David Cohen talks with Carly Brantz, Chief Marketing Officer at Digital Ocean — a Techstars Boulder grad that achieved unicorn status in 2020 and went public in 2021 — about how they Give First with love and content. 

“We get a tremendous amount of traffic to our website every month from people who are just searching for different ways to do things, learning different ways to code. It might not even be on our infrastructure, but we provide that content,” says Carly Brantz, Chief Marketing Officer at Digital Ocean. 

This is just one of many ways that Digital Ocean, which helps developers easily build, test, manage, and scale applications of any size on a complete cloud platform, Gives First to its customers, and even to people who aren’t its customers (but might one day be). Because when you give people what they need now, then when they do need your product, even if it’s a year or two from now, they’ll think of you. 

This could be just good marketing strategy, but for Carly — and for Digital Ocean’s founding team, Ben Uretsky, Moisey Uretsky, and Mitch Wainer, it’s more than that. It’s about love. 

David remembers when Digital Ocean was in the Techstars Boulder Accelerator, back in 2021: “Moisey and Ben and Mitch and everybody in the accelerator said 'love.' They talked about love being the differentiator. 'We love our customers. We want them to love our product.' They got this funny look from a lot of mentors and a lot of people like, ‘Hey, that's not really a way you can build the company.’” But for Digital Ocean, love turned out to be a winning strategy. 

Carly confirms that love is still a big differentiator for Digital Ocean: “Really everything that we do, we always say that it starts with community and ends with love.”

Listen for more about how community, content, and love can be a hugely successful marketing strategy — and why it’s never too early or too late to join Pledge 1%.

Follow Carly on Twitter @carlybrantz