Hyrax Marketing Budget
Hyrax Marketing Budget
| Engineering and product | 7 people |
| A year | $2.0M |
| Over the life of a seed round | $4M to $5M |
| Median seed round | $3.2M |
| People | 1 full time and 4 part time |
| Ads a year at today's rate | $147K |
| Tools a year | $31K |
| Defined marketing budget | none |
Engineering and product cost from the Hyrax Budget Review, 4 September 2026. Google Ads spend pulled from the account for the 30 days to 4 September, $12.3K, carried for a year. Tools are the monthly marketing subscriptions at $2.6K a month. Median seed round from Carta and PitchBook via Value Add VC; a seed round is built to last two to two and a half years.
| Company | Worth | The one GTM thing | What they did |
|---|---|---|---|
| ElevenLabs | $11B | Paid search | Bought Google ads on the exact words buyers type, like text to speech and voice cloning, and cut every keyword that brought browsers instead of buyers. 1 in 4 new paying customers came from it and each paid back in 4 to 5 months. |
| Clay | $7.1B | Comparison pages | Wrote a page for every rival's name and every question a buyer searches, so Clay shows up whenever someone compares tools. 60% of all their traffic comes from search. |
| Gamma | $2.1B | Paid creators | Paid 1,000 small creators to post decks made in Gamma instead of paying a few big ones. More than half of all signups came from creators. 70M users and $100M ARR with 50 people. |
| CodeRabbit | $1.5B | Free for open source | Gave the product away on public repos so every developer on those projects saw it review their code. Most installed AI app on GitHub, 150K repos, then 8,000 paying teams. |
ElevenLabs $11B at the February 2026 Series D led by Sequoia per Tracxn; paid search from Better Launch. Clay $115M at $7.1B per Reuters, 9 September 2026; search traffic from Clay's marketing team. Gamma $2.1B per TechCrunch, November 2025; creators from the Gamma growth playbook. CodeRabbit $1.5B per Reuters, August 2026; GitHub numbers from CodeRabbit.
| From | What | What we do | A year |
|---|---|---|---|
| ElevenLabs | Paid search | Google, Bing and ChatGPT ads on the words buyers type | $420K |
| Clay | Comparison pages | A page for every rival: CodeRabbit, Greptile, Augment, Sonar | $120K |
| Gamma | Paid creators | Developer creators on YouTube, X and LinkedIn | $180K |
| CodeRabbit | Free for open source | Hyrax reviews public repos for free. Product decision | $0 |
| Total | $720K |
Paid search is $35K a month across Google, Bing and ChatGPT, bought on cost per signup; Google alone ran $12.3K in the last 30 days at $34 a signup on the rebuilt campaigns. Comparison pages are writers and video at $10K a month. Paid creators are $15K a month across many small developer creators, the Gamma model. Free for open source costs marketing nothing and needs a product decision.
| What | What we do | A year |
|---|---|---|
| Paid social | Reddit, X, LinkedIn and Meta | $144K |
| Brand | A brand exercise that gives us the line and the look | $100K |
| Out of home | Billboards once the brand exists | $120K |
| Conferences | GitHub Universe, LDX3 and KubeCon | $180K |
| Recording and editing | Me on camera monthly, produced and cut | $72K |
| Product videos | Demo and feature films | $60K |
| Tools | Analytics, ads, posting and email | $31K |
| Total | $707K | |
| With the blueprint | $1.43M |
Conferences sized from the Hyrax Conference Plan: a GitHub Universe booth starts at $40K, LDX3 New York runs $15K to $40K and KubeCon Silver is $18K. Out of home is six months at $20K a month and starts after the brand exercise. Tools are the monthly marketing subscriptions at $2.6K a month.
| Quarter | Spend | What it goes to |
|---|---|---|
| Q1 Sep to Nov | $300K | Paid search, comparison pages, tools, GitHub Universe and the brand exercise starts |
| Q2 Dec to Feb | $345K | Brand exercise finishes, paid influencers start, other paid channels, recording and editing |
| Q3 Mar to May | $375K | Out of home goes up with the new brand, product videos, LDX3 and KubeCon |
| Q4 Jun to Aug | $407K | Scale whatever produced signups at the lowest cost |
| Year | $1.43M | $119K a month on average |
The year runs September 2026 to August 2027. Quarters ramp because the brand exercise has to finish before out of home and influencers scale. Ads and tools today are $147K plus $31K, or $178K a year; $1.43M is eight times that. Tools are inside every quarter so the total on this page is the actual number.