Northbound sells an API monitoring tool to backend engineers. When I joined, essentially all pipeline came from a founder-led outbound motion and one conference sponsorship, and the site carried about forty pages of content that could have belonged to any company in the category.
We needed a second acquisition channel before the next raise, and the obvious candidate was organic search — except the audience was developers, who block ads, refuse to fill in gated forms, and can tell within a paragraph whether the person writing has ever used the product.
We stopped publishing listicles and started publishing what an engineer would actually search for in the middle of an incident: error-message pages, honest comparison pages against the three competitors we kept losing to, and runbook-style guides written alongside our own support engineers. Every piece was reviewed by someone who had run the tool in production. I also argued for rebuilding the documentation as an indexable surface rather than a single-page app, which in the end was worth more than the blog ever was.
Organic sessions went from 9,000 to 186,000 a month across roughly two years, and organic signups from 140 to 2,100. Inbound-attributed revenue reached $1.45M against $180K when we started, and organic became the largest single source of new pipeline.
The documentation work returned the most and was the hardest to get approved, because it did not look like marketing to anyone reviewing the budget. If I were starting again I would make that argument in the first week rather than the thirtieth.