How we get users

We'd rather earn attention than rent it. That shapes almost every choice about how people find our products, and how they decide to trust them and the company behind them.

The culture is the marketing

Building in public, this handbook, the honest writing, the prices with the markup in plain sight: that is the distribution strategy. People who have never used anything we make can already read exactly how the company runs and how we think, and that earns more trust than any campaign we could buy. It also carries over: someone who trusts how Flagon works has a reason to try the next product, even though it wears its own name. See open source and building in public for why it's the whole plan.

Bottom-up and developer-led

The developer who feels the problem finds the product, tries it for real, and brings it into their team because it made their week better. No demo wall in front of the product, no sales call to get started, no gate between a curious person and the thing working. Adoption starts with one person solving one real problem, and grows from there.

We earn word of mouth

The best distribution we have is someone telling a colleague "this actually fixed the thing." You only get that by being genuinely useful and honest, over and over, including when it's inconvenient. We optimize for the person in front of us being glad they used it, and trust that a lot of small, real recommendations beat one loud, bought one. Why that recommendation is the whole growth strategy, and not just one channel among many, is its own chapter.

What we won't do

No dark patterns, no manufactured urgency, no growth tricks that only work because someone wasn't paying attention. If a tactic would give us the ick as a user, it's out, no matter what it would do to the numbers this quarter.