Soooooo, Plug.Dev is three years old 🎂 Most people don't know this. . but I started Plug with about €7k in my bank account. The first thing we built was a profile where technical creators could show their work and receive bookings. There was no company side and no revenue and I hadn’t set out to build an agency. After years of building developer communities, I wanted to make something useful for the people teaching and supporting developers. I shared with a few creators I knew for feedback, then creators began sharing Plug with each other. The first 50ish creators signed up to our platform before we had a single devtool customer. And when that first customer came, it was from a creator referral. There was no formal referral program or incentive. Someone we’d built for trusted us enough to put our name forward. More introductions followed, first from creators and then from companies. Three years on, our team works with some of the world’s leading devtools. We’ve built a lot more than that first profile, but creators remain at the centre of Plug. We call them Creators That Code, and the approach we’ve built around them Creator-Led Growth for Devtools. I’m grateful to the creators who got us started, the devtool customers who trusted us early on and the Plug team currently building what comes next. Thanks folks ❤️ ✌

Random fact: I built Plug.Dev from a small village, located in the mountains of a national park, one hour north of Madrid, Spain. ⛰️ Yes, my Spanish is horrendous. No, I don’t have co-founders, advisors or investors. We’re a small bootstrapped business working with devtools like Vercel, Supabase, Databricks, OpenRouter, n8n and more, helping them reach developers. Some days, the contrast feels . . . surreal!?! And I’m here, hiding away in the mountains, shouting at the dog to stop chasing a horse one minute, jumping on calls with CMOs/CEOs from devtool unicorns the next. Crazy little life, kinda cool right? Yep, that’s the post. 🤷‍♂️

Y'ALL MUST HAVE FORGOT . . . Creators That Code! AI made technical content and instant answers abundant. Developers still rely on experienced people to test, interpret and explain what actually works. The first blog I wrote for Plug.Dev was about those people: Creators That Code. They’re the independent creators, engineers, founders, DevRel practitioners, educators and community experts helping developers learn, build and even influence decisions. Some have large audiences. Others contribute through open-source projects, inside companies or technical communities. What connects them is technical credibility, useful creation, novel insights and the ability to help that work reach others. Three years into building Plug, they feel more important than ever. Here's the blog post: lnkd.in/e73T7_CS

Around 3 years ago, I ran the first @posthog dev influencer campaign, it was an experiment... aaand it flopped. I missed the ICP, picked the wrong creators, and chose content formats that didn’t fit. With no rules in place, the whole thing felt more like ads than education, and worst of all, not enough content even made it live. Thanks for letting me be your guinea pig, @posthog (@james406 + Charles) 🙏 Sorry it was sh*t, but I learned a lot. That failed campaign contributed to the foundation for Plug.Dev What I realized wasn’t just that creators mattered... it was how broken the process was. Back then, I was cold DM-ing creators, stuck in endless back-and-forth comms, chasing invoices and payments one by one, throwing UTMs in email threads, and drafting legal contracts manually. It was messy, slow, and not scalable. Fast forward to today: we now run creator programs for the world’s leading DevTool brands... now with a platform that fixes all those pain points and a specialist team to support scaling programs: ICP-matched creators, streamlined outreach and bookings, one invoice for everything, built-in UTMs and analytics, and contracts handled from the start. That early flop showed me exactly what was broken, and those learnings helped inform priorities whilst building Plug.dev ... so yeah, cheers posthog 🦔🙏