Memes as a growth channel for dev tools

Some of the most-shared posts from serious infrastructure companies are jokes. That is not an accident, and it is also not a strategy you can start with. Here is how meme posting actually functions as a growth channel, and the conditions under which it backfires.

The argument against is obvious: you are selling a database, a scheduler, an authentication layer — products bought by people with budget approval and a security review. Why would you post a joke? The argument for is equally simple, and it is about arithmetic rather than tone.

Why a joke outperforms a release note

A release note is shared by people who use the product. A joke about the job is shared by everyone who has the job. The audience for “authentication now supports these providers” is your existing users; the audience for a joke about how the work feels is the entire profession.

That reach is not directly valuable — the people resharing it are not buying anything today. It is valuable the way a billboard is valuable: it determines whether your name is already familiar the next time someone needs the category. Familiarity is a real, if unglamorous, asset, and jokes buy it far more cheaply than ads.

The precondition nobody mentions

Every company account that posts jokes successfully spent years posting useful things first. The joke works because the account has standing — the audience already knows it ships, answers support, and writes decent docs. Remove that history and the same post reads as a brand trying to be relatable, which is actively repellent.

So the sequencing matters more than the content:

1. 1Year one: be useful, relentlesslyReleases, docs, answers, incident updates. Boring on purpose. This is the deposit.
2. 2Then: jokes from the founder account onlyA person is allowed to be funny immediately. A logo is not. Test your voice where the risk is lowest.
3. 3Later: let the brand account have a voiceOnce the account is known for shipping, humour reads as confidence rather than desperation.

The four jokes that work for technical products

1. The shared pain. A specific, recognisable frustration of the job. Specificity is everything — “programming is hard” is not a joke, a particular error message is.
2. The self-deprecating one. A joke where your product or your team is the butt of it. These travel unusually far because they signal you are not fragile.
3. The category observation. A wry take on how the industry behaves. Adjacent to positioning, which is why it converts better than the other three.
4. The internal artefact. A screenshot of a genuinely absurd thing that happened while building. Impossible to fake, which is exactly why it lands.

The three that backfire

• —Punching at a named competitor. It reads as insecurity, and it hands them the reply. Argue for your worldview instead — the reasoning is in how Cal.com builds in public.
• —Borrowed formats with the logo pasted in. A trending template with your product name inserted is a stock photo of a joke. Everyone can tell.
• —Anything at a user’s expense. Jokes about customers who filed dumb bugs get screenshotted and outlive the account’s goodwill by years.

The ratio

A working mix on a company account is roughly one joke for every five useful posts. On a founder account the ratio can invert without cost. If the company account’s timeline is mostly humour, the joke stops being a surprise — and the surprise is where the reach comes from.

Measuring something this fuzzy

You cannot attribute sign-ups to a meme, and pretending otherwise leads to posting more of them than is healthy. Two things are measurable:

• —Branded search volume. If your name is being searched more, recognition is doing its job.
• —“How did you hear about us?” One free-text field at sign-up. When people start writing “saw you on X”, you have your answer.

Everything else — likes, reposts, follower spikes — tells you the joke was funny, which you already knew. Do not let those numbers pull the account away from the posts that actually sell the product, like the release formats covered in 5 launch post formats that actually worked.

The summary, if you skipped to the end

Memes are a reach subsidy for accounts that have already earned trust with useful posts. Start on the founder account, keep them specific to the work, never aim them at a competitor or a customer, and hold the ratio at about one in five. Done that way, a joke is the cheapest brand awareness available to a small company. Done as a shortcut, it is just a logo talking to nobody.

See the pattern across products in the meme posts in the library, or compare an account’s jokes with its release posts on Supabase and Cal.com. Request any product that is missing — requests come with the Pro plan on pricing.