Most seed-stage devtools do not need a paid analyst relationship. If you are pre-Series A, selling to individual engineers or small teams with a credit card, spending five or six figures on a Gartner or Forrester contract is a waste. I have watched founders do it anyway, usually because a board member said “we should be in the Magic Quadrant,” and usually the money bought a logo on a slide nobody read.
That said, the moment you start selling into the enterprise, analyst relations stops being optional theater and becomes part of how deals close. So the useful question is not “should I pay an analyst,” it is “when does this game start mattering to my buyers, and how do I not look like an amateur when it does.”
What analyst relations actually is
Analyst relations, or AR, is the practice of building relationships with the people who research and rate technology categories, so that when a buyer asks them “who should I look at for X,” your name comes up and it comes up accurately.
The classic firms are Gartner, Forrester, and IDC. They sell research to enterprise buyers and advisory to vendors. A CIO pays Gartner a lot of money every year, and part of what they get is analysts they can call before a big purchase. When your buyer is about to spend two million dollars on infrastructure, they often call their analyst first. That call is the thing you are trying to influence.
There is also a newer layer of independent analysts. People like the folks at Redmonk in the developer-tooling world, plus a growing set of solo analysts and small firms who publish on Substack, run their own newsletters, and have real credibility with practitioners. These people usually cost less, move faster, and in devtools specifically often carry more weight with the actual engineers than the big three do.
How analysts are different from press
Press wants a story. Analysts want to be right.
A reporter covers you because you did something newsworthy: a launch, a raise, a controversy, a number. The relationship is transactional and fast. You pitch, they write, it runs or it does not, everyone moves on.
An analyst is building a mental model of your category that they will defend to paying clients for years. They are not looking for news. They are looking to understand where you fit, whether your claims hold up, and whether they would stake their reputation on recommending you. That means an analyst briefing is closer to a technical sales call than a media pitch. They will poke at your architecture. They will ask about customers by name. They remember what you told them last time and they will notice if the story changed.
The other big difference: with most of the big firms, you can pay them, and with press you cannot. That creates an obvious tension, which I will get to.
What is a briefing and how do you run one
A briefing is a scheduled call, usually 30 to 60 minutes, where you walk an analyst through what you do, who you serve, and why you are different. Most firms offer briefings for free even if you are not a paying client, because your information makes their research better.
Here is how I run one so it does not fall flat:
- Lead with the category and the buyer, not the demo. The analyst needs to slot you into their map. Tell them what problem you solve and for whom in the first two minutes. If they cannot place you, the rest is noise.
- Bring proof, not adjectives. “We are the fastest” means nothing. “Here are three customers running this in production at this scale, and here is the before and after” means everything. Analysts talk to your customers whether you want them to or not, so get ahead of it.
- Be honest about what you are not. The fastest way to lose an analyst is to claim you do everything. Tell them where you are strong and where you are early. They respect it, and it makes your strong claims believable.
- Have one crisp answer to “why now.” Why does this category exist today when it did not three years ago. If you cannot answer that, you have a positioning problem, not an AR problem.
- Send a tight deck after, not during. Ten slides. They will forward it internally. Make it skimmable.
Do not treat a briefing as a pitch to win. Treat it as calibrating how a smart, skeptical outsider describes you when you are not in the room. If your positioning is muddy, a briefing will expose it in about four minutes, which is actually a gift.
How do you get into the reports and category maps
You get in by being briefed, being relevant to a report the analyst is already writing, and in the case of the big evaluative reports, sometimes by meeting inclusion criteria you have to formally apply for.
The named reports work differently from firm to firm. Gartner has Magic Quadrants and Market Guides. Forrester has Waves. Getting into a Magic Quadrant usually requires hitting a revenue threshold and other criteria, and there is a whole structured process with surveys, demos, and customer references. Market Guides are lower bar and often where a younger company first shows up as a “representative vendor,” which is a perfectly good place to start.
For a startup, the realistic near-term targets are the Market Guide style listing, the independent analyst’s landscape or newsletter, and getting named when an analyst answers an inquiry. That last one is invisible and it is the most valuable. Nobody sees it. It just moves deals in the background.
If you are building a genuinely new category rather than fighting for a spot in an existing one, the map itself is the battle, and that is a different playbook. I wrote about that in category design for AI tools, because getting an analyst to accept that your category exists is half the war before any quadrant matters.
The honest bit about paying them
Yes, the big firms sell you research subscriptions and advisory, and yes, being a paying client generally gets you more analyst time. No, paying does not buy you a good rating, and reputable firms are genuinely careful about that line. But paying buys you access, more briefings, inquiry calls where you can ask the analyst questions, and feedback on your positioning before an evaluative report.
For a Series B or later company selling six-figure deals into regulated enterprises, that access is often worth it. For a seed company, it almost never is. The money is better spent on customer stories that your sales team can actually use in a deal this quarter.
When AR is premature
AR is premature when your buyer does not consult analysts. If you are selling bottoms-up to developers who discover you through a GitHub repo, a Show HN, or a coworker, no Gartner inquiry is in that purchase path. Building an AR program before you have enterprise motion is optimizing for a buyer you do not have yet.
Signs it is time to start paying attention, not necessarily paying money:
- Your deals now include a procurement team and a security review.
- Prospects ask “are you in the Gartner report” during evaluation.
- You are displacing an incumbent that analysts already cover.
- Your average contract value crossed into the range where a buyer would get fired for choosing wrong.
When those show up, start free. Do briefings with the relevant analysts. Build the relationship a year before you need the report. The worst time to introduce yourself to an analyst is the week their Wave closes.
The realistic payoff versus the cost
The payoff is air cover. When an enterprise buyer champions you internally, they get asked “is this a real company or a science project.” An analyst mention, a report inclusion, a favorable inquiry answer, gives your champion something to point at that is not your own marketing. It de-risks the decision for the person whose neck is on the line. That is worth real money in enterprise sales, and it is nearly worthless in bottoms-up developer sales.
The cost is money and time. Big-firm contracts run into five and six figures. The bigger cost is the hours: someone senior has to run briefings, manage inquiries, prep references, and keep the relationship warm. If you do not have someone who owns it, you will pay for access you never use.
So the plan for most infra startups is simple. Do not pay yet. Learn how the game works now. Start free briefings with independent analysts the moment enterprise deals appear, and only write the big check when a specific report or a specific stalled deal makes the ROI obvious. Knowing how it works is cheap. Playing before you need to is not.
