DevStats
Do You Flow?
A burnt-out dev finds his flow in a seedy back alley.
Watch the full campaign · 1:15
The Strategy
DevStats helps software teams see where their work gets stuck, so they can ship faster, getting finished code out the door. It's built by engineers, and the people who buy it run engineering teams of 30 to 100 developers. They're always being asked to move faster, and they can't see what's slowing them down.
There's a catch. Engineers hate being watched, and a tool that measures their work can feel like a boss looking over their shoulder. DevStats' own rule is support, not surveillance. So the ads couldn't show a dashboard keeping score on anyone. They had to sell the feeling devs actually want: flow, the stretch of work where nothing gets in the way and code finally ships.
We pitched three ways in, and DevStats picked the one built on flow: DevStats shows what's slowing you down so you can ship faster. Then we wrote four ideas. DevStats picked Do You Flow?, a short question a brand could own, and an idea that treats flow like something you can only buy in a back alley.
Trey is a developer at the end of his rope. His cracked phone won't stop buzzing with Slack alerts, and none of them are good news. In the 15-second teaser, he knocks on a metal door in an alley. A slit snaps open and a pair of eyes asks one question: when'd you last ship? He can't remember. The slit slams shut.
DevStats' founder asked us to put more shipping into the scripts, in the words devs really use. That question started life as "What's your cycle time?" Shipping is what every dev on a slow team is missing.
In the 30-second main spot, the eyes tell Trey to turn around. The dealer is right behind him. He hands over two pills, one yellow and one blue, and he's gone. In the 15-second follow-up, Trey's phone is quiet, the cracks are gone and he's floating down the alley, too happy to look up. The dealer has one word for him: duck. Two 6-second reminders close it out: the eyes again, and a palm full of pills with hands reaching in from every side.
We kept the product's screens out of it on purpose. Software changes, and an ad that shows today's screens goes out of date. An ad about flow doesn't.
The Process
The dealer started out as a blind man. In our first scripts he wore dark glasses and mismatched socks with no shoes, and he always stood facing a little bit the wrong way. He held out the pills a few inches off to the side, and his one line was a warning nobody listened to: duck.
About a week before the shoot, DevStats' founder asked us to take the dealer in a new direction: a Walter White type, straight out of Breaking Bad. We moved the shoot back two weeks to do it right. We rewrote the scripts around the new character and recast the role with an actor who could wear the bowler hat, the dark glasses and the goatee. The lines nod to the show without copying it. Trey asks how he can flow. The dealer says, "Say our name." Trey tries, "DevStats?" And the dealer answers, "You're goddang right."
We shot all five spots in one day, in October 2025, in an alley in Denver. Finding an alley we could control was the hard part, so Brian, from our team, who wrote and directed the ads, staged nearly every shot along one wall, like a side-scrolling video game. The camera only looks straight down the alley at the very end of the main spot.
Most of the alley's look is real. The fog and steam came from a fog machine on set. The barrel fire isn't a fire: it's a barrel with lights inside that flicker like flames. We built the sliding peephole door ourselves, borrowed from the old noir movies where you need the right answer to get inside. The pills are cake fondant.
The moment the pills kick in is a dolly zoom, the shot made famous in Jaws, where a face stays the same size while the world behind it stretches. Our crew pushed the camera along on a dolly, a camera cart on rails, while our camera assistant pulled the zoom at the same time, right there on set, with nothing added later.
Trey's float is practical too. He stood on a dolly with the camera rigged to it, and two crew members pushed it slowly down the alley, so he glides without taking a step. The pipe he hits is foam, painted to look like old metal and held up on a light stand. So when his face hits it, that's a real hit.
We delivered a 30-second main spot, two 15-second ads and two 6-second reminders, in widescreen, square and vertical, with and without subtitles. They send viewers to DevStats.com. DevStats ran its own media.
DevStats' founder came back for a second campaign with us, Fire Your Frankenstack, for DevSquad, his other company.
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