Cursor: Zero-marketing coding startup outpaces Slack's growth

Cursor, an AI coding assistant, has become tech's newest unicorn without spending a penny on marketing. The startup doubled its revenue from $100M to $200M in just two months, while serving over a million daily users.

The secret sauce? A simple tool that makes coding feel like chatting with a genius colleague. Cursor analyzes developers' keystrokes and suggests the next lines of code. It's become the go-to assistant for programmers at OpenAI, Spotify, and even Major League Baseball.

The tool has sparked "vibe coding" - a laid-back programming style where developers simply nod along to AI suggestions. OpenAI's Andrej Karpathy coined the term, describing it as "giving in to the vibes and forgetting code exists."

Cursor keeps pricing straightforward: $20 monthly for pros, $40 for business users. Most revenue comes from individual developers who expense it or pay themselves. The company even tried hiding their contact info to avoid enterprise customers. They showed up anyway - 14,000 businesses already pay for access.

Why this matters:

• Product-market fit trumps marketing every time. When developers love your tool, they'll sneak it through the company backdoor
• The next AI gold rush isn't about building models - it's about making them useful for everyday work