Building a brand with Ramiro Nuñez Dosio from Supabase
Supabase's only full-time marketer inherited a company where the founders already answer support tickets on Twitter and the CTO personally apologizes for downtime in the replies. Ramiro Nuñez Dosio's actual job is less about running campaigns and more about not getting in the way of that.
Ramiro Nuñez Dosio is a growth marketer at Supabase, and previously worked in marketing at Ably and Auth0.
We get into why Supabase's founders being visibly, personally active in the community matters more than any campaign, how weekly active databases beats signups as a north star metric, why launch weeks are tied directly to how the company actually ships product, and the specific process he uses to decide which framework ecosystem to invest content in next.
The Q&A below is experimental — extracted from the episode transcript with AI. If you spot a mistake, let us know at jack@scalingdevtools.com.
Supabase doesn't market itself the way most dev tools do. What's actually different about the approach?
We don't do the usual marketing playbook — instead we lean into showing and promoting developer culture, connecting directly with developers, since Supabase can genuinely be used by almost any type of developer. We do talk about features and integrations, but that's never the starting point. What we focus on instead is building a real brand, which is something this industry tends to overlook in favor of quick, direct growth tactics.
You've said having founders deeply involved in community and marketing from day one is critical. What does that actually look like at Supabase?
You see it directly with Paul and Ant, the co-founders — talking with developers, listening to feedback, answering support tickets, engaging with the community, and acknowledging things openly when something isn't working. Being genuinely active on social media matters enormously for founders specifically. Auth0's co-founder and CTO, Matias Woloski, is a great example of this done consistently over years — doing informal user research on Twitter, acknowledging what was and wasn't working, from Auth0's earliest days all the way through. Even a few months ago, during a long Supabase downtime incident, our CEO was personally replying to individual complaints on Twitter, apologizing and giving updates — someone who exited a company for $6.5 billion, still directly in the replies while the team fixed the problem. That's what I mean by founders being deeply embedded in community building, not delegating it entirely to marketing.
You mentioned listening and engaging as a core part of the strategy. What does that mean in practice?
Supabase is built on open-source technologies, so we try to give a real voice to anyone building on top of it or using one of our features — when people come to us and share what they're building, we actively help amplify that message rather than just broadcasting our own.
You're the only full-time marketer at Supabase. How does marketing actually get done at that scale?
I'm the first and, right now, only pure marketing hire — but everyone at the company does marketing in some form. We have a four-person DevRel team, and the founders are heavily involved themselves. During launch weeks specifically, engineers write blog posts and documentation, join livestreams and Twitter Spaces — everyone contributes their part rather than it being purely a marketing department function.
Launch weeks are a distinctive part of how Supabase does marketing. How do they actually work?
Launch weeks have become something of a phenomenon, and they're deeply tied to how we actually ship product — they set the cadence and timeframes we build around. But we're not only marketing during launch weeks; we're constantly shipping and announcing things in between. I've come to really believe in launching something multiple times rather than waiting for it to be in a perfect final state — sometimes that means a beta, then a full release, gathering user feedback in between to improve the feature. Launch weeks are where we push hard on top-of-funnel growth and new user acquisition, while also keeping existing users and the community updated on what's new.
With so much positive community feedback, how do you stay focused on what actually matters?
Right now we're deliberately focused on adoption specifically — bringing in new users matters, but what matters more is helping people actually build and ship fast. One of our most important metrics is weekly active databases, not just signups, because it tells us people are genuinely using Supabase in production, not just trying it once. We also need to build a sustainable business — hosting hundreds of thousands of databases isn't cheap, so revenue has to stay in view too. We actually put a database to sleep if it goes unused, partly for cost reasons, but it doubles as a growth nudge — it's a gentle reminder that brings people back to a project they'd let sit.
You've worked closely with DevRel teams across your career. What's the actual value you bring there?
Helping teams embrace marketing in a structured way — improving process, clarifying what to measure and why, and tying that back to real business goals. I work with DevRel on being more strategic about what to talk about, how to create content, and especially how to distribute it, which I'm genuinely passionate about. Since I'm not technical myself, a lot of that work is a two-way exchange — I help introduce structured processes like content briefs and outlines, and in return I build up technical understanding I wouldn't otherwise have.
What's a mistake you commonly see when marketers work with DevRel teams?
Underinvesting in distribution specifically. It's not enough to create good content — you need a real process for making sure it reaches the right people: which communities, which newsletters, which Discord groups. Repurposing content is part of that too — if a DevRel person builds up real expertise creating one video or blog post, that knowledge shouldn't just sit there; it should be reused across other formats and pushed further into that same topic area, rather than moved on from immediately.
How do you decide which framework or ecosystem to invest content and product effort in next?
It's a mix of content and product signals — does an emerging framework or tool make sense for us to prioritize from a community size and revenue standpoint, and does our product actually work well with it. A good tactic before committing to something bigger, like a new SDK, is starting with content to validate real interest — see whether it actually drives signups and usage before investing further. You look at things like search volume and how large the framework's community already is, and whether it has, say, a real-time provider we'd be directly complementary to, or whether competitors are already deeply embedded in that specific ecosystem.
With so many moving parts across content, product, and community, how do you actually measure success?
You have to set clear metrics and KPIs upfront and actually report against them on a regular cadence — deciding what 'success' means for a given initiative and focusing hard around that, ideally aligned with genuine business needs, not just vanity output. It's really the same discipline as running an experiment: form a hypothesis, define how you'll measure it, see what actually happens, and iterate toward the outcome you defined at the start.
How do you actually distribute content well in developer communities without it feeling like spam?
It comes down to a long-term plan rather than one-off drops. For something like Next.js, we have a dedicated DevRel — Andrew, who specializes in Svelte, is another example — who consistently shows up in the relevant Reddit threads, forums, and Slack communities over time, not just once. Sometimes it's better for DevRel specifically to handle distribution, since they're the public-facing people already building genuine brand recognition within those specific ecosystems, which gets a much warmer reception than an unfamiliar marketing account showing up cold.
Given Supabase could theoretically write about almost anything, how do you actually narrow content focus?
It depends heavily on company and product specifics. For us, we're currently focused on web developers, with about five specific communities, ecosystems, or frameworks where we're consistently active, creating content and genuinely helping people. That said, we're not neglecting mobile — Flutter is actually one of our strongest and most invested areas, even though it's a Google framework closely tied to Firebase, because our Flutter DevRel, Tyler, is deeply embedded in that community and does excellent work — we recently made our Flutter SDK fully supported with a v1 release, and we're seeing real Flutter products building Supabase integrations as a direct result, including some publicly asking for Supabase support despite already having Firebase.
You're very active on Twitter but much less so on channels like TikTok. Is that a deliberate constraint?
Yes — being the only pure marketer means we double down on the channels that are genuinely effective for us right now: Twitter, YouTube, and Hacker News. We're definitely open to expanding into other channels like TikTok or Instagram if we found the right creative person to actually own and run them well — that's a real opportunity for someone who wants to do creative work with an engaging community and a genuinely interesting product, if the right person comes along.