Funnel teardown: Mintlify (Developer documentation)
Founder(s): Han Wang and Hahnbee Lee

Mintlify made beautiful docs a category. The funnel demos itself.

TL;DR: Mintlify's funnel works because the marketing site IS a Mintlify-built docs site, and so are the docs sites of every visible customer. Every page a developer reads in the category is implicit Mintlify advertising. The lesson: if your product produces a public artifact, optimize for the artifact being recognizable and traceable back to you.

What they sell: A documentation-as-code platform that turns Markdown plus components into a polished docs site with search, analytics, and AI-assisted answers.
Who it's for: Developer-tool SaaS, API companies, and platforms that want documentation that looks intentional rather than templated.
Pricing: Free tier for open-source projects. Paid tiers per editor seat scale into team and enterprise (verified 2026-05-17).

Hook pattern: Visible customer aesthetic
The hero is supported by a logo bar of well-known developer-tool companies whose docs run on Mintlify. The recognition is immediate for the target reader: 'their docs look like Anthropic's docs, and I want my docs to look like Anthropic's docs'.

Story pattern: Output-as-proof
The marketing site itself runs on Mintlify. There is no story to tell because the reader is already inside the proof. Every interaction with the marketing site is a product demo by accident.

Offer pattern: Free for open source plus seat-based for teams
Free for open-source projects acquires the developer credibility flywheel; seat-based pricing for teams captures the paid revenue. The free tier produces the visible customer aesthetic that sells the paid tier.

What's working:
Marketing site is a product demo, eliminating the gap between claim and proof.|Logo bar of well-known dev-tool customers carries the trust load that copy would otherwise have to.|Free tier for open source projects floods the visible-customer surface, which is the primary acquisition channel.|Documentation as a marketing channel: every customer docs site is a Mintlify referral.|AI-search and analytics features tap the same buyer trend (LLM-assisted everything) without overpromising.

What to adapt:
If your product creates a public artifact, make that artifact recognizable and traceable to you. Subtle attribution, but present.|Use a free tier specifically to seed visible-customer presence in your category.|Eat your own dog food on the marketing site. If your product is good, you cannot avoid this and you should not want to.

What to avoid:
Do not add visible attribution on paid tiers. The visible-customer flywheel is a free-tier specialty.|Do not seek a logo bar before you have logos. Empty logo grids and 'Customer logos coming soon' are conversion-killers.

Brunson lens:
Hook: Trust-by-association hook (Brunson 'Borrow authority') executed via visible customer logos in the buyer's own category.
Story: Output-as-proof: the marketing site is the demo and the customer sites are the case studies. The story is environmental.
Offer: Free-for-OSS plus seat-based paid tier — Brunson 'two-rung Value Ladder' tuned to a developer-tool buyer.
Value ladder tier: Front-end lead funnel (OSS free) plus subscription core (paid teams).