Convex growth playbook

Move the research to convex.dev/research/agents-break-postgres, link it from the homepage, the Supabase and SQL compare pages and the docs on transactions. Launch it properly: a Stack post with the method and repo, a short founder thread, a Hacker News submission written by the engineer who ran it, and the raw data downloadable.

It is substance, not hype: reproducible numbers about a failure developers fear, presented the way skeptical engineers trust. That is exactly the bar the Head of Marketing brief sets.

• Postgres experts call it unfair

  Publish the prompts and invite them to rerun with their own guidance.

• Your websiteResearch page "The backend platform your agents can't break" (served at chef.convex.dev): frontier coding agents one-shot the same ten apps on Postgres and on Convex; "9 out of 10 apps silently corrupted data on Postgres. None of them did on Convex." A shopping-cart app on Postgres falls to 28% correct updates at 256 concurrent shoppers while Convex holds at 100%.Source
• HiringProduct Marketer: "We ship frequently, but aren't great at talking about it"; "Once developers find us they tend to stick around"; "we'd sooner publish a 'how to give Convex less money' post than pretend what we do is magic"; owns launches end to end and writes the post and cuts the assets; "connective tissue between engineering, developer experience, design, and creators".Source
• HiringHead of Marketing: "At a company our stage the founders (James and Jamie) are the de facto CMO(s)"; own positioning, launches, content, community, events and brand; "Decide what we don't do. Pick the two or three motions that matter most and go deep"; "nothing hypey, nothing generic, nothing we'd be embarrassed to put in front of a skeptical engineer"; "Ship a bunch of cool marketing nobody would believe came from a database company."Source

Every Friday, a short Stack post and email to active developers: what shipped, why it matters, one code snippet each, and a link to docs. A draft is generated from merged release notes; the Product Marketer edits for voice and cuts anything that is not interesting.

Momentum is one of the three beliefs the founders say Convex needs ("Convex is alive"), and a steady cadence shows it without a single ad.

• Becomes filler

  Skip a week rather than send a thin one.

• HiringProduct Marketer: "We ship frequently, but aren't great at talking about it"; "Once developers find us they tend to stick around"; "we'd sooner publish a 'how to give Convex less money' post than pretend what we do is magic"; owns launches end to end and writes the post and cuts the assets; "connective tissue between engineering, developer experience, design, and creators".Source
• Your websiteStack post "Everything We Tried Failed Except for This One Weird Trick": the team tried newsletters, paid creators, Google and Reddit ads and an AEO agency (fired). Paid traffic had 3.3x shorter sessions, 2.5x the bounce rate and zero conversions; about $100k on newsletters and creators in two months brought visitors "who didn't actually build anything". What worked was the startup program: that cohort "compounds their Convex spend 30x over 24 months". The plan: more in-person events, bigger budgets for supporting demanding customers, "fewer paid sponsorships", built on trust, aliveness and recommendation.Source
• programmable.infoSite scan: 502 URLs including 181 component pages, 116 TypeScript guide pages, 62 event pages, 36 templates, 24 Databased podcast episodes, 23 "can do" pages, 6 hackathons, 5 compare pages (SQL, MongoDB, Appwrite, Firebase, Supabase), 5 evals pages and a single case study (Conduit). npm package "convex" about 1 million weekly downloads; 23,800 GitHub stars across the org (convex-backend 12,700); YouTube 13,800 subscribers, 416 videos, 1.4 million views; 63 Hacker News mentions. Named customers include OpenAI, Tripadvisor, a16z, Zapier and Reducto.Source

Pick five signals (first production deploy, custom domain, a second developer invited, auth configured, function calls past a threshold) and when a team hits three, post it in a channel where an engineer sends a short, specific note: what they noticed, one tip for their stack, and an offer to help, with no meeting link.

Help from an engineer at the right moment is "technical, specific, and earned", the only kind of outreach the brief allows, and it starts relationships with the startups that compound 30x.

• Feels like surveillance

  Mention only what the team shipped publicly or in the dashboard, and offer help, not a call.

• HiringGTM Engineer, the first: "Every week thousands of developers sign up for Convex"; "model which deploys are getting serious, surface intent the moment a team crosses a threshold, and route it to the right play or the right human"; "agent + human-in-the-loop outbound that's genuinely useful"; "We are deeply allergic to slop"; "the most valuable signal lives in product usage, not a lead form".Source
• Your websiteStack post "Everything We Tried Failed Except for This One Weird Trick": the team tried newsletters, paid creators, Google and Reddit ads and an AEO agency (fired). Paid traffic had 3.3x shorter sessions, 2.5x the bounce rate and zero conversions; about $100k on newsletters and creators in two months brought visitors "who didn't actually build anything". What worked was the startup program: that cohort "compounds their Convex spend 30x over 24 months". The plan: more in-person events, bigger budgets for supporting demanding customers, "fewer paid sponsorships", built on trust, aliveness and recommendation.Source
• Your websitePricing: Free & Starter ($0 and pay as you go, 1-6 developers), Professional at $25 per developer a month (log streaming, exception reporting, HIPAA/SOC 2 reports, daily backups, custom domains), and Business & Enterprise with a $2,500 monthly minimum. Startups can get up to a year of Professional free; the program lists YC and NEO companies and investors such as OpenAI Fund, Index Ventures and Accel.Source

Give every startup program founder a personal link: the friend gets an extra six months of Professional on acceptance, the referrer gets added credits and a dinner invitation. Applications through a link skip the queue but still meet the bar.

It amplifies the exact channel the founders say works (recommendations from trusted builders) and keeps the program selective.

• Quality drops

  Same review bar for referred startups.

• Your websiteStack post "Everything We Tried Failed Except for This One Weird Trick": the team tried newsletters, paid creators, Google and Reddit ads and an AEO agency (fired). Paid traffic had 3.3x shorter sessions, 2.5x the bounce rate and zero conversions; about $100k on newsletters and creators in two months brought visitors "who didn't actually build anything". What worked was the startup program: that cohort "compounds their Convex spend 30x over 24 months". The plan: more in-person events, bigger budgets for supporting demanding customers, "fewer paid sponsorships", built on trust, aliveness and recommendation.Source
• Your websitePricing: Free & Starter ($0 and pay as you go, 1-6 developers), Professional at $25 per developer a month (log streaming, exception reporting, HIPAA/SOC 2 reports, daily backups, custom domains), and Business & Enterprise with a $2,500 monthly minimum. Startups can get up to a year of Professional free; the program lists YC and NEO companies and investors such as OpenAI Fund, Index Ventures and Accel.Source
• Your websiteStack blog: ClawHub, the skill repository for the OpenClaw project, scaled "from 0 to 1M visitors a week in just over a month" on Convex; a new "Convex Explained" home for interactive explainers; posts on the Claude Code and Codex plugins, competitive benchmarks and incident response that builds trust; a post about planning a conference.Source

Interview three startup program companies about a scaling moment, write each as an engineering story (the numbers, the design choices, what broke) and publish under a "built on Convex" section with the founders' approval.

Trust is the first belief Convex needs, and stories from builders others respect are the "expensive and hard to fake" signal the founders describe.

• Customers decline

  Offer anonymous technical write-ups.

• programmable.infoSite scan: 502 URLs including 181 component pages, 116 TypeScript guide pages, 62 event pages, 36 templates, 24 Databased podcast episodes, 23 "can do" pages, 6 hackathons, 5 compare pages (SQL, MongoDB, Appwrite, Firebase, Supabase), 5 evals pages and a single case study (Conduit). npm package "convex" about 1 million weekly downloads; 23,800 GitHub stars across the org (convex-backend 12,700); YouTube 13,800 subscribers, 416 videos, 1.4 million views; 63 Hacker News mentions. Named customers include OpenAI, Tripadvisor, a16z, Zapier and Reducto.Source
• Your websiteStack blog: ClawHub, the skill repository for the OpenClaw project, scaled "from 0 to 1M visitors a week in just over a month" on Convex; a new "Convex Explained" home for interactive explainers; posts on the Claude Code and Codex plugins, competitive benchmarks and incident response that builds trust; a post about planning a conference.Source
• Your websiteStack post "Everything We Tried Failed Except for This One Weird Trick": the team tried newsletters, paid creators, Google and Reddit ads and an AEO agency (fired). Paid traffic had 3.3x shorter sessions, 2.5x the bounce rate and zero conversions; about $100k on newsletters and creators in two months brought visitors "who didn't actually build anything". What worked was the startup program: that cohort "compounds their Convex spend 30x over 24 months". The plan: more in-person events, bigger budgets for supporting demanding customers, "fewer paid sponsorships", built on trust, aliveness and recommendation.Source

Add a source tag to the commands in each copy of the setup prompt (homepage, docs, templates), log it on project creation, and build a simple funnel: prompt copies, ai-files installs, first deploy, production deploy. Fix the biggest drop first.

More of Convex's developers are now agents. Knowing where agent setups fail is the activation work that matters most.

• Tags removed by users

  Treat untagged setups as a separate source.

• Your websiteHomepage: "The reactive backend platform that keeps up with you and your agents. Database, functions, workflow, sync, search, file storage, and more. All TypeScript, zero glue." The first call to action is "Copy the setup prompt for your agent", which installs Convex guidelines and plugins for Claude Code and Codex. Headline changed over the last year from "The backend platform that keeps your app in sync" to "All gas, no breakages".Source
• HiringHead of Developer Experience: own how developers "and agents become great at building on Convex"; "increasingly the developer learning it is an agent rather than a person"; owns docs.convex.dev and its information architecture and the blog at stack.convex.dev; builds documentation as a function.Source
• HiringGTM Engineer, the first: "Every week thousands of developers sign up for Convex"; "model which deploys are getting serious, surface intent the moment a team crosses a threshold, and route it to the right play or the right human"; "agent + human-in-the-loop outbound that's genuinely useful"; "We are deeply allergic to slop"; "the most valuable signal lives in product usage, not a lead form".Source

Twelve to sixteen people each month: four startup program founders, the rest founders at seed and Series A who are choosing a backend. No pitch; one founder tells a scaling story. Follow up with a startup program invitation.

Choosing infrastructure is a trust decision, and founders trust peers and the people who will run their backend.

• Feels exclusive

  Publish notes from each dinner on Stack.

• Your websiteStack post "Everything We Tried Failed Except for This One Weird Trick": the team tried newsletters, paid creators, Google and Reddit ads and an AEO agency (fired). Paid traffic had 3.3x shorter sessions, 2.5x the bounce rate and zero conversions; about $100k on newsletters and creators in two months brought visitors "who didn't actually build anything". What worked was the startup program: that cohort "compounds their Convex spend 30x over 24 months". The plan: more in-person events, bigger budgets for supporting demanding customers, "fewer paid sponsorships", built on trust, aliveness and recommendation.Source
• Your websitePricing: Free & Starter ($0 and pay as you go, 1-6 developers), Professional at $25 per developer a month (log streaming, exception reporting, HIPAA/SOC 2 reports, daily backups, custom domains), and Business & Enterprise with a $2,500 monthly minimum. Startups can get up to a year of Professional free; the program lists YC and NEO companies and investors such as OpenAI Fund, Index Ventures and Accel.Source
• Your websiteEvents and community: the "All Gas" hackathon sponsored by OpenAI, Firecrawl and AgentMail, an OpenAI Build Week community meetup in San Francisco, a Founders Inc startup partnership, and a Convex Champions ambassador program; community runs on Discord.Source

Offer accelerators and venture platform teams a packaged perk (a year of Professional, an engineer office hour, priority support) and a quarterly scaling workshop for their portfolio.

It puts Convex in front of founders at the moment they choose infrastructure, through people they already trust.

• Perk fatigue

  Lead with engineer access, not discounts.

• Your websitePricing: Free & Starter ($0 and pay as you go, 1-6 developers), Professional at $25 per developer a month (log streaming, exception reporting, HIPAA/SOC 2 reports, daily backups, custom domains), and Business & Enterprise with a $2,500 monthly minimum. Startups can get up to a year of Professional free; the program lists YC and NEO companies and investors such as OpenAI Fund, Index Ventures and Accel.Source
• Your websiteStack post "Everything We Tried Failed Except for This One Weird Trick": the team tried newsletters, paid creators, Google and Reddit ads and an AEO agency (fired). Paid traffic had 3.3x shorter sessions, 2.5x the bounce rate and zero conversions; about $100k on newsletters and creators in two months brought visitors "who didn't actually build anything". What worked was the startup program: that cohort "compounds their Convex spend 30x over 24 months". The plan: more in-person events, bigger budgets for supporting demanding customers, "fewer paid sponsorships", built on trust, aliveness and recommendation.Source
• Your websiteEvents and community: the "All Gas" hackathon sponsored by OpenAI, Firecrawl and AgentMail, an OpenAI Build Week community meetup in San Francisco, a Founders Inc startup partnership, and a Convex Champions ambassador program; community runs on Discord.Source

Migration guides from the most common stacks (Postgres with Prisma or Drizzle, serverless Postgres hosts, Firebase), each with a "when not to switch" section, a schema translation and a script. Keep the respectful tone of the Supabase page.

Honesty is the brand, and a guide that says when not to switch is more persuasive to a skeptical engineer than a feature grid.

• Guides go stale

  Test them with agents every release.

• programmable.infoSite scan: 502 URLs including 181 component pages, 116 TypeScript guide pages, 62 event pages, 36 templates, 24 Databased podcast episodes, 23 "can do" pages, 6 hackathons, 5 compare pages (SQL, MongoDB, Appwrite, Firebase, Supabase), 5 evals pages and a single case study (Conduit). npm package "convex" about 1 million weekly downloads; 23,800 GitHub stars across the org (convex-backend 12,700); YouTube 13,800 subscribers, 416 videos, 1.4 million views; 63 Hacker News mentions. Named customers include OpenAI, Tripadvisor, a16z, Zapier and Reducto.Source
• Competitor researchConvex's compare page on Supabase: "an open-source alternative to Firebase" built on Postgres and other open-source projects, "a modern development experience similar to Convex"; Convex says it has "a lot of respect for Supabase". Compare pages also cover Firebase, Appwrite, MongoDB and SQL.See the research Source
• HiringHead of Developer Experience: own how developers "and agents become great at building on Convex"; "increasingly the developer learning it is an agent rather than a person"; owns docs.convex.dev and its information architecture and the blog at stack.convex.dev; builds documentation as a function.Source

A packaged offer for app-builder platforms: platform APIs for provisioning and billing, per-deployment pricing, a co-branded badge ("backend by Convex") and a shared support path. Publish a page and two platform stories.

Each platform partner creates thousands of Convex projects, and every user who graduates to production becomes a direct customer.

• Low margin per deployment

  Price per active deployment and charge for production.

• HiringCreative Director / Head of Design: the brand "has to be distinct, thoughtful, a little playful, and honest. The kind of thing a skeptical engineer trusts on sight"; works in Figma and the codebase alongside existing creative freelancers. Product Manager (the second PM): product areas include the AI gateway, platform APIs and the component ecosystem; calls with customers "to understand why their team is spinning up hundreds of deployments"; works with "our Heads of GTM and Marketing".Source
• HiringSoftware Engineer, AI: "It's not sufficient for Convex to be the best platform for agentic development, it also has to be the best platform for building agentic applications"; works with the Head of AI Ergonomics and the CTO; "Strengthen the case that Convex is the best platform for agentic development, through demos, examples, and working directly with customers."Source
• Your websiteResearch page "The backend platform your agents can't break" (served at chef.convex.dev): frontier coding agents one-shot the same ten apps on Postgres and on Convex; "9 out of 10 apps silently corrupted data on Postgres. None of them did on Convex." A shopping-cart app on Postgres falls to 28% correct updates at 256 concurrent shoppers while Convex holds at 100%.Source

Give component authors usage stats, a featured slot, a monthly author spotlight and early access to platform features. Add a "most used this week" list and a template for new components.

Recognized authors build more and share their work, which shows momentum without paid promotion.

• Low-quality components

  Review before featuring.

• programmable.infoSite scan: 502 URLs including 181 component pages, 116 TypeScript guide pages, 62 event pages, 36 templates, 24 Databased podcast episodes, 23 "can do" pages, 6 hackathons, 5 compare pages (SQL, MongoDB, Appwrite, Firebase, Supabase), 5 evals pages and a single case study (Conduit). npm package "convex" about 1 million weekly downloads; 23,800 GitHub stars across the org (convex-backend 12,700); YouTube 13,800 subscribers, 416 videos, 1.4 million views; 63 Hacker News mentions. Named customers include OpenAI, Tripadvisor, a16z, Zapier and Reducto.Source
• Your websiteStack post "Everything We Tried Failed Except for This One Weird Trick": the team tried newsletters, paid creators, Google and Reddit ads and an AEO agency (fired). Paid traffic had 3.3x shorter sessions, 2.5x the bounce rate and zero conversions; about $100k on newsletters and creators in two months brought visitors "who didn't actually build anything". What worked was the startup program: that cohort "compounds their Convex spend 30x over 24 months". The plan: more in-person events, bigger budgets for supporting demanding customers, "fewer paid sponsorships", built on trust, aliveness and recommendation.Source
• HiringCreative Director / Head of Design: the brand "has to be distinct, thoughtful, a little playful, and honest. The kind of thing a skeptical engineer trusts on sight"; works in Figma and the codebase alongside existing creative freelancers. Product Manager (the second PM): product areas include the AI gateway, platform APIs and the component ecosystem; calls with customers "to understand why their team is spinning up hundreds of deployments"; works with "our Heads of GTM and Marketing".Source

Give Champions a meetup kit, a small budget, early access and a direct line to engineers. Ask for one meetup or one post a quarter. Track recommendations (signups citing a Champion).

Local, trusted recommendations scale the founders' own trust beyond San Francisco.

• Uneven quality

  Engineers join the first meetup in each city.

• Your websiteEvents and community: the "All Gas" hackathon sponsored by OpenAI, Firecrawl and AgentMail, an OpenAI Build Week community meetup in San Francisco, a Founders Inc startup partnership, and a Convex Champions ambassador program; community runs on Discord.Source
• Your websiteStack post "Everything We Tried Failed Except for This One Weird Trick": the team tried newsletters, paid creators, Google and Reddit ads and an AEO agency (fired). Paid traffic had 3.3x shorter sessions, 2.5x the bounce rate and zero conversions; about $100k on newsletters and creators in two months brought visitors "who didn't actually build anything". What worked was the startup program: that cohort "compounds their Convex spend 30x over 24 months". The plan: more in-person events, bigger budgets for supporting demanding customers, "fewer paid sponsorships", built on trust, aliveness and recommendation.Source
• programmable.infoSite scan: 502 URLs including 181 component pages, 116 TypeScript guide pages, 62 event pages, 36 templates, 24 Databased podcast episodes, 23 "can do" pages, 6 hackathons, 5 compare pages (SQL, MongoDB, Appwrite, Firebase, Supabase), 5 evals pages and a single case study (Conduit). npm package "convex" about 1 million weekly downloads; 23,800 GitHub stars across the org (convex-backend 12,700); YouTube 13,800 subscribers, 416 videos, 1.4 million views; 63 Hacker News mentions. Named customers include OpenAI, Tripadvisor, a16z, Zapier and Reducto.Source

When a team's function calls or bandwidth grow fast, an engineer reviews their dashboard data and sends three concrete fixes (indexes, query patterns, costs). Offer a call only if they reply.

It is the opposite of a cold email: specific, earned, and it saves them money, which builds the trust the founders say Convex depends on.

• Too much engineer time

  Limit to teams above a growth threshold.

• Your websiteStack blog: ClawHub, the skill repository for the OpenClaw project, scaled "from 0 to 1M visitors a week in just over a month" on Convex; a new "Convex Explained" home for interactive explainers; posts on the Claude Code and Codex plugins, competitive benchmarks and incident response that builds trust; a post about planning a conference.Source
• HiringGTM Engineer, the first: "Every week thousands of developers sign up for Convex"; "model which deploys are getting serious, surface intent the moment a team crosses a threshold, and route it to the right play or the right human"; "agent + human-in-the-loop outbound that's genuinely useful"; "We are deeply allergic to slop"; "the most valuable signal lives in product usage, not a lead form".Source
• Your websiteStack post "Everything We Tried Failed Except for This One Weird Trick": the team tried newsletters, paid creators, Google and Reddit ads and an AEO agency (fired). Paid traffic had 3.3x shorter sessions, 2.5x the bounce rate and zero conversions; about $100k on newsletters and creators in two months brought visitors "who didn't actually build anything". What worked was the startup program: that cohort "compounds their Convex spend 30x over 24 months". The plan: more in-person events, bigger budgets for supporting demanding customers, "fewer paid sponsorships", built on trust, aliveness and recommendation.Source

Run the evals on every docs and guidelines change, publish the score over time, and block changes that make agents worse. Share the method on Stack.

It makes Convex measurably the easiest backend for agents, which is a claim nobody else can show.

• Evals overfit

  Rotate tasks each quarter.

• HiringHead of Developer Experience: own how developers "and agents become great at building on Convex"; "increasingly the developer learning it is an agent rather than a person"; owns docs.convex.dev and its information architecture and the blog at stack.convex.dev; builds documentation as a function.Source
• programmable.infoSite scan: 502 URLs including 181 component pages, 116 TypeScript guide pages, 62 event pages, 36 templates, 24 Databased podcast episodes, 23 "can do" pages, 6 hackathons, 5 compare pages (SQL, MongoDB, Appwrite, Firebase, Supabase), 5 evals pages and a single case study (Conduit). npm package "convex" about 1 million weekly downloads; 23,800 GitHub stars across the org (convex-backend 12,700); YouTube 13,800 subscribers, 416 videos, 1.4 million views; 63 Hacker News mentions. Named customers include OpenAI, Tripadvisor, a16z, Zapier and Reducto.Source
• HiringSoftware Engineer, AI: "It's not sufficient for Convex to be the best platform for agentic development, it also has to be the best platform for building agentic applications"; works with the Head of AI Ergonomics and the CTO; "Strengthen the case that Convex is the best platform for agentic development, through demos, examples, and working directly with customers."Source

A page and doc: how to export everything, how to run the open source backend yourself, what guarantees Convex makes, and how long migration would take. Give enterprise buyers a written version.

Showing the way out lowers the risk of coming in, especially for CTOs at the Business and Enterprise tier.

• Encourages churn

  Churn is driven by product, not by documentation.

• Your websiteStack post "Everything We Tried Failed Except for This One Weird Trick": the team tried newsletters, paid creators, Google and Reddit ads and an AEO agency (fired). Paid traffic had 3.3x shorter sessions, 2.5x the bounce rate and zero conversions; about $100k on newsletters and creators in two months brought visitors "who didn't actually build anything". What worked was the startup program: that cohort "compounds their Convex spend 30x over 24 months". The plan: more in-person events, bigger budgets for supporting demanding customers, "fewer paid sponsorships", built on trust, aliveness and recommendation.Source
• Your websitePricing: Free & Starter ($0 and pay as you go, 1-6 developers), Professional at $25 per developer a month (log streaming, exception reporting, HIPAA/SOC 2 reports, daily backups, custom domains), and Business & Enterprise with a $2,500 monthly minimum. Startups can get up to a year of Professional free; the program lists YC and NEO companies and investors such as OpenAI Fund, Index Ventures and Accel.Source
• programmable.infoSite scan: 502 URLs including 181 component pages, 116 TypeScript guide pages, 62 event pages, 36 templates, 24 Databased podcast episodes, 23 "can do" pages, 6 hackathons, 5 compare pages (SQL, MongoDB, Appwrite, Firebase, Supabase), 5 evals pages and a single case study (Conduit). npm package "convex" about 1 million weekly downloads; 23,800 GitHub stars across the org (convex-backend 12,700); YouTube 13,800 subscribers, 416 videos, 1.4 million views; 63 Hacker News mentions. Named customers include OpenAI, Tripadvisor, a16z, Zapier and Reducto.Source

One day in San Francisco: talks by startup program founders about real scaling, a hackathon the night before, live office hours with engineers and an open roadmap session with the founders. Record everything for Stack.

It concentrates the in-person bet into one event that produces months of content.

• Low turnout

  Keep it small and invite-led.

• Your websiteStack blog: ClawHub, the skill repository for the OpenClaw project, scaled "from 0 to 1M visitors a week in just over a month" on Convex; a new "Convex Explained" home for interactive explainers; posts on the Claude Code and Codex plugins, competitive benchmarks and incident response that builds trust; a post about planning a conference.Source
• Your websiteStack post "Everything We Tried Failed Except for This One Weird Trick": the team tried newsletters, paid creators, Google and Reddit ads and an AEO agency (fired). Paid traffic had 3.3x shorter sessions, 2.5x the bounce rate and zero conversions; about $100k on newsletters and creators in two months brought visitors "who didn't actually build anything". What worked was the startup program: that cohort "compounds their Convex spend 30x over 24 months". The plan: more in-person events, bigger budgets for supporting demanding customers, "fewer paid sponsorships", built on trust, aliveness and recommendation.Source
• Your websiteEvents and community: the "All Gas" hackathon sponsored by OpenAI, Firecrawl and AgentMail, an OpenAI Build Week community meetup in San Francisco, a Founders Inc startup partnership, and a Convex Champions ambassador program; community runs on Discord.Source

An agent-facing flow: an agent can create a project for its user, choose a plan with the user's approval, and request an upgrade when limits are hit, with every step confirmed by the human.

If agents choose backends, the backend that agents can provision fastest wins the default.

• Abuse and runaway costs

  Hard spending limits and human approval.

• Your websiteHomepage: "The reactive backend platform that keeps up with you and your agents. Database, functions, workflow, sync, search, file storage, and more. All TypeScript, zero glue." The first call to action is "Copy the setup prompt for your agent", which installs Convex guidelines and plugins for Claude Code and Codex. Headline changed over the last year from "The backend platform that keeps your app in sync" to "All gas, no breakages".Source
• HiringSoftware Engineer, AI: "It's not sufficient for Convex to be the best platform for agentic development, it also has to be the best platform for building agentic applications"; works with the Head of AI Ergonomics and the CTO; "Strengthen the case that Convex is the best platform for agentic development, through demos, examples, and working directly with customers."Source
• HiringHead of Developer Experience: own how developers "and agents become great at building on Convex"; "increasingly the developer learning it is an agent rather than a person"; owns docs.convex.dev and its information architecture and the blog at stack.convex.dev; builds documentation as a function.Source

Fund and open-source a benchmark suite: agent-built apps on many backends, load tests for correctness, published quarterly by a neutral group with an advisory board that includes competitors.

If Convex is right, an independent result is far more credible, and leading the standard keeps Convex central to the conversation.

• Convex loses a category

  Publish it anyway and fix it; credibility is the point.

• Your websiteResearch page "The backend platform your agents can't break" (served at chef.convex.dev): frontier coding agents one-shot the same ten apps on Postgres and on Convex; "9 out of 10 apps silently corrupted data on Postgres. None of them did on Convex." A shopping-cart app on Postgres falls to 28% correct updates at 256 concurrent shoppers while Convex holds at 100%.Source
• Your websiteStack blog: ClawHub, the skill repository for the OpenClaw project, scaled "from 0 to 1M visitors a week in just over a month" on Convex; a new "Convex Explained" home for interactive explainers; posts on the Claude Code and Codex plugins, competitive benchmarks and incident response that builds trust; a post about planning a conference.Source
• Competitor researchConvex's compare page on Supabase: "an open-source alternative to Firebase" built on Postgres and other open-source projects, "a modern development experience similar to Convex"; Convex says it has "a lot of respect for Supabase". Compare pages also cover Firebase, Appwrite, MongoDB and SQL.See the research Source

A series of cost-cutting guides (indexes, pagination, caching patterns) and a dashboard check that flags the three biggest savings for each project.

Helping customers spend less builds the trust that makes them stay and recommend Convex, which is worth more than the savings.

• Revenue dips

  Retention and referrals more than offset it.

• HiringProduct Marketer: "We ship frequently, but aren't great at talking about it"; "Once developers find us they tend to stick around"; "we'd sooner publish a 'how to give Convex less money' post than pretend what we do is magic"; owns launches end to end and writes the post and cuts the assets; "connective tissue between engineering, developer experience, design, and creators".Source
• Your websiteStack post "Everything We Tried Failed Except for This One Weird Trick": the team tried newsletters, paid creators, Google and Reddit ads and an AEO agency (fired). Paid traffic had 3.3x shorter sessions, 2.5x the bounce rate and zero conversions; about $100k on newsletters and creators in two months brought visitors "who didn't actually build anything". What worked was the startup program: that cohort "compounds their Convex spend 30x over 24 months". The plan: more in-person events, bigger budgets for supporting demanding customers, "fewer paid sponsorships", built on trust, aliveness and recommendation.Source
• Your websitePricing: Free & Starter ($0 and pay as you go, 1-6 developers), Professional at $25 per developer a month (log streaming, exception reporting, HIPAA/SOC 2 reports, daily backups, custom domains), and Business & Enterprise with a $2,500 monthly minimum. Startups can get up to a year of Professional free; the program lists YC and NEO companies and investors such as OpenAI Fund, Index Ventures and Accel.Source

A free job board and talent list: program companies post roles, engineers who build on Convex opt in with their projects. Feature it in the weekly email.

Helping customers hire builds goodwill and keeps their teams on Convex as they grow.

• Recruiting is a distraction

  Keep it a simple board.

• Your websiteStack post "Everything We Tried Failed Except for This One Weird Trick": the team tried newsletters, paid creators, Google and Reddit ads and an AEO agency (fired). Paid traffic had 3.3x shorter sessions, 2.5x the bounce rate and zero conversions; about $100k on newsletters and creators in two months brought visitors "who didn't actually build anything". What worked was the startup program: that cohort "compounds their Convex spend 30x over 24 months". The plan: more in-person events, bigger budgets for supporting demanding customers, "fewer paid sponsorships", built on trust, aliveness and recommendation.Source
• Your websiteEvents and community: the "All Gas" hackathon sponsored by OpenAI, Firecrawl and AgentMail, an OpenAI Build Week community meetup in San Francisco, a Founders Inc startup partnership, and a Convex Champions ambassador program; community runs on Discord.Source
• programmable.infoSite scan: 502 URLs including 181 component pages, 116 TypeScript guide pages, 62 event pages, 36 templates, 24 Databased podcast episodes, 23 "can do" pages, 6 hackathons, 5 compare pages (SQL, MongoDB, Appwrite, Firebase, Supabase), 5 evals pages and a single case study (Conduit). npm package "convex" about 1 million weekly downloads; 23,800 GitHub stars across the org (convex-backend 12,700); YouTube 13,800 subscribers, 416 videos, 1.4 million views; 63 Hacker News mentions. Named customers include OpenAI, Tripadvisor, a16z, Zapier and Reducto.Source

Five more explainers on the hard parts (reactivity, transactions, conflicts, caching, scaling), each playable in the browser and with a plain text version for agents.

Explainers earn links and teach the ideas that make Convex the right choice, without a sales pitch.

• Slow to make

  Reuse components between explainers.

• Your websiteStack blog: ClawHub, the skill repository for the OpenClaw project, scaled "from 0 to 1M visitors a week in just over a month" on Convex; a new "Convex Explained" home for interactive explainers; posts on the Claude Code and Codex plugins, competitive benchmarks and incident response that builds trust; a post about planning a conference.Source
• HiringCreative Director / Head of Design: the brand "has to be distinct, thoughtful, a little playful, and honest. The kind of thing a skeptical engineer trusts on sight"; works in Figma and the codebase alongside existing creative freelancers. Product Manager (the second PM): product areas include the AI gateway, platform APIs and the component ecosystem; calls with customers "to understand why their team is spinning up hundreds of deployments"; works with "our Heads of GTM and Marketing".Source
• HiringHead of Marketing: "At a company our stage the founders (James and Jamie) are the de facto CMO(s)"; own positioning, launches, content, community, events and brand; "Decide what we don't do. Pick the two or three motions that matter most and go deep"; "nothing hypey, nothing generic, nothing we'd be embarrassed to put in front of a skeptical engineer"; "Ship a bunch of cool marketing nobody would believe came from a database company."Source

For every customer-visible incident, publish a plain review within a week: what happened, who was affected, what changed. Link them from a reliability page with uptime history.

Trust is the first of the three beliefs Convex needs, and honest reviews prove it in the moments that matter most.

• Bad press

  Plain and honest reviews usually earn respect.

• Your websiteStack blog: ClawHub, the skill repository for the OpenClaw project, scaled "from 0 to 1M visitors a week in just over a month" on Convex; a new "Convex Explained" home for interactive explainers; posts on the Claude Code and Codex plugins, competitive benchmarks and incident response that builds trust; a post about planning a conference.Source
• Your websiteStack post "Everything We Tried Failed Except for This One Weird Trick": the team tried newsletters, paid creators, Google and Reddit ads and an AEO agency (fired). Paid traffic had 3.3x shorter sessions, 2.5x the bounce rate and zero conversions; about $100k on newsletters and creators in two months brought visitors "who didn't actually build anything". What worked was the startup program: that cohort "compounds their Convex spend 30x over 24 months". The plan: more in-person events, bigger budgets for supporting demanding customers, "fewer paid sponsorships", built on trust, aliveness and recommendation.Source
• Your websitePricing: Free & Starter ($0 and pay as you go, 1-6 developers), Professional at $25 per developer a month (log streaming, exception reporting, HIPAA/SOC 2 reports, daily backups, custom domains), and Business & Enterprise with a $2,500 monthly minimum. Startups can get up to a year of Professional free; the program lists YC and NEO companies and investors such as OpenAI Fund, Index Ventures and Accel.Source