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I'm Rémy, and I break down marketing tactics from the best startups.
Today, we are going to analyze the growth strategy of Black Forest Labs. One of the fastest growing German startup.
If you're building a technical product, it will give you ideas to grow your company.
About Black Forest Labs
BFL is a German AI startup founded in 2024 by former Stability AI researchers. Its founders are Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Patrick Esser. The company specializes in building the best text-to-image AI models, called FLUX.
BFL’s website
What They're Doing Right
1. Locking down enterprise partnerships
Black Forest Labs secured partnerships with big brands:
Adobe for Photoshop integration
Canva Inc
Snap Inc
It gives the company lots of social proof and predictable revenue, since BFL sells commercial licenses and API usage to enterprises.
2. Leveraging other companies’ distribution
They launched a developer API with partners like Together AI, Replicate and Fal.AI.
It made FLUX available everywhere developers already work.
Every integration point is a distribution channel.
3. Doing the open source playbook
They made open-source AI models available to everyone on Hugging Face and GitHub. It builds developers goodwill and allow them to experiment with the models.
It is free marketing. Developers can influence their company to use BFL’s AI models and get big enterprises deals.
Where They're Leaving Money On The Table
1. Their content and SEO strategy is (almost) nonexistent
I searched for Black Forest Labs tutorials, case studies, and educational content. Their blog exists but has minimal content. Only product announcements and case studies. No educational resources or tutorials.
They're sitting on hundreds of high-intent keywords:
"how to generate product mockups with AI"
"AI image generation for marketing teams"
"FLUX vs Midjourney comparison"
"how to integrate FLUX API"
No tutorials on YT
Every day without this content, competitors are capturing search traffic that could be theirs.
My advice :
Publish 4-5 pieces per week targeting developer use cases and enterprise applications.
2. No clear developer community strategy
I found no Discord server, no community forum where people share their usecases.
They only provide a dedicated email address ([email protected]) for safety feedback.
Even customers created their own community:
Customers asking on reddit
During this time, Vercel or Hugging Face have big developer communities evangelizing the product.
My advice:
Launch a community (Discord server would be nice as it is what most developers use)
Feature community builds weekly.
Give access to beta models to get feedback and improve the models faster
When Grok's AI image generator flooded X with FLUX-generated images.
Where were the tutorials?
The content explaining how it made these pictures?
Viral moments create temporary windows of extreme awareness. BFL didn't have a system to convert that attention into signups after the hype died.
My advice:
When something goes viral, publish “how-to” content within 24 hours. It could be on X, Youtube, Linkedin. Even run faceless accounts to show images generated with Flux.
TL; DR
Black Forest Labs is winning right now because of their product quality and their strategic partnerships.
But that won't last forever. Their competitors are catching up on quality and partnerships can end (previous customer xAI built its own AI image generation model).
So there are huge opportunities to get more customers with content and community.
Want help growing your tech company?
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See you next week,
Rémy
PS: some merch I got
Merch at an event in Paris