If you’re obsessed with AI, you’ve probably heard of LangChain. But as a GTM person, you’re less likely to have heard of Mastra, the wildly popular open-source Typescript framework and their repeat co-founder/CEO Sam Bhagwat. Sam and team are building one of the most distinctive distribution engines in AI: a physical book (“Principles of Agents”) used as a scalable developer acquisition channel.
You’re hearing it from me first - Mastra has potential to become one of the most sought after early-stage GTM roles in 2026. Word on the street is Alphabet’s #1 hiring priority is Typescript developers.
What makes Mastra interesting for GTM operators isn’t “more AI.” It’s the opposite: a distribution strategy that can’t be faked in an era where every channel is saturating.
Below is GTMBA’s Founder GTM Spotlight and interview with Sam Bhagwat.
Q: In an age where everyone is shipping PDFs, blogs, and AI-generated content, why are you planning to ship 1,000,000 physical books in 2026? When did you realize this could be a primary distribution channel and GTM advantage?
Sam’s viral LinkedIn posts have caught the attention of millions
Sam: The real catalyst was YC Demo Day (March 2025). Leading up to this, my co-founder Shane and I had done 20 whiteboarding sessions around people trying to build agents and Shane said, “what if you wrote a book about this?”
I have some background here. In college, I was Editor for the Stanford Daily, and at my prior company Gatsby I’d already written a book. That Gatsby book didn’t perform that well from an ROI standpoint because it wasn’t practical enough: engineers want practical guidance, not a history lesson.
We brought 500 copies of the book to demo day and sent it to investors ahead of time. Investors started telling our batchmates, “One of your batchmates wrote this book - here’s feedback on your product from it.”
We basically took over demo day and decided to turn this into a repeatable GTM motion.
Q: Why did it resonate so strongly? People could just search this content using LLMs.
Sam: Two things: authority and social dynamics.
In a new domain like AI agents, people are extremely sensitive to information quality. They want experts who actually understand what’s happening. A book signals authority in a way that a blog post or PDF doesn’t.
The second part is that a book is a social object. New editions are news. News spreads differently than information. People ask each other, “Have you gotten the book yet?” That social layer is incredibly powerful.
Q: How did Mastra scale from “book at demo day” into a real distribution engine?
Sam: There are two key elements here - awareness and logistics.
For awareness, we started with what we internally called a guerrilla event takeover playbook - show up to developer events with stacks of books and make them easy to grab. Then we layered in mechanics that compound: On LinkedIn, we added the “comment BOOK” to drive virality and then introduced “comment BOX” for communities and hackathons. About 8% of commenters choose BOX, and the average box is 25 books, which massively increases distribution per interaction.
Internal Mastra slide on book distribution strategy
To support the insane demand, we had to treat logistics as a core capability. Our strategy only works if we treat distribution like operations, not marketing. We built a scaled system leveraging a hub-and-spoke network: Las Vegas printers for Vegas events, a large volume printer in Canada that feeds a 3PL in Colorado, expanding to EU and India…etc. We evolved from print-on-demand to buying books by the pallet to significantly bring down our CAC. Our system requires investment in a supply chain operational complexity.
Q: Even with economies of scale, this sounds expensive. How do you justify the cost?
Andrew Chen (a16z) published a popular essay calling out how AI saturates channels quickly and then kills the channel. AI SDRs are a great example of AI killing email.
Andrew Chen’s X Post and essay on channel commoditization.
So we ran in the opposite direction - toward things that can’t be faked. You can’t fake printing books. You can’t fake shipping pallets to events. You can’t fake years of understanding book distribution logistics, which I understand well from a prior life before Mastra.
The ROI is clear when you understand the world we live in today and how to scale your unique distribution advantage.
GTMBA Comment: Kyle Poyar recently posted a different example about “standing out in the age of AI slop”. Mastra has embodied this standout ethos for their target ICP.
Q: You did ~100K books in 2025 and are targeting 1M in 2026. Why 10x?
Sam: AI is evolving quickly. We treat the book as an append-only artifact. We don’t delete content - new primitives just get added.
We ship new editions every 3–6 months, and that creates a natural re-engagement loop. People who have the first edition want the next one. Each edition becomes a new customer touchpoint.
Q: What GTM lessons carried over from your prior company Gatsby? You competed with Next.js / Vercel. Any lessons from their Founder/CEO Guillermo Rauch?
Sam: We lost. Guillermo / Vercel beat us - and I have a ton of respect for him. He’s now an investor in Mastra.
Open-source developer tools are fundamentally a bottoms-up adoption game. Even if you do outbound, people take meetings because they’ve already heard of you.
The lesson is the same for both of us: if you’re building a devtool company, you have to be great at broad-based developer marketing. There really isn’t a substitute for that.
Q: When does Mastra build a GTM team?
Sam: As an open-source framework company, you’re really building two companies: the framework (distribution and mindshare) and the platform (monetization). You have to win both.
Our platform is in open beta now. We’re taking it to GA in Q2, then start charging a couple months later. GTM hiring will accompany that.
Q: What kind of GTM talent wins in DevTools?
Sam: Product-forward, ecosystem-aware, and operator-minded. Our best reps at Gatsby never sounded like reps. On the first call, you’d think they were a PM and deeply understood the framework and platform. At the same time, successful DevTools require a partner ecosystem and the ability to build trust with partners/agencies. Finally, the rep will be flooded with 1000s of leads and needs to quickly identify propensity-to-buy signals and build a system around this to spend time effectively.
GTMBA Comment: 2024 GTMBA article about PLG selling. Note, Branch was not DevTool, but many of the principles still apply.
Conclusion
Mastra is a company to watch closely for potential breakout GTM opportunities. Mastra expects to build out GTM post-GA as monetization ramps. If you’re a product-minded, ecosystem-savvy devtools GTM operator, this is shaping up to be one of the most interesting early-stage GTM seats in AI going into 2026.
Cheers,
Julian @ GTMBA