Richard Terry-Lloyd
A dense grid of faint dots standing for every company on the platform, with a scattered minority lit in amber to mark the accounts where five or more teams are already shipping
Back to blog

1,000 Companies, One Signal

·Richard Terry-Lloyd
Go-To-MarketRevenue OperationsAIBuildersNetlify

I was talking with the guy rebuilding our revenue operations from the ground up, Spencer Peterson, about how we picked the first 1,000 accounts for our newest campaign.

The answer wasn't firmographics. It was behavior.

The first signal: team sprawl

We're going after roughly 1,000 companies with one thing in common: at least 5 teams already actively using Netlify inside the same company in the last 90 days.

Team sprawl is the tell. 5 or more teams running quietly inside one company, usually without anyone above them knowing it's happening.

The second signal: how they're shipping

More of these teams are deploying outside of GitHub. We never had to ask them why.

That pattern alone tells us they're probably not developers pushing commits — they're likely builders working with something like Claude or Codex instead.

You can tell who's building with agents before you ever talk to them. Nobody has to disclose it. The deploy pattern already did.

What that changes

We didn't need a survey to find our best 1,000 accounts. We needed to know what "shipping without GitHub" looks like at scale, then build the model that spots it.