The 9 companies I obsessively follow for marketing inspiration 📡

[FREE] The exact ideas you can steal from each.

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Top marketing teams to follow (2026) ⭐️

I send marketing ideas to 91,500 subscribers every week.

The #1 question I get:

Where do all your ideas come from?

To be honest, the answer is the most boring superpower in marketing: I obsessively follow other companies and study what they do. So I thought I’d hand you my actual list. These 9 teams are a marketing school. Almost everything they ship is worth stealing, so that’s what we’re going to do.

Here are the top marketing teams to follow (2026 edition) ↓

1. Anthropic

2. Lovable

3. Ramp

4. Torq

5. tl;dv

6. Clay

7. Cluely

8. Ahrefs

9. Decart

Keep reading for what they do, the moves I love most, the one play I’d actually copy from each, and where to follow them.

Bookmark this one ⭐️

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1. Anthropic 🧠

Marketing team: ~50-80

The makers of Claude (the AI I use to edit my writing). They’re the rare AI company whose marketing pulls in people who don’t even work in marketing. Every campaign pushes the same pro-human message.

Their greatest marketing hits:

1. An “import from ChatGPT” button. A one-click feature that moves your chat history and memory over from ChatGPT. It brilliantly kills their competitor’s strongest lock-in. Greatest growth move of the decade IMO.

2. When a competitor ships a hated feature → make fun of it. Soon after ChatGPT announced ads, Anthropic dropped very funny videos of AI assistants ruining chats with sponsored answers.

3. Turn a product test into a 24/7 live event. Anthropic livestreamed Claude failing to beat Pokémon Red non-stop on Twitch. Thousands tuned in to watch it.

4. Swag that flatters the people wearing it. They opened a Claude coffee shop in NYC for one weekend and gave away hats embroidered with “thinking”. I personally waited 2 hours for mine.

5. Google ads on developer error messages. When code breaks, developers paste the error into Google. Anthropic buys ads on those exact searches, so Claude shows up right when someone’s stuck. (Spicier version: bid on the errors your competitor’s product throws…)

Steal this: put the customer at the center of your marketing and keep the product in the background. Almost every Anthropic campaign is really about the people using Claude.

👉 Follow on LinkedIn: Anthropic

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2. Lovable 💻

Marketing team: ~15-25

An AI “vibe coding” platform, one of the fastest-growing AI products of 2026. Elena Verna runs growth and posts most of the smart plays herself.

Their greatest marketing hits:

1. A competitive hackathon live-streamed like a sports event. “Build Launch Win” is a multi-city competition with up to $440K in prizes. People watch AI-built apps go head to head, live on camera. We did something similar at Wiz.

2. Invent a 24-hour event for one specific community. “SheBuilds” gave each woman builder $100 in Anthropic credits and $250 in Stripe credits.

3. Dropbox’s old growth hack, brought back. Students could nominate their university to win $100K of free Lovable access, and naturally spam classmates to vote. It’s like the new and better version of the 2012 Dropbox Space Race!

4. A two-word Google ad. Search “Bolt AI” and you’d see “Lovable > Bolt”. No salesy texts, just easy positioning.

5. Censor your own announcements: Lovable posted a new integration announcement with the partner’s name blurred out. People started guessing in comments. Engagement exploded. A few hours later they revealed it was Shopify. Wayyyyy bigger impact than if they’d just announced it normally.

Steal this: pick one specific group (women builders, students, vibe coders), throw a 24-hour event just for them, and pay people to show up. Lovable does this on repeat, and every launch turns into a thing people actually talk about.

👉 Follow on LinkedIn: Elena Verna (Lovable’s Chief Growth)

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3. Ramp 💳

Marketing team: ~80-100

A corporate card and expense platform with one of the best brand teams in B2B. They made expense management funny. I didn’t think that was possible.

Their greatest marketing hits:

1. Show people what life WITHOUT your product actually looks like. Ramp put Brian Baumgartner (”Kevin” from The Office) in a glass box in NYC and livestreamed him filing 600,000 expense reports by hand. Ramp can do it automatically. 110+ million views.

2. Write a job post so wild it goes viral on its own. Ramp’s “Viral Creative Producer” role with a public “taste test” is genius. They also built and internal AI Skills marketplace for employees and hired Agentic Operator. I honestly think they’re in the top 1% of the marketing world in terms of team building.

3. Engineer a street stunt built to be filmed by civillians and reposted. Ramp launched their Treasury product by smashing a branded car with a wrecking ball in Manhattan. 3x the views of their previous best video.

4. Show how tiny a customer’s team can be. Ramp’s ad bragged about a customer doing $10B in revenue with a 3-person finance team (thanks to Ramp). Every CFO wants that kind of efficiency.

5. Reddit ads disguised as a confession. Ramp ran it in Reddit’s viral TIFU (”Today I F*cked Up”) format, because people skip ads… but they stop for a spicy confession and a screenshot!

Steal this: make the pain your product removes physically visible (let people watch the misery in real time).

👉 Follow on LinkedIn: Ramp

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4. Torq 💀

Marketing team: ~30-40

A cybersecurity automation platform (the “anti-SOAR”). Security marketing in 2026 is a sea of identical silver-and-blue booths with F1 simulators. Torq showed up with a monster truck and a flaming skeleton.

Their greatest marketing hits:

1. Declare your competitor’s whole category dead. Torq published a downloadable “SOAR is Dead” manifesto (the legacy category their tool replaces), plus branded merch.

2. Take design seriously (in a category that doesn’t). Torq keeps winning “best booth” awards at security conferences, because nobody else bothers. We’re guilty of doing it at Wiz too.

3. Make a conspiracy-theory video about your own brand. Torq leaned so hard into their branding universe that they shipped multiple full conspiracy-theory parodies. Fans play along.

4. $10 per visitor to charity at Black Hat. For every booth visitor, Torq donated $10 to a Vegas nonprofit teaching kids tech, and handed out free socks. No demo.

5. Put a “hype monkey” on the payroll whose entire job is to be funny online. Trevor is Torq’s “Junior Media Intern,” a fictional character played by an actor who posts memes and stars in his own show, TorqTV. At conferences, real people line up to take photos with him, and all that goodwill rubs off on Torq.

Steal this: in a category where every competitor looks the same, just looking different is a real advantage. Torq went full flaming-skeleton, and it probably did more for them than their first $20M in pipeline.

👉 Follow on LinkedIn: Don Jeter (Torq’s CMO)

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5. tl;dv 🎙️

Marketing team: ~2-5

An AI notetaker for your Zoom and Teams calls. They went from 0 to 2M+ users on comedy alone. It’s the only B2B page on LinkedIn that makes me laugh out loud.

Their greatest marketing hits:

1. Run your company page like a comedy account. tl;dv’s official LinkedIn posts running bits like “PM vs Product Owner” and “Best music for meetings that drag on”. Employees like Renée Shaw do it perfectly, too.

2. Give your whole team fake job titles on LinkedIn on the same day: tl;dv “promoted” all 50+ employees to CEO at once. Everyone updated LinkedIn. That’s 50+ “new job” notifications hitting thousands of feeds. LinkedIn rewards job changes with free reach.

3. Attack a competitor’s selling point and turn it into content. When rivals sold invisible “bot-free” notetakers, tl;dv explained why invisible is worse for your privacy.

4. Jokes built for one role at a time. Separate humor for PMs, engineers, sales, and CS. The narrower they went = the better it did.

5. Let creators apply to promote you, and only pay for the views. tl;dv flipped influencer marketing with an open ambassador program anyone can join: post about them, get paid per impression, no follower minimums or approvals. It pulls 10M+ organic impressions a month.

Steal this: let your brand actually be funny. tl;dv runs their LinkedIn like a stand-up account, and the comedy alone took them past 2M users.

👉 Follow on LinkedIn: tl;dv (the company page *is* the comedy show)

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6. Clay 🗂️

Marketing team: ~15-25

A GTM data and outbound platform that sales teams use to find and reach prospects. Most B2B companies have users. Clay has DISCIPLES, and they built the cult on purpose.

Their greatest marketing hits:

1. Make your certification harder to get into than a top college. Clay University accepts as few as 19%, and “Clay Certified” shows up on people’s LinkedIn because it’s so rare.

2. Invent your own category festival (instead of sponsoring one). Sculpt takes over SF’s Pier 48 every year, branded robes and a magician on stage included.

3. Replace your support team with a public community. Clay killed Intercom and pushed everything into a 15K-20K member public Slack. Users now answer each other. Don’t do this if you’re not confident in your product.

4. Build fan clubs of your future buyers before they’re hired. Clay runs 60+ student clubs, training GTM Engineers before they start their careers. Of course, they will all use Clay on Day 1 of their first job.

5. Use your own product in public and show the receipts. Clay used Clay Ads to cut their LinkedIn cost per lead from $250 to $25, then published the whole playbook.

6. Let customers compete for weird “world records”. Clay tracks who used their product in the strangest places (underwater, on mountains, on jet skis). Winners get featured on their website. Give people a public way to compete, and they’ll create content trying to win.

Steal this: build an actual community around your product. Give your best users something to belong to (Clay gives them a “Clay Certified” badge and a 20K-person Slack), and they start doing your selling for you.

👉 Follow on LinkedIn: Varun Anand (Clay co-founder)

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7. Cluely 🥷

Marketing team: ~2-5 core + 60+ paid creators on retainer

The most controversial AI company of 2026. It started as a tool to cheat on coding interviews and is now an assistant that runs invisibly in any conversation. Most companies shouldn’t copy this. Every marketer should study it.

Their greatest marketing hits:

1. Pick a deliberately provocative positioning. Cluely’s entire pitch is “cheat on everything“ - interviews, sales calls, dates, exams. (They toned it down a bit after launch). This positioning is so loaded people fight about it for free.

2. Make a launch video designed to make people angry (rage bait). Roy Lee used Cluely on a blind date to fake his age and job until she walked out. Tons of views and national backlash in 72 hours, on purpose.

3. A 3M-impression post about getting kicked out of Columbia. Roy posted about his suspension and went insanely viral.

4. A “$50/hr interns in SF” tweet they actually acted on. The tweet hit 4.9M views, so they hired 60+ creators to each post 4+ TikToks a day. 20M views in two weeks.

5. A screenshot of a huge Cluely payout, with no explanation of what Cluely is. Thousands started Googling the name to find out. It broke no Reddit rules, since it was just “someone” flexing their income.

6. Ugly billboards in Times Square. Basic black text on white reading “hi i’m roy / pls buy my thing”, going insanely viral for their simplicity.

Steal this: publish your own playbook in public, including the parts that failed. Cluely openly admitted some videos got 50M views and almost no signups. Almost nobody is that honest, so it builds real trust.

👉 Follow on X: Roy Lee (Cluely’s CEO)

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8. Ahrefs 🌐

Marketing team: ~15-20

The most underrated marketing team on this list. They sell SEO software, hit $149M+ ARR with no outside funding, and run almost no outbound sales. Most of their tactics look boring on paper. They’ve worked for over a decade.

Their greatest marketing hits:

1. Give away a premium product for free, forever. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools hands over backlinks and site audits for any verified site for $0. At most companies that’s the paid product.

2. Share industry insights based on your internal data. CMO Tim Soulo gives away amazing data for free, like what makes AI chatbots recommend a brand.

3. Build a YouTube channel that teaches, never advertises. Tim has one rule since 2015: “creating videos about new features is boring.” 600K+ subscribers, never broken.

4. Ask your audience to publicly roast your product. Tim keeps inviting people on Reddit to trash Ahrefs, 8 years running.

5. Put your ad on something the audience already carries. At BrightonSEO, Ahrefs printed SEO stats on the conference coffee cups, so every attendee held a tiny Ahrefs ad.

Steal this: give away tools and insights you could charge money for. For a bootstrapped company it’s the cheapest way to grow without ads.

👉 Follow on LinkedIn: Tim Soulo (Ahrefs CMO)

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9. Decart 🌀

Marketing team: ~5

A tiny Israeli AI lab building real-time generative video. 7 people out-marketing labs 30x their size, with one marketing rule: every product ships as a public, playable link on day one.

Their greatest marketing hits:

1. Hire someone full-time to use your product in public (dogfoodmaxxing). Decart makes an AI video model, so they hired a full-time filmmaker who does nothing but create videos with their own tools and post them.

2. Build an in-house studio so you can SHOW your product. On top of the above, their small internal team ships campaigns across gaming, robotics, and fashion. When the product is hard to explain → just show it.

3. Launch with a free demo people can play with right now. Oasis, a playable AI Minecraft clone where every frame is generated live, hit 1M+ users in 79 hours, mostly from people posting clips of it glitching out. It got covered by TechCrunch.

4. Replace your press release with a public URL. Lucy 2.0 let anyone swap their face and clothes live in the browser, then went on stage at AWS re:Invent. Let people play with your product!

5. Send every prospect a personalized version of your demo. Decart’s CMO told me they generated a 1-of-1 AI avatar clone for every journalist on their list, with that person’s own face in it. Millions of views, $0 paid.

Steal this: “Try it yourself" > "Book a demo”. If people can play with your product in a browser, skip the demo form and just ship the link. Show your product and its results whenever possible. That’s Decart’s entire strategy.

👉 Follow on LinkedIn: Decart

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What they all have in common

Read these a few times and the you’ll notice the same five patterns:

• ✅ Make the product itself the marketing. Decart’s Oasis. Anthropic’s Golden Gate Claude. Cluely’s launch video. Ahrefs’ free tools.

• ✅ Build characters and series, not one-off ads. Ramp’s Brian. Torq’s conspiracies. tl;dv’s green-screen sketches.

• ✅ Turn your community into your distribution. Clay’s Claygencies. Lovable’s clippers. Cluely’s intern army.

• ✅ Make creative so weird people share it for you. Cluely’s blank billboards. Ramp’s wrecking ball. Anthropic’s coffee shop.

• ✅ Pick a fight on purpose. Cluely’s whole brand. Torq’s “SOAR is Dead.” tl;dv vs “bot-free”.

See you next week ✌️

Tom