The CEO behind Cursor said that the AI coding tool has spread from YC startups to technology giants thanks to only two things.
Michael Truell, CEO and 25 -year -old co -founder of the startup behind Cursor, said in June a combiner event in June that the growth of the company did not come from splashing marketing. After a first push on social networks, the founders passed the Monk mode, eliminating distractions to focus on improving products. Then they left satisfied users carry the rest.
“We live in a way as monks in 2023 and we just focused on the product,” said Truell in a cat by the fire published on Wednesday on Youtube Channel by Combinator. “And it really spreads from word of mouth.”
The team has sometimes debated the question of whether the cursor was good enough and if it was time to pay energy in growth engineering, said Truell, adding that they had even directed short sprints on these efforts.
But the results were negligible compared to the impact they obtained by simply improving the product, he added.
In the very early stages of launching the cursor in 2023, the team tried to “evangelize” the AI tool on social networks, which helped them build a waiting list of early users, said Truell.
“It was useful to start us started,” he said. “But after that, we are getting away from it.”
Cursor’s mother company, Anysphere, raised $ 900 million to an assessment of $ 9.9 billion, the company announced in June. The company lists Stripe, Instacart and Shopify as customers.
Business Insider reported the same month that Amazon was in talks with Cursor to adopt the internal AI coding tool.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that in the call of May winnings that Cursor, an AWS Cloud client, was a key engine behind “the explosion of coding agents”.
The major technology leaders also used the cursor to vibrate the code. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in June that he had built a personalized web page with the AI coding tool with casual.
Truell and Cursor did not respond to a request for comments from Business Insider.
Marketing for IA startups
All AI startups do not think that marketing is redundant. Some people look into it.
The viral startup of the “cheating” AI Cluelley is betting on influencers to stimulate growth.
Cluelley must be “the greatest” on Instagram and Tiktok, CEO and co -founder Chungin “Roy” Lee said on a podcast in June. “Each large company is known by ordinary people,” he added.
Lee had previously told Bi that its main objective for Cluelley was to reach 1 billion views on all platforms.
Other startups continue what is called AEO or responds to engine optimization – the next generation of SEO as chatbots is increasingly replacing search engines.
Business Insider reported in May that dozens of AEO startups and tools have been launched in recent months, all promising to help online companies are appeared when AI models answer user questions.
“There must have been 30 AEO product launches in recent months, all trying to do what SEO did 20 years ago,” said David Slater, a marketing director who worked at Mozilla, Salesforce and other technological companies. “It will absolutely be a hot space.”
