AI can build your entire application, but it still can’t actively find you users. What good is a product without any users?

That gap between building and reaching users is the defining bottleneck for 47 million developers worldwide. That’s why we invested in Mike Khristo, Jim O’Brien, and Steven Doyle to build Layers: a code-aware, agentic marketing suite that gives engineers an AI-powered growth team.

Building used to be the hard part

Two years ago, shipping a production app meant months of architecture decisions, 24 hour coding sessions, and deployment headaches. Today, a founder with AI at their side can go from idea to a product in production over a weekend. At Google, AI now writes half the code. At Ramp, 57% of pull requests come from AI agents. Some engineers at OpenAI and Anthropic report that AI writes all of it. The pace of software development is accelerating and the number of new products is going to swell.

As a result, it’s an exciting time to be a developer. A developer can spend more time working on the features that are most unique and valuable, and get products to market much faster. That’s clearly resonating with real-world engineers, which are rapidly increasing in number. There are 2x more software engineers in 2025 than there were just four years ago in 2021. There are 388 million repositories on Github now across the globe, a 3x increase from 5 years ago.

It is truly time to build.

But distribution is the missing Layer

These 47 million engineers writing code today want to build products that people actually use, whether it’s back-office productivity software or the next indie game on Steam. The best engineers want to see their work in the hands of users.

But finding and acquiring users is brutally difficult, particularly for a new product. The numbers are stark: 32% of games published to Steam in 2024 failed to generate more than $500 in revenue and 83% of mobile games fail within 3 years after launch. Only ~25% of software startups make it past their third birthday (Carta). Mobile apps lose 77% of their users by the end of their first month.

Most engineers haven’t had the time to understand complex marketing approaches - and there are a lot of them required to drive users to your application:

• Structuring ad creative and content testing frameworks (e.g., hook testing)

• Configuring pixel, SDK, and server-side conversion tracking with proper attribution windows across Meta, Google, and TikTok

• Building audience hierarchies using lookalikes, exclusions, retargeting pools, and value-based bidding signals tied to LTV cohorts

• Managing bid strategies (tCPA, tROAS, cost caps), budget pacing, and cross-channel allocation based on marginal CAC efficiency curves

• Designing full-funnel campaign architecture (prospecting, retargeting, retention) with segmented messaging aligned to user lifecycle stages

These are disciplines that take marketers years to master. And that’s exactly what Mike, Jim, and Steven are building into Layers.

A Builder’s Knight in ROAS Armor: Layers

Mike and Jim spent years designing Snapchat’s ads ecosystem, working with some of the largest brands in the world to build and manage marketing campaigns at scale. All of that hard-won expertise is now codified into Layers.

Claude code supercharges an engineer’s coding capabilities. Lovable imbues non-technical individuals with the ability to create applications. Layers provides the next crucial step: it provides distribution and growth superpowers to every builder.

Here’s how it works. A developer adds their GitHub repo. Within minutes, Layers analyzes the codebase, identifies the product’s value proposition, and generates a full marketing campaign: ad copy and visuals, user targeting strategy, and budget allocation.

Layers deploys agents to scan social media platforms and discern what types of content is most effective for similar applications. Based on that information, they use VLMs to generate content for your application that can be pushed to UGC and ad platforms.

As marketing campaigns run, Layers monitors performance and adjusts bids and creative automatically. Developers can track their applications’ performance directly on a dashboard that simplifies the entire experience for them.

Layers is collapsing the learning curve on distribution so engineers can focus on building the best product possible. Suddenly those 10x engineers all have 100x growth capabilities. There’s never been a more exciting time to build.