Semgrep: Selling security to developers who distrust marketing.

Developer tools have a marketing problem most categories do not: the person evaluating you writes software for a living, has seen every dark pattern, and will close the tab the moment a claim outruns the product.

Semgrep had the product and the developer credibility. What it did not have was a repeatable path from a developer running the open-source scanner to a security team signing an enterprise contract. Acquisition cost was high because the funnel leaked between those two states, and the company was competing for enterprise budget against incumbents roughly ten times its size with the brand recognition to match.

The first job was onboarding, because that is where the money was leaking. We rebuilt the path a developer takes from first scan to a working setup inside their CI, then instrumented it so we could see which step lost people.

Cutting customer acquisition cost by 40% came out of that work, not out of spending less. When the product-led path converts, you stop paying salespeople to do what onboarding should have done.

You cannot outspend a competitor ten times your size. You can be more useful than them on the exact page where a buyer is deciding.

So we built the competitive comparison pages properly: data-driven, specific about where each tool wins, honest enough that a developer would send one to a colleague. They became some of the highest converting assets on the site, which is what happens when the buyer trusts the source.

Behind the pages sat the sales side of the same argument. Battlecards, an enablement program, and a proof-of-value framework with written success criteria agreed before an evaluation started, so deals were judged against what the buyer actually said mattered. Structured evaluations win more often than open-ended ones, and they close faster.