Cloudsmith is a leading universal artifact management platform built with cloud-native principles to scale with modern demands. Headquartered in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Cloudsmith empowers developers to securely manage and distribute software artifacts globally.

Nigel Douglas, Head of Developer Relations, leads initiatives to engage developers, drive adoption, and ensure product experiences are consistent, seamless, and developer-first.

Challenge

“Instruqt has become a go-to standard for us — and really for the industry — when it comes to delivering safe, scalable, hands-on environments. The moment someone sees an Instruqt lab, they know they’re getting a real, guided experience that mirrors production.”  – Nigel Douglas, Head of Developer Relations at Cloudsmith

As a fast-growing, developer-first company, Cloudsmith faced mounting challenges around engaging their technical audience, demonstrating their platform’s differentiated value, and scaling those efforts across marketing, sales, and education initiatives. They needed to rethink how they introduced developers to their solution — ensuring every touchpoint reflected a consistent, hands-on experience.

Key challenges included:

• Scaling hands-on experiences: Existing artifact management solutions struggled with scale; Cloudsmith needed a way to consistently demonstrate its cloud-native advantage to developers.

• Developer-centric engagement: To build credibility with a technical audience, Cloudsmith required self-service, CLI- and API-driven experiences — not just traditional marketing assets.

• Consistent demo experiences at events: At major events like KubeCon, the team needed polished, standardized labs to ensure attendees had a unified experience.

• Accelerating feature adoption: Cloudsmith needed a faster, more scalable way to educate users about new features without relying on slow documentation cycles.

• Lead qualification through product interaction: Identifying the most engaged prospects demanded visibility into real user behavior — not just surface-level metrics like form submissions.

Solution

“Instruqt gives us a way to deliver a consistent, safe, and engaging developer experience — whether it’s at an event like KubeCon or asynchronously online.” – Nigel Douglas, Head of Developer Relations at Cloudsmith

Cloudsmith adopted Instruqt to create seamless, hands-on experiences that engaged developers, educated prospects, and supported marketing and sales objectives — all while remaining true to their developer-first values.

They leveraged Instruqt in several critical ways:

• Scalable labs for consistent demos: Cloudsmith built a standardized Instruqt lab that offered all users — whether at events or asynchronously — a consistent, cloud-native artifact management experience.

• Self-service, developer-friendly interface: With Command Line Interface (CLI), API, and documentation integrations baked into the labs, Cloudsmith delivered an authentic experience for technical users in the environments they prefer.

• Marketing enablement for lead generation: Cloudsmith can now track user engagement inside the labs — measuring who completed labs, how long they stayed engaged, and qualifying prospects based on behavior.

• Rapid lab creation and updates: Thanks to Instruqt’s intuitive builder and GitHub integration, technical teams quickly created and iterated labs without requiring heavy engineering resources.

• On-demand learning library vision: Cloudsmith plans to extend these efforts by offering a library of labs that developers can access anytime to deepen their understanding of Cloudsmith’s features at their own pace.

Results‍

“For a fast-moving company like ours, Instruqt became essential — helping us roll out new functionality faster, more consistently, and with real developer impact.” – Nigel Douglas, Head of Developer Relations at Cloudsmith

Cloudsmith quickly saw measurable improvements by using Instruqt as the foundation of their developer engagement and product education strategy. The ability to standardize experiences, capture lead insights, and scale hands-on learning has significantly accelerated their go-to-market motion.

Specific outcomes include:

• Standardized 100% of event demos: All KubeCon demo experiences were unified, eliminating inconsistencies and providing a polished, professional touch across every attendee interaction.

• Lead insights from product interaction: Cloudsmith now identifies high-intent prospects based on deeper behavioral data — like lab completion rates and time spent on key tasks.

• Accelerated feature education: New feature releases were immediately supported by interactive labs, reducing time-to-adoption and increasing confidence among users.

• Time savings for developer relations: Reusable lab templates and streamlined lab creation workflows freed up developer relations teams to focus on scaling impact rather than managing technical environments.

• Future-ready content library: Cloudsmith is building a self-service learning hub that empowers users to explore the product anytime — helping to support product-led growth strategies without additional lift from sales teams.

Outlook

With Instruqt now embedded in their marketing and event strategies, Cloudsmith plans to deepen their investment in hands-on learning. By expanding their on-demand lab library and creating richer self-service exploration paths, Cloudsmith is poised to engage even broader developer audiences, shorten sales cycles, and accelerate adoption in a competitive DevOps ecosystem.

Learn more about Cloudsmith here.