Cursor Hit $200M Without Spending a Dollar on Marketing. According to Bloomberg, It Didn’t Even Try.
- Emily Rector
- Apr 7
- 2 min read
While marketing teams are busy optimizing subject lines, Cursor—an AI coding tool from a 60-person startup—just blew past $200M in ARR without spending a single dollar on marketing.
Not a campaign. Not a brand video. Not even a landing page you could contact them through.
According to Bloomberg, Cursor grew to over a million daily users by doing one thing:
building something so useful that people couldn’t stop talking about it.
This isn’t a fluke. It’s the blueprint.
Cursor’s Growth Strategy? Don’t Have One.
“Despite not having spent a single dollar on marketing, it’s become one of the fastest-growing startups of all time.”— Bloomberg, April 2025
No PR blitz. No drip campaign. Cursor didn’t even make it easy to buy. Their early team avoided enterprise buyers, removed contact info from their site, and focused solely on serving individual developers.
And guess what? The developers sold it for them.
Thousands of engineers brought Cursor into the enterprise from the bottom up. 14,000 companies are now paying for it. Not because they were targeted—because they were obsessed.
Marketing Theater Can’t Keep Up With Product Truth
Cursor isn't just a software story—it's a signal. Today’s buyers don’t care about campaigns.
They care about control, usefulness, and other users saying “this changed how I work.”
88% of B2B buyers trust users and peers over brands (Edelman x LinkedIn)
94% of buyers say content from customers influences their decision more than any other source (Demand Gen Report)
And yet most B2B companies are still wasting budget on webinars no one watches and whitepapers no one reads
You Already Have the Proof. You Just Haven’t Turned It On.
If you’ve shipped a product. Supported a customer. Trained a team. You’ve already paid to run your business. So where’s the free marketing that should come with it?
Your customers and colleagues are already sitting on signal. You just haven’t extracted it.
At MarketScale, we’re done pretending marketing lives in the brand department. It lives in the crowd. That’s why we built Studio—to help B2B companies scale user-generated content that actually sells.
Not to look good. To move.
This Is What It Looks Like When You Build for the Crowd, Not the Committee
Cursor didn’t A/B test their way to $200M. They built something real, and let the market become their media team.
That’s the play.
And it’s wide open.
Want to build a community-driven marketing strategy that actually works?
Let’s talk about how UGC and authentic voices can power your growth. Contact us to get started.