market. The bucket of work where you do naming, pricing, packaging, positioning, and then translate all of that into assets for your self-serve funnel and/or enable your sales team for the field. 

3. Ongoing growth and engagement. This third bucket of work is often forgotten at hypergrowth companies. You shouldn’t just launch and then move on to the next shiny object! Good product marketers act like a mini CMO to ensure engagement with the product and feature over time. They think through product hooks, defragment the sales narrative when you have major product launches, etc.

To me, a developer marketer has to think in that same way, but they have the added burden of really internalizing a deeply technical audience and their preferences - it’s like understanding a different culture. It can seem daunting, but this skill is learnable. 

Can you share a bit about how you balance B2C, B2B, and B2D marketing work in your current role, and how you have to shift your mindset and strategy to be successful across those different functions?

OpenAI has a lot of audiences to think about concurrently:

1. Consumers: folks around the world use ChatGPT for everything from weekly meal planning for their vegan teenager, customized tutoring for learning new skills or languages, planning epic trips, and everything in between - there’s so much variation in how consumers use the product.

2. Businesses: we launched ChatGPT Enterprise because we saw that people were organically using it for work - 92% of the Fortune 500 have employees using OpenAI’s products. We now have a whole variety of plans and offerings - which makes it more like a seat-based, PLG SaaS product when you consider the selling motion.

3. Platform and API: this is how enterprises and startups power AI within their own products and apps—we have over 2 million developers on the platform.

And of course, we have to think about these globally across countries, and across all stages of the funnel.

In some ways having to run these three marketing motions is a constant exercise in prioritization because we the team is fairly lean. OpenAI’s marketing team was only established when I joined the company in late 2023. 

One of the mandates that I've given my team at OpenAI is that we really need to pick and choose projects that would not happen if marketing weren't here. And I think this is an opinion that I hold for the rest of the industry as well, is that marketing should only be taking on strategic projects that change the trajectory of the company. 

You don't have to have your finger in every pie in order to be a great marketer. Even though many marketers have the superpower of being that fantastic quarterback that can pick up the slack in any function, considering where, strategically, marketing can make the most impact is critical. 

Are there certain things that you've found effective with all three audiences? 

People think that these three disciplines are very different, but there’s a ton of interplay across them, especially in the realm of brand marketing. 

People like to say that developers hate marketing, and I really think that's a misnomer.

Developers just hate bad marketing. All these developer companies that we talk about that do great developer marketing have one thing in common - there's a strong brand. 

On top of that - really crisp product marketing applies just as well to the developer space as it does to the consumer space. Nobody really cares for fluff or opaqueness in marketing.

So that's an ethos that can cut across all three. 

I couldn’t agree more, so let’s talk about brand and taste. One of the things that stands out about your career in particular is that you've built top notch developer brands. How do you build a great developer brand? 

I was the first marketer at Stripe and was the only marketer there for three years. In some ways, brand was key to our growth, but I can’t take credit for that. Our first brand marketers were Patrick and John, our founders. They were developers and instinctively knew the shibboleths of reaching developers. 

We also had a mastermind comms lead - and I now view the ability to think about earned media and PR at the same time as investing in a community-level groundswell as a critical one-two punch.

There are three unspoken rules of developer branding. These are hard won learnings, I can’t believe I’m just dropping them here!

1. Be non-transactional. What I mean by that is if you put out content, don't expect anything in return - not an email address, not a download, not a subscribe. Nothing. Share in-depth learnings, or a unique perspective that people can't find anywhere else. You should aim to make people feel like they’ve found “their people”, or their niche.

• At Stripe we created guides on how to navigate major compliance changes coming out of the EU. The goal wasn’t leads, it was just to be helpful, and we ended up seeing a lot of good will (and, surprise - leads) as a result.

• Cloudflare’s 1:1:1:1 campaign is a great example too. It isn’t trying to drive signups, it’s offered altruistically, but definitely created brand goodwill and awareness that pays off long term. 

2. Sweat the details, and consider them the business value of delight. Taking a few extra cycles to really imbue delight into the things that you're putting out there pays off with developers (and pretty much all audiences). 

• Stripe’s first open-source page was delayed for two weeks because our designers decided to build The Game of Life into the background - the background! It was a totally “unnecessary” addition but ended up gaining us extra virality for the launch.

• Linear’s manifesto page “Last Year You Said Next Year” is a great example of sweating the details of look and feel, we took inspiration from it at Retool for our long-form writeups like A History of Visual Basic, which was full of easter eggs that people ended up digging.

3. Steal liberally, but not from your industry. If you follow somebody else's playbook in your category and try to do the same thing as them, you’ll end up in a derivative space or optimizing for local maxima. If you can go and take a look at companies in completely different domains, you can learn a lot. 

• At Stripe, when we launched Stripe Sigma, we looked at how people launch new programming languages, not just payments or APIs. That informed a really cool visualization on the original landing page.

• We also ran a digital “capture the flag” tournament which is usually relegated to the security domain. In one instance, tens of thousands of people competed across all six challenges, it was a huge success for developer attention in our early days.

How do you actualize good developer taste? How do you teach a scaling marketing team to have good developer taste, especially when so much of “taste” relies on voice and tone?

A lot of marketing teams working on developer products can have a deeply ingrained imposter syndrome. They think that they are playing in foreign territory, that they need to prove themselves with technical fluency. 

I'd suggest cutting through that by making friends with developers and finding your trusted “advisory board” of developers and devrel folks internally to whom you can pass dumb ideas by and get feedback. These folks are usually a wealth of advice, but also will not hold back in criticizing where the work falls flat. Don't feel like you need to sit in the cave and come out with this wonderful developer campaign. Instead, pressure test it with actual developers and engineers. You'll build up that voice over time. This is a very learnable skill.  

Something I often speak about with founders of dev tools is whether marketing needs to be able to code or not. How do you think about this when you're hiring?

I have good news and bad news on this front, the good news is I don't think it has to be a requirement. You can be a very technically fluent marketer without being technical yourself, but you need to have the superpower of making friends with very technical people in order to beef up your technical fluency. (Plug: my good friend Cristina recently did a great course about this very topic!)

The bad news is, I think for the first marketing hire at some of these companies, it does help to be technical yourself. I started off my career as a front-end developer at Google before I jumped to the marketing side, and I think that perspective helped unlock a certain bit of that technical translation that has served me well in developer-facing roles.

Let's talk for a minute about building growth marketing teams to acquire developers. What are the fundamental requirements for a developer oriented growth marketing engine, and how does that differ from the standard growth marketing at a B2B SaaS company?

Again, a sort of controversial answer here is that it's not all that different between B2D and B2B. This is surprising because B2B feels so viscerally different when it's put into market, but the process of creating the demand is not all that different. 

Emily & Kathleen over at MKT1 have a really good framework for this which proposes that in marketing you have the concept of engines and the concept of fuel. Engines are the vehicles or the channels with which you reach your audiences, and the fuel is the content or the collateral that ends up actually fueling the engine and making it go.

As long as you're very mindful of the different fuel, you’ll find the engines themselves are quite similar: events, paid media, brand work, content, SEO - you’re still doing all of these. Some small differences might be in CTAs - you might want to ask developers to join a community or try a product instead of booking a sales call.

At Retool we set up a bunch of “lightning demo” online events (please don’t call them webinars) where we would actually go into the product and show you how to build an app within the product alongside our customers. And that actually worked very well for us compared to something like a “talking head” case study that many pure B2B companies succeed with. Still a webinar, but different “fuel.” 

How have you seen marketing changing as a result of AI? Do you think that developer marketing in particular will have any unique impacts or new developments because of AI?

Of course, people think about blog posts, and writing, but actually even just research and brainstorming are really great functions for ChatGPT. For instance, ideating how to approach personalization in sales emails - not just the personalized email outputs itself - ChatGPT is a great brainstorm partner. 

You hear a lot about T-shaped marketers - folks who are great at product marketing, or growth, or content - AI can help round out their skillsets. ChatGPT can help do data analysis, even if that isn’t your own superpower innately, it now can be. 

It’s really most powerful when the whole org invests though. It gets more helpful if you integrate it with systems like CRMs or project management tools to automate workflows, not just generate content.

You still have to do the work of making sure you understand your users really deeply. AI can be a catalyst and an accelerant, but it doesn’t replace strong strategy and a differentiated approach. A listicle or shallow piece of content is still going to flop with developers, whether or not AI helps you write it.

Lightning round!

Any marketing frameworks that you love?

It’s not marketing specific, but I love the RACI framework. So much marketing work is cross functional, it’s essential for keeping work on track. 

Marketing stack favorites?

ChatGPT and Gong. I use ChatGPT multiple times a day to get work done. Gong is excellent for synthesizing customer research, doing win/loss analysis and all without having to bug sales or schedule multiple calls with customers and annoy them. 

Are there developer brands that you have your eye on or think are really great? 

• Linear - their developer taste is so good.

• Vercel - they’ve done excellent category creation and have won over the JavaScript community in a way that is admirable.

• PostHog - they do fantastic content work, so straightforward. They clearly understand the developer audience and mindset. 

You advise a lot of startups: what's the marketing advice that you find yourself giving again and again?

I’ve said this once before, but the first job of marketing for a startup is being a diagnostician. You need to understand your go to market motion, your biggest challenges, the dynamics of your funnel, and then layer in the strategies to solve those problems and grow the business.

Instead of copying the playbook of successful companies, think to yourself “what was some of the surrounding context that made that particular strategy work at that company?” For instance - Stripe had this very high inbound volume, so some of the things that we invested in were brand, self-serve materials, docs and a fantastic website that had to do the work of what typically a salesperson would do. This made sense in the context, awareness levels, and competitive environment that Stripe was operating in. 

Instead of just following the output of the strategy, you have to think about the inputs of the strategy instead. I would suggest that founders try to apply lessons from companies in similar contextual environments.

Huge thanks to Krithika for joining us on the newsletter today. As you can tell, she’s an all star. You can follow Krithika on LinkedIn and Twitter/X.