Manifesto

Why I Built Communium

I spent a decade running GTM for CAD Exchanger, a devtools startup that scaled from $0 to $5M ARR. I built the self-serve PLG motion that eventually pulled in 100K+ monthly developer visitors and closed accounts like NASA, Siemens, Airbus, and Tesla without bloated sales teams.

One of the most insightful moments I had while building this motion was an experiment I called “Project Stargaze.” Using the GitHub API, I fetched 34,000 stargazers across five open-source repositories and extracted 12 structured fields per profile — job title, company, location, bio tone, social presence. It turned out to be a goldmine. My funnel had never been this informed, this data-driven, before. And I kept asking myself the same question: why would anyone cold-message a stranger on LinkedIn when you could talk to someone who just starred your repo — or even better — your closest competitor's repo? You already know they're interested. They just haven't talked to you yet.

I remember thinking I'd invented something — I even had a name for it in my head: “midbound.” Not inbound, because they never signed up. Not outbound, because you're not spraying and praying your message. I felt like a genius for about a day, until I looked it up and found out there's an entire category — and a company literally called Midbound — built on exactly that idea. Turns out I'd rediscovered something. Fine by me. It meant I was right.

Everything in this manifesto follows from that midbound insight. This unlocked the way to build our developer community in 4 stages: Awareness, Trust, Engagement, Pipeline.

01

Awareness

Before anyone engages with your product, they have to have seen you — repeatedly, without pressure. Impressions on Google, impressions on social, an ad that shows up once a week and never gets clicked.

02

Trust

Once your product has made a few impressions on the person, it's time to spark interest and involve "borrowed trust": seeing your product show up somewhere they already trust — a YouTube creator they follow, a tweet by a developer they respect, a mention on Reddit or Hacker News. That's the moment a passive impression turns into "let me go look this up myself." They search.

03

Engagement

They land on your site. If the experience is good, they're ready to engage. But joining a Discord, opening an issue, reviewing a PR — those are high-commitment asks for someone on their first visit. A star costs nothing and does two jobs at once: it puts you back on their GitHub feed the next time you ship, and it adds one more visible signal of social proof for the next visitor who lands on your repo undecided. And don't give me "developers don't star." Today's developers are a product of the social media generation. They sniff out social proof much stronger than the assembler veterans ever did.

04

Pipeline

And now it's time to take action. After they've seen you, trusted a third party's endorsement of you, and engaged on their own terms, outreach finally makes sense. This is midbound. You're not cold-emailing a stranger who vaguely fits an ICP spreadsheet. You're reaching someone who has already told you, with a real action, that they're interested.

I watched the mechanic work so well that CAD Exchanger eventually got acquired.

The idea never left me. Afterward, I went looking for the closest thing on the market and landed on Clay — a genuinely good tool. But replicating what I'd built internally meant a serious setup lift, and you had to bring your own GitHub API key to make it work. As a devtools founder, I already know my repo. I know my competitors' repos, and the adjacent ones serving the same audience. I just wanted to plug those in and get the right audience on the other side. Was that too much to ask? I didn't think so.

So I built exactly that. That's Communium.