What they’ve built in 2 years is unreal:
- From $0 to $500M ARR
- Double their ARR every two month
- 360,000+ paying users
- Almost 1 billion lines of code generated daily
- Even engineers at OpenAI switched to Cursor
What drives Cursor’s insane growth?
Here's the playbook that broke every SaaS rule:
1️⃣ They ignored the "enterprise-first" advice
- $20/month Pro, $40/month Business
- 2,000 free AI completions to hook users
- No sales team, no enterprise contracts
Enterprise deals are slow. Developers move fast. Cursor bet on speed, self-serve, and word-of-mouth.
2️⃣ They let the product spread organically
- Attracted early adopters from elite tech companies
- Users loved it and shared it with their teams
- Twitter did the rest
No ads. No outreach. Get the individual, get the team, get the enterprise. Classic product-led growth.
3️⃣ They built for speed, not features
- Forked VS Code instead of building from scratch
- Ultra-fast AI responses (developers hate waiting)
- Obsessed over making today's version feel "obsolete in a year"
Cursor's ultra-fast AI responses created a moat that's harder to replicate than features.
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Cursor succeeded because they asked a fundamentally different question:
- Most tools: "How do we add AI to coding?"
- Cursor: "How do we rebuild coding for the AI era?
Your thoughts?
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