Cloudinary and the Business Case for Developer-Led Product Growth

[00:00:03] - [Speaker 0]
What does product led growth really look like when the product is built for developers? But the business depends on scale, trust, and long term relationships. Well, in today's episode of the Tech Talks Daily podcast, we're gonna unpack this question through a conversation that sits right at the intersection of code, community, and commercial reality. My guest is from a company called Cloudinary, and they're a company that many developers already rely on without realizing just how much is happening behind the scenes because it powers image and video workflows for millions of developers and thousands of companies around the world from fast moving startups to global brands. But my guest role places him in somewhat of a rare position because he leads both developer experience and self-service growth.

[00:00:59] - [Speaker 0]
And this means he can spend his days translating between two very different worlds. On one side, developers who value clarity, reliability, and documentation that actually works. And on the other side, we have business leaders. They're focused on sustainable revenue, experimentation, and growth that doesn't collapse under its own weight. But what makes this conversation particularly interesting, instead of leading with marketing, they invested early in support.

[00:01:29] - [Speaker 0]
Instead of treating documentation as an afterthought, they turned it into a strategic asset. And instead of chasing growth at all costs, they chose profitability and sustainable growth from day one. And all these things collectively force sharper decisions about what works and what doesn't. And if you're a developer listening, that's your kind of language. Right?

[00:01:54] - [Speaker 0]
And whether you are building products for developers or leading a product led organization or just simply curious about how trust can become a growth engine, I think this episode will have plenty to think about. But enough from me. Let me officially introduce you to my guest right now. So a massive warm welcome to the show. Can I tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do?

[00:02:22] - [Speaker 1]
Thanks, Neil. My name is Sanjay Saurathi, and I work for a company called Cloudinary, and we are an SaaS based image and video platform. My official title is vice president of self-service and developer experience, and I wear two hats, actually, Neil. I I wear a business hat, and that business hat is being responsible for our volume business, what we call our self-service business, which makes up about 25 to 30% of our overall revenue. And I also wear what I like to call a persona hat where we're responsible for the feeding and caring of the developer community, which is our primary user community.

[00:03:04] - [Speaker 1]
But those two hats actually come together and complement each other very well because our primary audience are often the folks who initially use the product, recommend the product, and the self-service business are off in a lot of cases are the people that purchase the product. So, there's a technical side of of the work we do, and there's a business side of the work we do.

[00:03:31] - [Speaker 0]
And kudos to you. And the reason I say that is you you said you wear the business hat, the persona hat, the technical hat, looking after the developer community. And you're right. They do complement each other, but being able to talk both those languages, and they are very different, is a skill on itself, isn't it? There's not not too many people out there that can do that.

[00:03:50] - [Speaker 0]
You're probably too humble to admit it, but it it is a skill, isn't it?

[00:03:54] - [Speaker 1]
It is. And I think it's one where I've learned a lot over the the the years that I've been doing this at at Cloudinary and and understanding when to really put on the hat that makes the most sense is something that, you know, I've just learned to both appreciate and understand how to how to do it over the years.

[00:04:18] - [Speaker 0]
And as you said, you oversee developer experiences and self-service at Cloudinary. And your role that sits right at the intersection of product, growth, and community. So how do you define a strong PLG motion when the primary audience is developers? Is that is that tricky?

[00:04:37] - [Speaker 1]
Well, I think it was very helpful to have the foundation set by the founders themselves who are three developers. And the three founders wanted to build a SaaS solution that they themselves as developers would use day in and day out. So they said, hey. How do we create Cloudinary such that folks like ourselves would be excited about using it? So the fact that that foundation was laid down by the founders makes it made it, I think, a significantly easier task.

[00:05:16] - [Speaker 1]
And the idea is really about earning developer trust, and that comes in a number of different forms. It's about the fact that the platform works. It's about the fact that what we put into our documentation maps to what actually happens in the product. So that concept of trust that we do what we say and the product works as we outline. It works in the documentation.

[00:05:43] - [Speaker 1]
The trust is very central to to our whole ethos and our culture. And earning that trust allows adoption to happen, allows long term loyalty to happen, allows revenue to happen, allows word-of-mouth to happen. So the PLG motion is enhanced by sort of building that developer trust that really was rooted in the foundation of how the company was started.

[00:06:10] - [Speaker 0]
And the platform does bring in thousands of developer sign ups every single day. And I'm curious, what did you learn early on about what developers actually need from a self-service experience versus what companies often might assume that they want? Because very often, they can be completely different.

[00:06:27] - [Speaker 1]
I think one of the bets we made early on, Neil, that has proven to be very useful for us and may have been counterintuitive was even before we invested in what I guess now is called growth marketing and go to market motions and branding and whatnot, we actually invested very early on in technical support. One of the earliest first three, four employees we hired is currently was on the support side. He's now he runs in entire support organization for Cloudinary. And the idea is even though we want a lot of things to be self-service, developers still care about being successful and support was necessary especially with a new with a brand new product and a and a brand new category. Investing in that support and making that successful, making developers successful was I think one of the best bets and maybe not something that everybody thinks about when you first think about a PLG motion and think about a self-service experience.

[00:07:32] - [Speaker 1]
A lot of folks immediately think about how do you scale go go to market experience. So but it worked for us, and it actually helped us scale.

[00:07:42] - [Speaker 0]
And throughout my career, my conversations with developers, I know that they are or they tend to be skeptical of marketing claims, very suspicious. And how do you earn trust through things like product design, documentation, and tooling rather than traditional sales messaging? Because by the large part, that doesn't work with a developer community. They're much wiser than that.

[00:08:04] - [Speaker 1]
You're absolutely right. It's you know, developer marketing in a lot of ways is a bit of an oxymoron, but I'll I'll lean into maybe documentation because one of the areas I'm responsible for is that and talk a little bit about what we've done there. And what we've discovered is it's important not just to talk about the what of the product, so the specific features, the specific APIs, refer and components of the product, but the how. So for example, the team create has created and continues to create these guides that showcase use cases that combine a lot of different features. So if you are, for example, a developer at an ecommerce company, one of our target verticals, then you have this ability to give you examples of how you can take advantage of Cloudinary in the context of images and videos that are on your ecommerce site.

[00:09:11] - [Speaker 1]
And we go through different sort of how to's. And so the the ability to combine the what and the how, we found to be very relevant and very interesting. We've also done a lot more of embedding of videos so that we break up the text with little videos that showcase how you would actually support a particular capability or feature in in your particular environment. We've added an AI assistant to our doc site, and that is multilingual. And so that's gotten huge usage since we launched that early this year.

[00:09:57] - [Speaker 1]
And I think the combination of all those different things to say, hey, what will make a developer successful really helps versus, you know, as you mentioned, what's traditional sales messaging. And and I think the work they've done has helped them out. If I can put an old plug for the docs team, they just won an award for some of the best API work and use of AI as part of their as part of the site. And and I think that's a credit to them to really think of themselves. Our and our docs team are actually developers that write well.

[00:10:35] - [Speaker 1]
Right? So they they understand the what's needed from the people they're trying to serve.

[00:10:42] - [Speaker 0]
Quick shout out to the docs team. They're huge kudos to them. And before you came on the podcast today, I went by the website, and I quickly learned that you support and are trusted by an incredible 3,000,000 plus developers and 11,000 enterprise and hyper growth companies that that use it as a critical part of their tech stack globally. Now this is phenomenal scale. So a scale like this, where does developer advocacy show up in ways where that directly influence things like adoption and retention?

[00:11:18] - [Speaker 0]
Anything you can share around your experiences here?

[00:11:21] - [Speaker 1]
Sure. We have a developer relations team, which, again, one of the groups that I manage that does a great job of thinking through both what I like to call high touch in person type engagement where we're at very specific events or give talks at very technical workshops, but also do high create videos and do high volume types of engagement as well. I think the way we think about advocacy and one of the ways that the work that they do shows up is through what we like to call word-of-mouth. We between 15 to 20% of the registrations on our site come through a referral from a friend or a peer or somebody who they know. And from my perspective, we don't get that word-of-mouth if we're either not offering value in the first place or the developers don't feel like they can trust us.

[00:12:23] - [Speaker 1]
And so our ability to create that flywheel around advocacy, but also trust and then the word-of-mouth is what's driving the acceleration in our growth. And, you know, we're just this week, even though this is the 2026, you know, we're already seeing over 3,000 registrations a day, which, you know, people just coming back from vacation. It's it's growing even, you know, even in the first week after the holiday. So that's a huge part down to the work that the DevRel team, the docs team, and and and candidly, the developers who we support, you know, thanks to them as well.

[00:13:07] - [Speaker 0]
And I recently spoke with a founder on here who framed security work as a a growth asset once the value was made visible to the enterprise. And in in your world, how do technical capabilities like media performance, reliability, or automation, do they become clear drivers of product growth too?

[00:13:27] - [Speaker 1]
They do. It's interesting. There was a thread at the December on x slash Twitter, and they I saw it because I have an alert on Cloudinary, and the person said the reason why companies like Cloudinary have the valuation they do isn't just because of the components of the technology. It's because of all the, what they call, ITT's. Right?

[00:13:54] - [Speaker 1]
So reliability and scalability and integratability. And I think that's a huge part of our not just product growth, but success within both self-service and our enterprise markets that people companies feel like we'll grow with them as their needs and their basically, business grows that we'll scale with them and that we provide the necessary services around the core key features that make them successful. So I think that's a enormous part. One of the terms we like to use is automation at scale, as one of our differentiators, and I think that's a big part of why people choose us.

[00:14:41] - [Speaker 0]
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[00:15:24] - [Speaker 0]
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[00:16:07] - [Speaker 0]
And I think when you use words like community, many people listen. They often hear it talked about, but it's so much harder to build. So what was it that you learned about nurturing this developer community that contributes feedback, shares knowledge, and effectively becomes almost an extension of the product team? Because that's where the magic happens, but I've seen many people or or many enterprises and many communities try this and fail. It it is such a tricky balance to achieve, isn't it?

[00:16:38] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. And I and I think it's not just about one community. I think I think there are many, many communities, and I think developers self identify in different types of communities, whether that's based on the languages they code in or the IDEs they use so you could have React communities. You can have Laravel and PHP communities. You can have communities around, hey, I'm a cursor user or I'm a you know, I I care deeply about using Claude, especially in the world of AI these days.

[00:17:16] - [Speaker 1]
And so we've realized that Cloudinary operates in the context of all these communities. And to make developers successful, we need to understand how developers want to use Cloudner in the context of that ecosystem of that community. So we want to do our best to make a React developer really successful using their language and framework of choice. We actually did a survey just a few weeks ago, really trying to understand from we actually talked to hundreds of developers around their use of our React and Next. Js libraries.

[00:17:59] - [Speaker 1]
And we've now identified things we need to change and work on to to make that happen. But we also have communities that are not just at the technology level, but are you know, we have our customer advisory boards where we spend a lot of time listening to enterprise needs. And these happen both in Europe and in in The US. So we have, you know, companies like Black and Decker and Paul Smith and Adidas and Puma showing up and and providing us with that really important feedback around how to think about making them successful. And they learn and they talk to each other as well.

[00:18:35] - [Speaker 1]
So so I think it's it's it's both at a volume level, at a technology level, but also a community of people of users that that use us in figuring out ways in which we can bring them together to to engage.

[00:18:51] - [Speaker 0]
And self-service, that's something that also sounds incredibly simple. But as an overcautious and overprotective ex IT guy, it can fall apart quickly without the right guardrails in place. But what trade offs have you faced when balancing ease of onboarding with the complexity of real world image and video workflows where things can quickly go wrong. Is that something you've struggled with? Any lessons learned along the way there?

[00:19:16] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. I think it's a ongoing challenge, especially when you think about constantly adding new capabilities to the platform, which we've done since our inception. And I think what we have to constantly remind ourselves is that developers come to Cloudinary to solve a particular problem that they have. Right? They don't say, hey.

[00:19:41] - [Speaker 1]
I want to look at the 55 things I can do with Cloudinary. They go, hey. I want to solve problem x. It could be, I want to provide a user generated content solution for my travel app, or I want to optimize images for my ecommerce app. And whatever the use case may be, they want us to help them solve that problem quickly.

[00:20:02] - [Speaker 1]
So on one hand, we need to be very good about giving them the information to solve that problem. While at the same time, should they choose to explore, we give them paths to explore all the other capabilities that might be interesting for them. So it's an ongoing challenge. For example, right now, we're actually in the process of revamping our onboarding process to make it more prescriptive based on what the developer wants to do so that we're not leaving them in an environment where there may be too much for them to think about versus helping them with information they need to solve the problem right away. So it it is an ongoing challenge for us as a platform, Neil, and I think one that we're constantly thinking about and talking through internally and obviously talking with developers as well.

[00:21:00] - [Speaker 0]
As we look ahead and developer tools become more crowded and AI starts reshaping how software is built, we're doing lots of things of vibe coding at the moment, for example. What will separate PLG companies that scale sustainable sustainably from those that stall after early adoption? Any anything you see taking shape here?

[00:21:23] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. And the you mentioned the word scale sustainably, and I think that's really important because Cloudinary has been profitable from day one. And we've made a conscious decision to be a profitable company to drive our initiatives and programs with that in mind. So by definition, we have to be focused because we've chosen that path of sustainable growth. And what that means in practice is that when we see something that works, and we run experiments all the time, when we see something that works, we really double down on that.

[00:22:06] - [Speaker 1]
Because we know that we can generate incremental value both for our users, our customers, as well as ourselves. But if we don't you know, if we see something that doesn't work, that's still success because we've experimented and we figured out. But we don't have the luxury of time of saying, oh, let's give it another year. We we move quickly away from it. So that's that's the bet we've made.

[00:22:31] - [Speaker 1]
And I think that's true in the AI world. We've we've very quickly identified Gen AI capabilities that work and get traction, and we've doubled down on making those more visible and improving those. And there are bits that we that haven't worked and we've said, okay. This doesn't make sense and let's let's steer clear. So that's so underlying company business philosophy has helped us think about how we implement or use AI both internally and enable AI to make developers most successful.

[00:23:07] - [Speaker 1]
But it's done with this underlying, how do we create a sustainable, healthy growth business, and that's that's drives a lot of our thinking.

[00:23:18] - [Speaker 0]
And for anybody listening from that developer community or business leads, you are on both sides of the fence. Anyone listening wanting to carry on this conversation or keep up to speed with some of the developments at Cloudinary? Where would you like to point everyone listening to that?

[00:23:33] - [Speaker 1]
Oh, you can you can go to our website, www.cloudinary.com, and there's a lot of information there whether you're a developer or even a business user that wants to learn more and multiple channels. We have a free product that you can play with and you can register for, and it's free forever. So we encourage developers to to try us out if that's of interest. And business users can do the same, but they can also contact us if they wanna get more information.

[00:24:05] - [Speaker 0]
Well, as Steve Bulma once said, it is all about developers, developers, developers. So a big thank you for shining a light on this. I'll be adding links to everything you mentioned there, and I would urge anyone listening to check that out. And in particular, developers, if you're interested in learning more about the power of having this strong developer community, I'll urge anyone listening to check that out. But more than anything, thank you for sharing your story and sharing the great work you're doing.

[00:24:32] - [Speaker 0]
Thanks again.

[00:24:32] - [Speaker 1]
Thanks so much, Neil.

[00:24:34] - [Speaker 0]
So what happens when developer trust becomes the foundation of growth rather than just another nice to have? I think in this conversation today, we heard how their approach to product led growth is shaped less by hype and marketing buzzwords and so much more by discipline Because trust earned through documentation that matches reality, support treated as a driver of success rather than a cost center, and communities respected in the environments developers already care about rather than pulled into a single corporate branded space. These things are so important, and it goes against lots of what I've seen throughout my career. So it's so refreshing to hear what they're doing here. And for business leaders listening, I think there's a clear reminder here.

[00:25:22] - [Speaker 0]
Sustainable growth often comes from doing the unglamorous work well and doing it early. Investing in support before marketing, doubling down quickly on experiments that show traction, and being brave enough to walk away from ideas that actually might look great, may look shiny, but they don't deliver any real value. And I think we've all seen instances of that with AI over the last three years. And for developers, I think there's something equally important here. The tools that earn long term loyalty, these are the ones that respect your time, solve real problems, and scale as your needs grow.

[00:26:03] - [Speaker 0]
So if today's episode sparked ideas or challenged assumptions about product led growth, developer advocacy, or how technical decisions influence revenue, I'd love to hear your perspective on this. Where have you seen trust make or break adoption in your work? And what do you think more companies still get wrong when building for developers? I bet you've got more than a few stories out there, and I wanna hear them. Share your thoughts.

[00:26:31] - [Speaker 0]
Let's keep this conversation going. You can record me an audio message over at tech talks network dot com. Send me a DM on LinkedIn, x, Instagram at neil c hues, or email me techblogwriter@outlook.com. Let me know your thoughts. But that's it for today.

[00:26:47] - [Speaker 0]
A big thank you to my guest and an even bigger thank you to each and every one of you for not only listening to this episode, but getting right to the end. Thank you so much. Speak with you all again tomorrow. Bye for now.