DigitalOcean’s strategy with evergreen technical content was to duplicate Linode’s strategy with evergreen technical content wholesale, down to individual articles. Linode Library, including a complete custom CMS and community engagement strategy to pay Linode users to help generate evergreen, was in place and driving conversions long before DigitalOcean was founded. They cribbed just about everything substantive from Linode documentation including the editorial structure that allows churning out content (install X on Y, basically, and enumerate administration verbs, Xs, Ys every time you deploy a new OS for users).
I distinctly remember multiple Library articles getting rewritten about a week later and appearing on DO’s site with just enough distance to be unique, but it was clear that our work was on the screen while they wrote it based on document structure and technical approach (this was in the early “catch up” phase, roughly 2011-2012; it’s probably established enough now that this is no longer the case). More than once they not-so-subtly rewrote the technical approach to distinguish it and ended up breaking the instructions. They took verb ideas, they took X ideas, they took whole documents and shoved them in a blender with their systems. This is likely provable with Internet Archive but I’ve never bothered to look - I left Linode a decade ago.
I wouldn’t have left this seemingly negative for no reason comment had you not identified DO’s documentation strategy as an early insight. It was an early insight, but absolutely, definitively not theirs. They raised the VC to get exposed to this audience and successfully presented nearly all of Linode’s business insights as their own, and it’s understandable that it seems that way if you didn’t follow Linode before DO.
The first several years of DigitalOcean’s existence made it very clear they looked at Linode and said that, but with funding rounds. And that’s fine. They’ve done well. But let’s not attribute insights to their copies of things; their primary corporate insight all along was realizing Linode was handicapped with bootstrapped capital alone. And to give them credit, it was undeniably savvy to apply Linode’s successes to scaling DigitalOcean. It just means it’s not their ingenuity in any sense of the word.
I distinctly remember multiple Library articles getting rewritten about a week later and appearing on DO’s site with just enough distance to be unique, but it was clear that our work was on the screen while they wrote it based on document structure and technical approach (this was in the early “catch up” phase, roughly 2011-2012; it’s probably established enough now that this is no longer the case). More than once they not-so-subtly rewrote the technical approach to distinguish it and ended up breaking the instructions. They took verb ideas, they took X ideas, they took whole documents and shoved them in a blender with their systems. This is likely provable with Internet Archive but I’ve never bothered to look - I left Linode a decade ago.
I wouldn’t have left this seemingly negative for no reason comment had you not identified DO’s documentation strategy as an early insight. It was an early insight, but absolutely, definitively not theirs. They raised the VC to get exposed to this audience and successfully presented nearly all of Linode’s business insights as their own, and it’s understandable that it seems that way if you didn’t follow Linode before DO.
The first several years of DigitalOcean’s existence made it very clear they looked at Linode and said that, but with funding rounds. And that’s fine. They’ve done well. But let’s not attribute insights to their copies of things; their primary corporate insight all along was realizing Linode was handicapped with bootstrapped capital alone. And to give them credit, it was undeniably savvy to apply Linode’s successes to scaling DigitalOcean. It just means it’s not their ingenuity in any sense of the word.