Overview

How marketing works

Marketing at SucuriLabs is a collaborative effort across all the company teams.

Teams channels to know

To keep up with what’s shipped across the company, join #changelog – what’s just shipped. Owned by the Engineering team and updated constantly as PRs merge.

The channel is populated by agentic workflows that scan merged PRs and feature flag changes in the SucuriLabs products repo and summarize them into it. PRs that are still behind a feature flag stay out, based on the Release status section of the repo PR template.

Marketing values

1. Be opinionated
2. Pull, don’t push
3. No sneaky bs or fear mongering
4. No AI slop please

1. Be opinionated

SucuriLabs makes your email and organization safer – that’s the vision our marketing and content need to reflect, and not dilute it with boring corporate-speak. (For the canonical positioning, see Brand foundations.)

When we write content, we take a firm stance on what we believe is right.

How we say it – clear, direct, honest, and with room for genuine humor – lives in the voice & tone guide. The short version: we have a distinctive, weird company culture and we share it with customers rather than putting on a fake corporate persona. SucuriLabs should not look like a generic B2B SaaS company.

(Sometimes we may use terminology like ‘return on investment’ because that’s the standard marketing term for a well-understood concept. That’s ok and that’s allowed.)

2. Pull, don’t push

We focus on word of mouth by default.

We believe customers will judge us first and foremost on our product (i.e. our app, our website, and our docs). We won’t set ourselves up for long-term success if we push customers into using us.

If a customer doesn’t choose SucuriLabs, that means either:

1. The product isn’t good enough
2. The product isn’t the right solution for them
3. We didn’t communicate the product and its benefits well enough

We don’t believe companies will be long-term customers of a competitor because they did a better job of spamming them with generic marketing.

Tackling point (1) is the responsibility of everyone at SucuriLabs. The job of marketing teams is to avoid spending time advertising to people in point (2), and making sure we do a great job avoiding point (3).

This means:

• Making sure our comms are extremely high quality;
• Sharing our messages in the right places, where relevant users can see them;
• Spending enough time and/or money in those places so that our messages get through.

3. No sneaky bs or fear mongering

Our ICP is technical and acutely aware of the misleading, exaggerated, and tedious marketing tactics that cybersecurity companies use to try and entice them. Stop. It’s a lack of respect to them and the marketing people creating the content.

4. No AI slop

AI can help with brainstorming, research, and drafting plans or outlines. Use it to explore ideas, understand a subject, or work out where to start.

But it can’t replace the human element: our experience, taste, and point of view. We don’t use it to write copy, make creatives, or create content. We do that ourselves.

Use AI to speed up your work, not to do your job for you. Handing our marketing over to it produces generic work and undermines customer trust. People should be able to tell that someone at SucuriLabs cared enough to make it.

For these reasons, we:

• Don’t use any fear mongering or deceptive marketing tactics. Customer trust is more important than making our marketing team’s lives easier.

• Don’t make claims about our product that are not 100% genuine and verifiable. And we don’t make promises for future functionality either beyond what’s already released or on our public roadmap.

• Don’t unfairly criticize or make false claims about our competitors. We will compare ourselves to them to help customers make a decision, and occasionally they may be a better solution for what a customer needs. You can always crack a joke about this.

• Don’t spam customers with ‘deals’, pop-ups, and other annoying dark patterns. These affect customer trust in the long term.

• Don’t pretend our customers are different from us (i.e. more gullible, more susceptible to marketing). We are an engineering-led team building products for other security engineers. If you wouldn’t like it, assume our customers wouldn’t either.

• When doing cold outbound, do it tastefully. When was the last time you read the 5th email a company sent you and thought “ok yes, I now want to use this product”? Never… Therefore, keep it low-volume, thoughtful, and relevant.

Marketing vision

Beyond our company mission and strategy, we have some marketing-specific areas we want to focus on.

Things we want to be excellent at

• Word of mouth mindset: We want to build a hugely successful company driven primarily by word of mouth, rather than paid ads or PR. This means being known for quality in all things we do.
• Helping our customers be safe: Through our docs, tutorials, newsletter, emails, video, and so on, we help our customers be more safe, both generally in their day to day, and as users of SucuriLabs.
• Launches: Our teams ship a lot of products and features. We need launches to break through the noise and get noticed. This helps create the momentum our products need to succeed.
• World-class documentation: We work with the engineering team to maintain up-to-date, high-quality docs. We work to ensure users can discover them. Doing this enables users to “self-serve”, discover what they need, and get the most out of SucuriLabs.
• Conferences: We have been involved in some conferences, but we are still figuring out “our way” to do them. We don’t just want to be a name on the list. We want to create impact.
• Social media: Specifically LinkedIn, where we’ve seen good traction posting on our personal accounts and the SucuriLabs brand account. We want to start posting more there and on Twitter/X. We don’t use other social media channels.
• Paid ads: While we don’t run a lot of paid ads on Google and others, we want to be good at this, but do it in a way unique to ourselves. We’re not just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. We have a minimum bar we want and need to hit.
• Graphics: We’re not the most aesthetically focused team, but creating visuals and animations is a great way to communicate complex ideas. They also make for excellent content. You can just create a basic version and get the design pros on the team to help.

Things we don’t want to spend time on

• Optimizing marketing spend: We’re more concerned about growing fast than being the most efficient marketing team. Go fast, run experiments, look for upside.

• PR: If we do word of mouth well, our community will be far more valuable/credible than an appearance in TechCrunch.

• Being cool and interesting people in online communities: There are a bunch of communities we could be more active in like Reddit and Discord, but we’d prefer to focus on our own community first.

• Short-form video: We want to try it, but not right now. Our audience might be there, but it isn’t urgent enough.