Hyrax Marketing Budget
FY27 request and supporting model
Hyrax Marketing Budget
FY27 request and supporting model
Objective and request
Make $10 million in the first year.
This document sets out how much marketing spend is required to do that.
| Revenue objective | $10,000,000 annualised |
| Timeframe | First year |
| Marketing spend required, per month | $78,599 |
| Marketing spend required, year one | $831,594 |
Spend is released in four quarterly steps rather than in full at the outset. Conditions on slide 18.
$78,599 per month for Hyrax marketing, released quarterly against performance. Year one commitment is $831,594.
| Monthly at full release | $78,599 |
| Year one, released in four quarterly steps | $831,594 |
| Current approved monthly spend | $45,000 |
| Increase over current, at full release | $33,599 per month |
| Revenue target | $10,000,000 annualised |
| Modelled position at month 12 | $7.84M annualised, 1,379 customers |
| Modelled month the target is met | Month 16 |
| Cost to acquire one paying customer | $363.33 |
| Payback period | Under one month |
Decision required: approval of the year one commitment and the quarterly release conditions on slide 18.
Bars are ad spend, left axis. The line is signups, right axis. Spend from the Google Ads (8518001543), Reddit (a2_iyhg34o7cahk), LinkedIn (537800361) and X (18ce55vw38i) accounts. Signups from PostHog project 436309, account_created and wizard.started. Pulled 2026-09-02. The monthly cap has been raised three times: $15,000, $20,000, $25,000, $45,000. September is the current run rate, not a completed month.
| Monthly revenue | $833,333 |
| Paying customers | 1,389 |
| New paying customers per month | 150 |
| Free signups per month | 3,750 |
| Website visitors per month | 75,000 |
| Ad impressions per month | 1,875,000 |
Assumes 20 seats per customer at $30 per seat and 95% monthly retention. Both assumptions are set out on slide 6.
Assumptions
Conversion rates, landing team size and retention are from the Hyrax capital allocation proposal and growth funnel model, 2026-09-03. Settled seat count is revised to 20 on the evidence linked on slide 6.
| Revenue target | $10,000,000 / year |
| That works out per month at | $833,333.33 / month |
| Price per seat | $30 / user / month |
| Seats when a team starts | 8 |
| Seats once the team is fully on board | 20 |
| Average revenue per customer | $600 / month (20 × $30) |
| Paying customers we need | 1,389 teams |
| New paying customers a month | +150 teams / month |
| Free signups a month | 3,750 |
| Average cost per signup | $20.96 |
| Website visitors a month | 75,000 / month |
| Ad impressions a month | 1,875,000 / month |
Seat counts from published deployments at comparable company sizes: LSports 150 of 150 engineers (Codacy), trivago 133 weekly users of 668 staff (CodeRabbit), Pomelo 200 of 200 (Snyk), SalesRabbit 20 of 20 (CodeRabbit). Adoption rates once deployed run 70 to 100%: Brex 100% of code (Greptile), Brex 70%+ and Rippling 60% (Cursor), Qodo 46% monthly actives. Compiled in Track 7 research, Notion, 2026-09-03. Twenty seats is the low end of the observed range.
| Company | Revenue path | Time | What drove it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Same category, AI code review | |||
| CodeRabbit | $5M (Apr 2025) → $15M (Sep 2025) → $40M (Apr 2026) → approaching $100M (Aug 2026) | 16 months | Bottom-up GitHub Marketplace adoption, then a sales team. 17,000 customers, 2M reviews a week. $143M Series C at $1.5B. |
| Adjacent, AI code generation | |||
| Cursor (Anysphere) | $100M (Jan 2025) → $500M (Jun 2025) → $1B (Nov 2025) → $4B (Jun 2026) | 17 months | Individual developers first, then enterprise. Enterprise is now 65% of revenue and 60%+ of the Fortune 500 are customers. |
| Replit | $10M (Q4 2024) → $70M (Q1 2025) → $100M (Jun 2025) → $250M (Oct 2025) | 10 months | Agent launch in Sep 2024 was the inflection after six years at under $3M. Moved from developers to non-developers. |
| Lovable | $7M (Dec 2024) → $70M (Jun 2025) | 6 months | Pivot from a command-line tool to a visual product. 30,000 paying customers at $20 a month. |
| Windsurf (Codeium) | $40M ARR | — | Enterprise and on-premises focus. Acquired by OpenAI for $3B in May 2025. |
CodeRabbit is the closest comparable by product and category. It went from $5M to $40M in twelve months, and did so on bottom-up developer adoption before adding sales headcount.
All five had a product in market with demonstrated retention before these curves began. Hyrax is at the start of that. The comparison supports the target being achievable in the category, not the timing.
Sources, collected 2026-09-03: CodeRabbit Sacra and ARR Club. Cursor ValueAdd VC and Andrew Chan. Replit ARR Club and Scaled Enablement. Lovable and Windsurf SaaStr. Figures are third-party estimates and company statements, not audited.
| Measure | Benchmark | This request |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing spend as % of revenue, $1–10M ARR band | 56% | 8.3% |
| Median annual marketing OpEx, same band | $2,000,000 | $831,594 |
| Programs share of marketing spend, under $25M ARR | 54% | 100% |
| People share of marketing spend | 46% | 0% |
| Online share of programs spend | 63% | 69% |
The request is 42% of the median annual marketing OpEx for companies at the target revenue band, and carries no headcount.
The only comparable near the target revenue spends double this request on paid social alone. The three above $490M ARR spend under 1%, which is what scale and established brand buy.
ICONIQ Growth, Marketing Budgets & Productivity, pp. 10–12, portfolio and survey data as of 2024-10-29; n=91 for the ARR-band split, n=20 for programs versus people, n=105 for online versus offline. Competitor social spend is an AdClarity US panel estimate, 2026-04-27 to 2026-08-02, annualised; panel estimates rather than billed spend, and US-only spend measured against global ARR, so every competitor ratio shown is understated. CodeRabbit plotted at $45M, the midpoint of a reported $40–50M range. This request's paid media across year one is $576,624 against the $10,000,000 target.
Investment required
| Category | Monthly cost | % of total |
|---|---|---|
| Paid Media | $54,500 | 69.34% |
| PR & Events | $7,500 | 9.54% |
| Professional Services | $15,200 | 19.34% |
| Software | $1,399 | 1.78% |
| Total per month | $78,599 | 100.00% |
Every platform, contractor and software licence, listed separately.
| Line item | Monthly | Daily | % of total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Ads (SEM & Demand Gen) | $20,000 | $658 | 25.45% |
| Paid Developer Influencer Fees (1 video spotlight) | $10,000 | $329 | 12.72% |
| Product Hunt Sponsored Ads (fixed rolling slot) | $5,000 | $164 | 6.36% |
| LinkedIn Ads (conversion targeting) | $4,000 | $132 | 5.09% |
| X Ads (developer timeline) | $4,000 | $132 | 5.09% |
| Meta Ads (founder video retargeting) | $3,500 | $115 | 4.45% |
| Reddit Ads (developer subreddits) | $3,000 | $99 | 3.82% |
| ChatGPT / AI search network placements | $2,500 | $82 | 3.18% |
| TikTok Ads (short-form code demos) | $1,500 | $49 | 1.91% |
| Bing SEM (enterprise long-tail intent) | $1,000 | $33 | 1.27% |
| Paid Media total | $54,500 | $1,793 | 69.34% |
Google and X are set at current account spend. Google $658 a day, measured 31 August to 2 September in account 8518001543. X $4,000, its August total in account 18ce55vw38i. Google cost per signup over the 14 days to 2 September was $21.49, calculated against account_created in PostHog project 436309.
| Line item | Monthly | % of total |
|---|---|---|
| PR Agency Retainer & Tech Press Outreach | $4,500 | 5.73% |
| Developer Conferences & Hackathon Tiers | $2,000 | 2.54% |
| Product Hunt Launch Kit & Creative Design | $500 | 0.64% |
| Developer Swag & Onboarding Welcome Kits | $500 | 0.64% |
| PR & Events total | $7,500 | 9.54% |
The launch kit pairs with the $5,000 Product Hunt sponsored slot carried in Paid Media.
| Line item | Monthly | % of total |
|---|---|---|
| Video Editing Services (4 founder videos @ $2k each) | $8,000 | 10.18% |
| Organic Social Content Management (X / LinkedIn) | $5,000 | 6.36% |
| Gauge Media (ad creative validation) | $1,200 | 1.53% |
| Video & Motion Graphics Production (UI overlays) | $1,000 | 1.27% |
| Professional Services total | $15,200 | 19.34% |
No full-time hires. SEO documentation is written in-house, so it costs nothing here.
| Tool | Monthly |
|---|---|
| PostHog (product data and funnels) | $450 |
| Synter Media (ad buying) | $300 |
| Perplexity Sonar / Agent API usage | $150 |
| Vercel (website hosting) | $100 |
| Parallel (web data) | $100 |
| Exa AI (developer link mapping) | $100 |
| LinkedIn automation & management | $100 |
| Jina AI (clean text for crawlers) | $50 |
| Loops Email (automated emails) | $49 |
| Software total | $1,399 |
Function notes: Perplexity Sonar checks how the category is described online, Parallel pulls raw web data, Exa maps developer links, Jina turns pages into clean text for crawlers, Vercel hosts the site, the LinkedIn tool handles cold outreach. Published pricing: PostHog, Vercel, Loops, Perplexity, Exa, Jina, Parallel.
| Tools | Today | Overlap | Savings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Perplexity Sonar Parallel Exa AI Jina AI | $150 $100 $100 $50 | Four tools that all read the web. Sonar searches and summarises, Parallel searches and fetches, Exa finds related pages, Jina cleans them up. Two of them cover it. | $250 |
| Gauge Media Professional Services | $1,200 | Synter already tests ad creative and PostHog already has the funnel data. Our Gauge access ran out on 30 August. | $1,200 |
| LinkedIn automation vs Synter Media | $100 $300 | Synter buys LinkedIn ads. The other tool sends cold outreach. Different jobs. | $0 |
| PostHog vs Synter Media | $450 $300 | PostHog has the product data, Synter has the ad spend. The reports look similar but the data is different. | $0 |
| Total savings | $17,400 per year | $1,450 |
Vercel and Loops do not overlap with anything else. Pricing per the vendor pages linked on the previous slide. Gauge access status per the GTM log of 2026-08-30.
| Item | Indicative cost | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Attribution platform | $599–$1,399/mo | Not funded. PostHog covers product events; signup source tagging is unresolved and is a prerequisite for measuring channels against target. |
| SEO and keyword tooling | $250/mo | Not funded. SEO documentation is written in-house without a research tool. |
| Design tooling | $150/mo | Not funded. Figma and Canva seats are not in the software line. |
| Review site listings, G2 and Capterra | $1,500–$4,000/mo | Not funded. Both are used by this buyer during evaluation. |
| Website and landing page production | — | Not funded. Produced in-house. |
| Conference travel and accommodation | — | Not separately funded. The $2,000 monthly conference line covers sponsorship only. |
| Contingency | — | No contingency line. Variance is absorbed by pausing channels under the controls on the release schedule. |
| Marketing headcount | — | Deliberately excluded. Delivery is contractors and software only. |
Indicative costs are published vendor list prices: Dreamdata, HockeyStack, Ahrefs, Figma. These items are listed so the request is understood as a complete statement of what is and is not covered.
Expected return
| End of | Customers | Avg seats each | Total seats | Revenue a month | Revenue a year | Months to make it back |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Quarter 1 | 428 | 9.9 | 4,250 | $127,485 | $1.53M | 0.85 |
| Quarter 2 | 795 | 12.7 | 10,094 | $302,820 | $3.63M | 0.79 |
| Quarter 3 | 1,109 | 14.8 | 16,385 | $491,537 | $5.90M | 0.82 |
| Quarter 4 | 1,379 | 15.8 | 21,778 | $653,338 | $7.84M | 0.77 |
| Month 16 | 1,680 | 16.5 | 27,800 | $834,000 | $10.01M | 0.77 |
A customer starts at 8 seats and reaches 20 over six months. The average across the base rises from 9.9 to 15.8 in year one, held down by continued new customer intake at 8 seats.
Twenty seats at the 70 to 100% adoption rate in published deployments implies a 20 to 30 engineer company. Target range is 15 to 250 engineers.
Month 16. Year one closes at $7.84M because a large share of the customer base is recent and has not reached full seat count.
150 new customers a month, 95% retained monthly, seats growing 8 to 20 across six months. Months to make it back is that quarter's ad spend per new customer divided by monthly revenue per customer. Retention and conversion assumptions are from the capital allocation proposal; seat progression is from the Track 7 research linked on slide 6.
$54,500 of monthly ad spend divided by 150 new customers.
Customers stay 20 months on average and pay $600 a month.
33% of signups are modelled as arriving at zero media cost through organic search, AI answer engines and referral.
We make back what we spent on a customer inside their first month of billing. The automatic shut-off is on the next slide.
Release schedule and controls
The full year is approved at the outset. Funds are released one quarter at a time, conditional on the prior quarter meeting its stated measure.
| Quarter | Per month | Quarter total | Unlocks when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 | $55,000 | $165,000 | Released on approval. |
| Q2 | $65,000 | $195,000 | Q1 cost per signup at or below $20.96. |
| Q3 | $78,599 | $235,797 | Free-to-paid conversion at 4%, measured on actual customers. |
| Q4 | $78,599 | $235,797 | Average customer at 20 seats by month nine. |
| Year one | $831,594 | $111,594 below a flat release of $78,599 for twelve months. |
Ad spend is 69.3% of each quarter. The rest covers PR and events, contractors and software.
Appendix
| Who they are | Software engineer or senior software engineer |
| Daily workflow | Writes, reviews and revises code through GitHub pull requests |
| Tools in use | Cursor, Copilot, Devin, Claude Code, Codex, Augment |
| Motivation | AI speed without submitting code that feels generic, inconsistent or architecturally weak |
| Current pain | Review churn, missing context, repeated corrections, no certainty the generated code fits |
| Adoption behaviour | Will try it alone or with a small team if setup is light and value shows up in real work |
| Activation event | Hyrax catches a codebase-specific issue before a human reviewer does |
Source: Hyrax Ideal Customer Profile, Notion, last updated 2026-09-01.
| Type | Software-led or codebase-centric business |
| Engineering size | 15 to 250+ engineers. Strongest expansion above 50 |
| Workflow | GitHub is the source of truth, pull requests are central |
| AI adoption | Engineers are allowed and encouraged to use AI coding tools |
| Codebase | Mature enough to have its own patterns, history and boundaries |
| Infrastructure | AWS, GCP, Vercel, Kubernetes, modern CI/CD, microservices |
| Culture | Quality, learning and craft matter, not only output volume |
| Geography | North America, the UK, major European tech hubs |
A 15 to 50 engineer company qualifies if the codebase is complex, AI usage is high, and engineers can adopt tools without procurement. Source: Hyrax Ideal Customer Profile, Notion, 2026-09-01.
| Software engineer first user | Wants a codebase-aware review before submitting |
| Senior engineer amplifier | Repeatedly leaves the same review comments |
| Staff engineer sponsor | Currently the manual enforcement layer for architecture |
| Engineering manager buyer | Purchases to standardise a workflow already in use |
| VP Engineering or CTO budget owner | Engages after engineer adoption is established |
| Security or AppSec approval required | Reviews once usage extends beyond one team |
Representative account: a senior engineer at a 150-person B2B SaaS company using Cursor daily across several services. Source: Hyrax Ideal Customer Profile, Notion, last updated 2026-09-01.
| Channel | Share | Signups | Visitors | Impressions | Cost per signup |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paid — 55% | |||||
| Google search and video | 25% | 937 | 18,740 | 468,500 | $21.34 |
| Paid developer influencers | 12% | 450 | 9,000 | 225,000 | $22.22 |
| Product Hunt ads | 8% | 300 | 6,000 | 150,000 | $16.67 |
| Other paid social and search | 10% | 375 | 7,500 | 187,500 | $52.00 |
| Organic — 33% | |||||
| SEO and technical docs | 15% | 563 | 11,260 | 281,500 | $0.00 |
| AI answer engines | 10% | 375 | 7,500 | 187,500 | $0.00 |
| Organic social posting | 8% | 300 | 6,000 | 150,000 | $16.67 |
| Word of mouth — 12% | |||||
| Direct and in-product sharing | 8% | 300 | 6,000 | — | $0.00 |
| Private developer communities | 4% | 150 | 3,000 | — | $0.00 |
| Total | 100% | 3,750 | 75,000 | 1,650,000 | $20.96 |
Other paid social and search covers LinkedIn, X, Meta, Reddit, ChatGPT, TikTok and Bing. SEO docs are written in-house. AI answer engines are handled by the software stack. Direct and private community signups come from repository merge tags, engineers inviting teammates, and links shared in private Slack and Discord groups.
Phase 1 is the product as it works now: a free workspace, a repository connected within 72 hours, and $30 a seat.