FusionAuth

FusionAuth is an open source, developer-focused identity and access management platform.

FusionAuth was founded in 2018 by Brian Pontarelli and Daniel DeGroff. It span out of CleanSpeak - a profanity filter and moderation platform. Today FusionAuth has around 30 employees and seven-figure revenue and recently raised $65mn after being bootstrapped for years

Not an OSS product, but "free as in beer" w/o being overly restricted
Docs investment
Comparison/migration docs/pages to market leaders
Advertising (newsletters)
Content marketing: non-vendor content (/articles) e.g. sponsoring Screaming Into The Cloud
Use forums instead of Slack

"Don't use Slack, use a forum."

Dan Moore, Head of DevRel

Fusion get roughly 10% of their traffic from forums.
They still have slack but it’s only community members helping community members. Staff hang out on the forums.
They were getting same questions again & again on Slack & team was small.
There’s no latency in answering the question - forum is immediate
Is your tool part of a developers’ identity? Or just a tool they use & then forget about for a while. In his case auth was not part of their identity
‘Google is the ux for developers’ (Taylor Barnett) - you could build an amazing internal search but most developers will still use Google
Docs have to be true, but forums don’t have the weight of needing to be true for all time. There’s an understanding it may or may not still be true

The founders used their previous company CleanSpeak to fund FusionAuth
Their first customer reached out to them after finding an article they wrote about "a new player in town". And comparing themselves to Auth0 etc.