How Dev Products Grow: Bottom-Up Adoption and the Open-Source Wedge

Part of the Dev Tools for PMs series.

In 2009, Twilio's Jeff Lawson stood in front of a thousand people at a San Francisco meetup and, instead of explaining his product, live-coded a conference line and asked everyone to phone in. The room went wild, and that demo became the template for how developer products grow. This episode unpacks the playbook Twilio invented: self-serve onboarding, usage-based pricing, and expansion by default (its IPO filing showed ~155% net dollar expansion). Then the modern remix: how Vercel, Supabase, and Resend use open source as the wedge and launch rituals as the growth channel. Plus the honest counter-case: survivorship bias, the enterprise wall, and why developer love alone doesn't pay salaries.