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- Cloudflare's "Product as Marketing" Playbook
Cloudflare's "Product as Marketing" Playbook
PLUS: Lessons Learned Generating 5,000 AI Personas
Startup Spells 🪄
October 26, 2025
Cloudflare's "Product as Marketing" Playbook
Product as marketing works when you build something useful and give it to your target audience. Cloudflare nailed this strategy with their 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver and Warp VPN.
The web infrastructure company turned a simple utility into a powerhouse by launching it as a free public DNS service. Millions now use it for faster, private DNS lookups. And they made a VPN called Warp on top of it.
Two reasons it worked:
1. It was free
Cloudflare gave away Warp, a free VPN service built on top of the 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver. Free always wins attention.
2. The URL is stupidly easy to remember
Four ones. That's it. So everyone linked back to it naturally in articles, forum posts, and tutorials.
The 1.1.1.1 site ranks extremely well and has earned countless backlinks in tech communities. While not traditional content marketing, the DNS resolver indirectly promotes Cloudflare's brand as performance-focused. The SEO benefits flow naturally from endless discussions comparing DNS providers, all linking back to Cloudflare.
Simple domain. Free service. Backlinks everywhere.
That's how you market an infrastructure company.
Top Tweets of the day
1/
this is an amazing lesson in pricing
too many people price their products at a point that tries to satisfy everyone
reality is that for many products 99% of people would never pay a penny and 1% have a very inelastic willingness to pay
optimise your pricing for that 1%
— Matt (@mattgittleson)
2:27 PM • Oct 25, 2025
Charging $899 makes the product even more legit. People making $200K/year don't mind paying for it plus if the experiment works out, they make millions with just 1000 customers.
2/
Vertical subreddits are becoming small mafias. I can relate, small story time.
For a long time, we used f5bot.com to get alerts every time someone mentioned ScrapingBee on Reddit.
(Terrific free tool, by the way.)It used to happen a few times a week, I’d check
— Pierre de Wulf (@PierreDeWulf)
8:29 AM • Oct 25, 2025
Proof of Reddit Mods deleting competitor comments.
Little known hack: Partner up with Reddit Mods of niche subreddits and give them affiliate money to promote your product. I know a Reddit scheduler that promotes itself on large NSFW subreddits with mod help.
3/
2 years ago, I paid $68,000 to join the 8-Figure Boardroom business mastermind. This is more than my entire annual salary when I was a copywriter at 26.
The ROI has been over $5,000,000.
So, I paid $68,000 AGAIN last year.
Here are 3 mental models I've learned so far:
— Nicolas Cole 🚢👻 (@Nicolascole77)
12:26 PM • Oct 25, 2025
Love the last bit → Model #3: Role → QC → QC The QC.
Rabbit Holes
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