Stop Mining Gold. Sell the Shovels.

01 /The Concept

"Shipping new features faster is no longer the bottleneck. Getting attention is," argues Memoir. And unfortunately, it's right.

So the startup built a platform that automates the entire attention-generation process for developers.

Memoir's AI watches changes in a product's code repository and analyzes support emails and tickets. From this raw material, it continuously generates and publishes social media posts, blog articles, and short demo videos highlighting new product features.

To maximize reach, the AI also monitors what topics are gaining traction in the developer blogosphere right now – then shapes its posts to connect naturally with those trending themes.

To maintain authenticity, the AI studies the developer's editing patterns on drafts and their own published posts, adapting its writing style accordingly. According to Memoir, after a few months of calibration, AI-generated posts become 94% indistinguishable from posts written by the developer themselves.

The initial calibration period takes about 14 days. After that, the AI starts publishing – and according to Memoir's numbers, targeted audience reach grows 6x, with qualified LinkedIn profile visits up 38%.

Memoir is currently in Y Combinator's batch, with the launch announcement posted to the YC site yesterday.

02 /Why It Matters

With AI now capable of writing code, the software itself has stopped being a meaningful differentiator for attracting attention. What matters now is the information environment around the product – how frequently and compellingly developers talk about it, across how many channels.

The problem is that most developers dislike doing this and aren't particularly good at it. They manage to post occasionally, but occasional is not enough. Sustained content output requires a marketing infrastructure that takes real time, money, and mental energy to build. Or you can just hand the whole system off to a platform like Memoir.

Interestingly, the current YC batch has another startup – tday – solving almost the same problem, with the added capability to run paid ad campaigns. tday's tagline is worth noting: "You ship the code. We make it famous."

YC graduate Waldium ([covered here](/review/vot-kak-nuzhno-delat-mashinki)) launched a similar platform late last year. It also monitors code repositories and analyzes customer conversations, with its primary output being an automatically maintained developer blog.

Also in the current YC cohort, Manicule ([covered previously](/review/bolshinstvo-marketingovyh-instrumentov-stanut-neaktualnymi)) takes a narrower angle: it focuses specifically on developers building tools for other developers.

For that audience, Manicule argues the primary marketing lever isn't social posts or videos – it's documentation. Clear, accurate, current documentation is what actually converts developers into users. Manicule operates as an "AI agency": its team works with the developer to design the documentation architecture, then its AI system populates and maintains it automatically.

03 /Opportunities

There's nothing technically exotic about any of these platforms – AI can already monitor trends, analyze code repositories, write posts, and produce video. The real insight is the market focus.

All of these startups chose to serve only one audience: developers. The reasoning is straightforward.

Developers are historically bad at self-promotion. It's not in their nature, and most of them know it.

At the same time, the developer population is exploding. With AI coding tools, people who couldn't write a line of code two years ago are now shipping software. GitHub's repository count grew from 365 million in 2022 to 800 million in 2026.

More developers plus more products equals a much louder signal-to-noise ratio. Standing out has become dramatically harder, which makes the attention problem more acute – and the market for solving it much larger.

The relevant direction, then, is building platforms that handle product promotion for developers – with AI doing the heavy lifting instead of the developers themselves.

The meta-observation here is hard to miss: the situation is a textbook case of the old "gold rush" principle. During a gold rush, the real money isn't in panning for gold – it's in selling shovels to the prospectors. In other words: right now, the play might be to build software not to promote it to end users, but to help other developers promote their own software.