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👋🏻 Hi ServerFault community,

I’m the founder of Octopus Deploy. I’m a developer by background and started Octopus in 2011 as a project in my spare time. We’re bootstrapped, not VC funded, but we have grown to the point of employing 75 people. We’re mostly an Australian company but employ folks in the US and UK too.

I won’t insult your intelligence - we’re obviously sponsoring the site in hopes it will raise some awareness of us and what we do, particularly in the IT Ops space where I think we are doing some innovative things. We don’t have any full time marketers at Octopus, just myself and a couple of other technical people who I roped into dabbling with marketing from time to time, trying to raise a bit of awareness. In fact I edited the logo image for the sponsorship and designed and wrote the ad copy (and most of the website copy) myself because we really haven’t figured out how to “do marketing properly”.

Part of the reason we like sponsoring ServerFault is that if we’re going to advertise (and the techie in me still struggles with the idea of advertising), we’d rather do it on actual technical communities rather than random sites based on all the data Google collects about you. In other words this feels like the most ethical kind of advertising option.

I have personally found ServerFault useful many time in the past (I still code) and while I haven’t posted here much, I was pretty active on StackOverflow years ago. A number of folks on our team hang out on various stack exchange sites too. We know that this is a community, not any ordinary website.

We’re going to run a competition inside our company, with a prize for whoever can earn the most upvotes on our team on ServerFault by answering questions. We have lots of smart technical folks so I am sure they will be good quality answers. Hopefully this is a way we can give back to the community (or make our contribution somewhat neutral at least 😁). If you think this is a bad idea or see it causing issues let me know.

I really do hope our ads aren’t distracting or offensive (more than any other ad at least). If there’s anything about what we’re doing that you have a concern about, post here and I’ll keep an eye on the thread, or email me directly - my firstname.lastname at our web domain. Thanks.