The importance of distribution with Brandon Gubitosa from Plural
Brandon Gubitosa now spends 55-60% of his time on distribution, not writing. His rule for cutting a content idea: if a tutorial format doesn't feel meaningfully different from everything else already published, kill it — no matter how much work went into it.
Brandon Gubitosa is senior content marketer at Plural, which helps DevOps teams deploy open-source projects on Kubernetes, and previously worked at a technical content agency.
We get into why he believes distribution matters more than content creation itself, the metric his team uses to decide when a piece of content is genuinely working, how he collaborates with engineers who don't want to write, and why he thinks of open-source project collaborations the way YouTubers think of collabing with bigger creators.
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.
Where has most of Plural's growth actually come from?
Overwhelmingly from content. In the past few months specifically, we doubled down on our content strategy, but the real shift was focusing on distribution rather than just production. Producing content is genuinely hard, and we think we have a solid framework for that now, but making sure we have our distribution ducks in a row is what's actually driven growth across different audiences.
What does that distribution work actually look like in practice?
Finding new audiences to get our work in front of — pairing with people already established in the DevOps space, pitching newsletters and publications with the right kind of readership, and making sure what we write is genuinely relevant to those specific audiences. It's a genuinely hard thing to do at scale, so we take it step by step. As a startup, you don't have the luxury of focusing far into the future — you focus on driving impact quickly, since speed is our biggest advantage, and getting in front of the right audiences fast is what actually compounds.
Why do you think so many startups under-invest in distribution relative to production?
A few reasons. First, people underestimate just how much real work and value goes into producing good content in the first place — hiring strong freelancers or a quality agency costs real money, and if you're not measuring the value that content actually generates, which is exactly where distribution comes in, you've defeated the purpose of spending those resources at all. There's also a hesitation some people have about oversaturating a market or doubling down too hard. But if you're seeing the right signals — people leaving comments, reaching out directly, sessions increasing over time — that's a strong indicator you're creating genuinely compelling content and reaching the right people, and you should lean into it rather than holding back.
How do you actually use metrics to decide whether a specific content idea is worth continuing?
My rule is: if something clearly isn't working as fast as we expected, stop doing it. Early on, I built a whole framework for product tutorials that seemed like a great idea, but I realized it wasn't meaningfully different from everything else already out there — it was basically a copy-paste exercise, which isn't compelling for a developer. What I care about most is creating a genuinely good developer and reading experience, not just publishing content for the sake of having published something. My advice is: don't create content just because someone told you that you need to — have an actual reason, and metrics to back that reason up, so if something isn't landing, you can consciously pivot to a different angle or audience instead of just grinding out more of the same.
How do you justify not publishing constantly, if distribution and cadence matter so much?
My co-founders and I landed on a useful indicator: we noticed that after a genuinely viral piece of content, page views and sessions would dip about five to six days later. So we now treat roughly once a week as the cadence for a truly compelling piece meant to pull in new readers and audiences. It takes about a month of watching this pattern before it becomes clear, but since we're an open-source project, we can directly correlate a dip in new signups with a lull in strong content, versus periods with genuinely compelling pieces where signups clearly increase.
How do you actually decide which content ideas are likely to be compelling in a technical space like DevOps?
This is honestly something we're still refining. I'm not an engineer by background — I did a bootcamp covering the basics, but DevOps is genuinely complex — so I lean on what our co-founder and engineering team tell me is coming up in conversations they're having, and we run brainstorming sessions to decide what to focus on over the next few weeks. My previous boss, who ran Uber's engineering blog, gave me advice I still use: for a very technical piece where my own expertise won't help, I have the engineer write the core content against a high-level outline I provide, then I shape it, ask clarifying questions, and run it past an outside editor. My rule of thumb is to explain it as if to a five-year-old — not literally, but breaking it down to bare fundamentals so it's genuinely accessible regardless of someone's experience level.
How have you leveraged open-source communities specifically to drive growth?
Before we really had traction, our head of community, who came from Airbyte, helped us build real relationships in that community, which directly helped with deploying Airbyte on Kubernetes, which is core to what we do. Getting involved in open-source communities, forming genuine relationships, contributing to docs, doing joint events, and collaborating on blog posts all help meaningfully. I compare it to modern YouTubers — smaller creators lean on collaborating with someone like MrBeast to borrow some of his reach, and I think the same dynamic is starting to show up in open source, where projects collaborate with each other and everyone benefits from the combined audience.
You've worked both at a content agency and in-house. How do you think about when a startup should use an agency versus build in-house?
I'll be honest — when I started at my first agency, I barely knew what content marketing or SEO even were, but I ended up loving the technical side of it. Working agency-side was genuinely eye-opening — I saw firsthand how other marketing teams actually operate day to day and just how hard content is to do properly, let alone distribute properly. We set realistic goals there — if you're a small startup, you're realistically not going to rank for highly competitive keywords right away, given domain rating, post volume, and backlink profile; that can take six months to a year to build up properly. SEO content is genuinely worthwhile if you have the resources to sustain it, and that's exactly where an agency can offset work that isn't a fast-moving startup's top priority.
If a startup does hire an agency, what should they actually look for?
Look at where those specific writers have published before, and whether the agency has real relationships with publications that can get your content in front of a genuinely larger audience — producing the content is only half the job. As a content marketer, I spend maybe 55-60% of my time on distribution, because content doesn't organically show up in front of people just because you published it, especially for a small startup — you have to pitch it relentlessly and treat it like a numbers game. Coming from a sales background myself, I know how many touch points it typically takes before someone actually gives your content a chance — repeated outreach eventually gets you onto someone's radar, and it's just the nature of how this works. From there, tracking everything properly with UTMs and reporting it clearly to leadership matters too, since that data is what justifies future investment, like paid sponsorships or list partnerships, when those opportunities come up.