Write The Case They Publish

Become a real user, then give the vendor a story they will host and link.

Most "case study" advice is about writing one for your own site. The quieter play is to become a named customer on someone else's. You use the product for real work. You write the story, or you sit for theirs. They publish it on a /customers page that already has authority, and they link to you. You borrowed their domain, their design, and their traffic, and you look like a company other serious companies already picked.

What to do: Pick a tool you actually run in production. Use it long enough to have a before-and-after. Then ask the vendor for a customer story, or draft one they can edit, with a link back to your site. Prefer vendors who already keep a public customers index.

Why it works: Their marketing team needs proof as badly as you need a backlink. You are handing them an asset they were going to commission anyway.

Example: Resend keeps a customers library. The Payload Cloud story, live at resend.com/customers/payload in September 2026, is a quote from Elliot DeNolf, founder and CTO, next to Payload's own site, founding year, and "using Resend since February 2023." Linear does the same at linear.app/customers, with named stories for Ramp, OpenAI, Coinbase, Cursor, and others, each linking out as "Read story" or "Watch video."

Walk it through

I opened both libraries instead of trusting a screenshot from a slide.

1. See what a vendor-hosted story actually looks like.

This is not a guest post on a blog. It is a permanent page on the vendor's domain, with the customer's logo, a person with a title, and a path back to payloadcms.com. Payload did the work of being a real user. Resend did the work of putting that work on a URL they will keep.

2. See the index this page sits inside.

Linear's grid is the prize. OpenAI "chose Linear and scaled to 3,000 users." Ramp's coding agent is "behind 75% of merged PRs." Cursor is on the same shelf. If you are a company Linear would be proud to name, that page is a better placement than another post on your own blog.

3. Earn the page before you ask for it.

Use the product. Hit a number they can print. Then write the email like you are doing their marketer a favor: here is the problem, here is what changed, here is a quote I will stand behind, here is a link I want in the sidebar. Offer to draft the first version. Most customer-marketing teams will take a clean draft over a blank calendar.

The Webflow "how to create a job board" post from the original notes is a cousin of this play, a tutorial that uses the product in public. Prefer the /customers version when the vendor has one. The tutorial is what you write on your site if they say no.

The read

• Their domain is the point. A quote on your homepage is proof. A story on theirs is distribution.
• The index is the real asset. One story is a page. A slot next to OpenAI is a neighborhood.
• You have to be a user. Fake case studies die in legal review. Real ones get a sidebar link.

Steal it

Have the assistant list the tools you already pay for that keep a public /customers index, and draft the story in their voice from a before-and-after you can prove. One number. One named person. You check the number against the product, not against the draft. Send it to whoever runs content there, not to a support bot. If they publish it, add the URL to your own press or about page.

If you are the vendor, this chapter is inverted. Make the page easy. Link to the customer. That is how you recruit the next one.

Gotchas

• A logo wall is not this play. If they will only put your mark in a strip with fifty others and no link, you did not get the story. You got a sticker.
• Do not pitch a product you tried for a weekend. They will ask for usage data. You will not have it.
• Some vendors will ghost you. That is fine. Publish the same story on your blog as "how we use X," then they have something to reprint later.