Pennarun: Tailscale grew primarily through word of mouth and Hacker News hits
Avery Pennarun · How his $2B startup grew to $10M+ ARR with zero marketing. | Avery Pennarun, Founder of Tailscale · PMF Show · Jun 9, 2025 · at 37:39
Avery Pennarun, co-founder and CEO of Tailscale, describes how organic developer word-of-mouth and technical blogging drove early customer acquisition.
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“And that was the number one way tail scale spread is just through word of mouth. And then yes, we kept on writing blog posts. We, for whatever reason, the early people at tail scale are popular blog post writers that seem to like. We would write something. It would often get to the front page of Hacker News. I still can't explain why that happens. It's really not a voting block, even though we're accused of that sometimes.”
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