Somewhere along the way, I convinced a developer infrastructure company that we should advertise at the New York City Marathon.
And somehow, everyone agreed.
To be fair, the connection was practically begging to be made. Inngest builds infrastructure for long-running workflows. Marathon runners are, quite literally, long-running humans. And startup founders? Well, those people willingly sign up for years of running toward a finish line that may or may not exist.
It made perfect sense to me.
So this fall, we launched Build for the lonng run, a campaign celebrating the people building ambitious things and the infrastructure that keeps those things running.
And for marathon weekend, we took Inngest out of the terminal and onto the streets of New York City.
Hundreds of posters. Sidewalk messages. Brand ambassadors. Marathon signs that made sense to everyone, with a few extra layers for the developers in the crowd.
That was the whole idea.
Here's how it came together, what we hid in the creative, and why we think developer marketing deserves to have a little more fun.
Building something great is an endurance sport
I have a theory that building a startup and running a marathon require a similar level of questionable optimism.
You start with a plan. You feel pretty good about it. Somewhere along the way, things get significantly more complicated than anticipated.
And then you keep going.
The same is true for the software we're building.
Modern applications, especially AI agents, don't always finish in a single request. They call multiple services, wait for human input, recover from failures, and sometimes need to keep running for hours, days, or even months.
That's where Inngest comes in.
We give developers the infrastructure to build long-running workflows without having to spend their days managing everything that can (and inevitably will) go wrong.
Keep running. Measure what matters. Iterate as you go.
Those are the principles behind our product, and they became the foundation of the campaign.
The more we talked about it, the more obvious the connection became. Whether you're building a company, training for a marathon, or shipping an AI agent, getting started is rarely the hardest part.
It's everything that happens after.
Why the NYC Marathon?
I've always believed the best brand marketing doesn't feel like marketing. It feels like something you'd want to stop and look at, take a photo of, or send to a friend with absolutely no context.
And the NYC Marathon is basically the Super Bowl of people holding funny signs.
Every November, thousands of runners make their way through five boroughs while complete strangers yell encouragement, hold up increasingly unhinged posters, and somehow convince everyone watching that running 26.2 miles looks fun.
It's one of those rare moments when an entire city collectively commits to the bit.
And we wanted in.
Not with a giant billboard telling people how great our infra is. Nobody running mile 18 needs a lesson in durable execution. (We do have those available, by the way: right here.)
We wanted to make something that felt like it belonged there.
Something runners could appreciate, developers could recognize, and New Yorkers might actually stop to photograph.
The spectator signs were deliberately accessible. You didn't need to know what Inngest does, or even write code, to get the joke. But if you did happen to be a developer, there was another layer waiting for you.
And, as one does, we put the campaign on a few hundred posters around Manhattan and Brooklyn.
The Easter eggs hiding in plain sight
One of my favorite parts of this campaign was how much we could hide in the creative.
At first glance, our posters looked like marathon ads. Look a little closer, and you'll find references to developer culture, product features, and the strange little things that keep both humans and software running.
We didn't expect everyone to get every reference. Anyway, here's a little decoder:
1. Build for the lonng run
The headline that started it all.
For runners, it's literal. For founders, it's the long road to building something that works. For developers, it's about building systems that can keep going well beyond a single request.
At Inngest, long-running isn't just a clever metaphor we borrowed from running culture.
It's what we build for.
2. Never stop running.
Good marathon advice. Better infrastructure advice.
Because while stopping at mile 22 would be unfortunate, having a critical workflow fail halfway through a multi-hour execution isn't ideal either.
Inngest supports durable execution, automatic retries, and the ability to resume work without starting the entire process over.
Your workflows can pick up where they left off.
Your marathon legs, unfortunately, are on their own.
3. step.run
This one might be my favorite.
If you're familiar with Inngest, you've probably seen step.run() before. It's a core building block for durable functions, allowing developers to define units of work that can be executed and checkpointed.
Completed steps don't need to be repeated when a function resumes.
One step at a time.
Which is also, technically, the entire strategy for finishing a marathon.
There were plenty of smaller details tucked into the artwork, too. Running shoes, watches, little nods to New York, and references that probably only make sense if you've spent enough time debugging software.
Some are obvious. Some require a second look.
I'll leave a few for you to find.
From the streets to the sidelines
Of course, putting up posters was only part of the plan.
We wanted to show up in the community, not just advertise to it.
A few weeks before race day, we joined Founders Running Club in New York City for a run with founders, developers, and ambitious early birds.
Then came marathon weekend.
Our creative started appearing across Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Flatiron, Chelsea, and along the marathon route.
And on Sunday morning, brand ambassadors hit the streets with oversized signs to cheer on runners.
The signs were designed to do what good marathon signs do: make someone laugh, give them a little encouragement, or distract them from the fact that they still had several miles to go.
The product references were a bonus, not a prerequisite.
The result was exactly what we'd hoped for: a chance to show up in a community moment, have some fun with our brand, and make the connection between long-running humans and long-running software feel real.
The long run doesn't end in New York
As much as I'd love to claim the entire campaign was an elaborate excuse to spend marathon weekend in NYC, we had a bigger plan.
Build for the lonng run was never supposed to live in one city or one weekend.
The goal was to take a technical concept and turn it into something people could actually connect with.
And do it in places where our community already spends time.
In New York, that meant running clubs and marathon signs.
In San Francisco, it meant taking over Corgi Cafe (24/7) for our Caffeine Service pop-up for long-running humans.
We've got more community activations ahead, but the idea stays the same: meet developers and founders where they are, give them something worth engaging with, and remind them that the things they're building deserve infrastructure that can go the distance.
Now it's your turn to build for the long run
We couldn't spend an entire campaign talking about building for the long run without giving you something to actually build with.
So we're offering three months of Inngest Pro, free.
Whether you're experimenting with your first AI agent, orchestrating background jobs, or building production workflows that need to run reliably, Inngest helps you spend less time worrying about what might break and more time building.
Here's what that looks like:
- Keep running: Build durable workflows with retries, waits, and state management.
- Measure: Understand what's happening with traces, scoring, and experiments.
- Iterate: Improve and evolve long-running executions without starting from scratch.
Claim your three months of Inngest Pro →
See you on the next long run.
To everyone who ran, cheered, joined us for coffee, stopped to take a photo, or caught one of our developer jokes in the wild: thanks for being part of it.
This campaign was a reminder of why I love brand marketing.
You get to take something that might seem complicated, technical, or frankly a little boring to the outside world, and find a way to make people care about it.
And to everyone building something that takes a little longer than expected?
Keep going.
Build for the long run.
