The Impossible Journey: Fork to Market Leader in 6 months (And Why I'm Leaving)

How we built the leading open-source agentic coding platform from a fork that people initially called a “scam”.

The Beginning

Six months ago an old friend approached me with an ambitious vision: let’s create the best agentic coding tool with an unfair advantage, make it open source. Funding was already secured, we only needed the team, the product and the users.

As the first hire, I personally recruiting 14 talented individuals who believed in our vision and helped turn the project into the fastest-growing open-source agentic coding platform, and achieving market leadership.

I made the deliberate decision to pause my own venture of five years to fully commit to this opportunity. It wasn’t an easy call, but the timing and market need were undeniable, and I knew the biggest impact I could make was here.

Six months later, that leap of faith paid off. We steadily overcame every challenge and became the number one agentic coding tool, breaking every record along the way.

Now, as my journey here ends and I embark on a new adventure, I reflect on the amazing things we achieved in such a short time.

The Launch

Building on the shoulders of giants, we decided to fork Roo Code, the best agentic coding tool available at that time, and closest to our vision. Roo itself is a fork of Cline, and, whilst excellent, it misses a few quality-of-life features from Cline. Our first mission was clear: bridge those gaps and build a superset.

Once we had our product, we launched. But our launch wasn't smooth at all. We offered free credits to new users, which immediately caught the attention of a China-based hacker group that exploited our system to resell LLM tokens on mirror sites. Fighting off these assailants brought our product development nearly to a standstill and earned us accusations of the AI Community of being a "cheap fork" and even a "scam". Perceptions not helped by our intentionally minimal website (we were prioritizing product over presentation).

To combat abuse, we decided to implement a $10 credit card hold in exchange for free credits. This proved to be effective, but this unusual approach led many to believe we were trying to scam them out of $10. And at the same time our competitors offer unsustainable "unlimited" plans that make our pricing seem expensive.

While the hacker-group scammers started to die down, crypto scammers started to rear their ugly heads and launch a fake Kilo coin and pass it off as something created by us. They were very thorough, creating many X accounts and retweeting tweets about AI dating back years to make their account look more legitimate than ours. We kept trying to get their accounts closed down, and that only really worked once we talked to a sales rep for the X Ads team.

As the Developer Relations Lead, much of my time was spent personally convincing people on Reddit, X, Discord, GitHub, everywhere, that despite everything we were legitimate. I was going above and beyond to help users who encountered issues. Gradually, those who used to warn others about us began recommending us instead.

The Breakthrough

Our outreach intensified: we invested in influencer partnerships, Google Ads, Reddit campaigns, and created comprehensive resources including videos, workshops, documentation, and viral industry commentary often featured on Hacker News.

The turnaround was remarkable. We didn't just keep pace with Roo Code and Cline—we began developing our own unique features. This allowed us to add value for ourselves while contributing back to the upstream projects.

• Autocomplete, allowing us to fully compete with Cursor.

• Inline Assist, lets the AI read your mind.

• JetBrains integration, our most requested feature.

• Team features, making the extension viable for teams.

Record-Breaking Success

The numbers tell an incredible story. Within six months, we didn't just meet our ambitious targets, we shattered industry records that seemed impossible for a startup our size.

Platform Dominance:

• #1 on OpenRouter - surpassing established tools like Cline and Roo Code

• First to reach 1 trillion tokens per month - processing more code than any public platform in history

• 391,000+ extension downloads in just 6 months across VS Code and Open VSX

Industry Recognition:

• Elon Musk's attention - resulting in many tweets about Kilo Code and our Grok integration

• Anthropic partnership - hosting workshops and becoming their showcase for agentic coding

• Developer champions like Theo choosing us for GPT-5 testing

Technical Milestones:

• 2 trillion tokens this month - doubling our previous record

• Integrations across the ecosystem - VS Code, Cursor, JetBrains, and many LLM providers

• Created a movement - developers now actively contribute to our open-source project

The Open Source Advantage

Being open source from day one has been transformative. Our transparent, pay-as-you-go pricing model has allowed us to critique competitors who promise unlimited usage only to later implement rate limits and price increases. Because we are transparent about our pricing and don’t make money on token usage, we haven’t had to kneecap our agents to increase our margins. This allows our agents to become more powerful than those of companies that have raised over a billion dollars.

Since we are a fork of Roo and Cline, we’ve been able to build a business that profits from their project’s success. And on the flip side, we’ve been able to contribute back to those projects and lift them up as well. Really embracing and stimulating the community has been a huge multiplier for us on top of that, and means our small team can compete with giants like Cursor and Copilot while collaborating and helping the entire ecosystem grow. Our support for multiple languages has enabled community members to contribute documentation in their native languages. AI translation helps us maintain this approach, allowing us to reach developers worldwide.

Personal Journey

Around the time that I started with Kilo Code, I was diagnosed with ADHD. Suddenly everything made sense, but I also had to adjust to this new reality and re-learn how to cope under high pressure, with the odd working-hours and constant work taking a toll on my personal and family life.

The pleasure of working with the best we could find, also meant coordinating a distributed team across San Francisco, DC, New York, Amsterdam, Macedonia, Berlin, and New Zealand. At the same time I wanted to remain a hands-on parent, which proved to be exhausting. My days often stretched from 7am to 11pm, punctuated only by school runs, meals and bedtime stories. I found myself taking calls under all circumstances, e.g. whilst cycling through Amsterdam, trying to weave work meetings around my 5-year-old's school schedule.

This pace isn't sustainable. I've neglected rrweb, another open-source project I maintain, and my family life has suffered. It's time to step back.

What's Next

I'm taking time to reconnect with family and friends while giving rrweb the attention it deserves. I'm excited to see what the future holds.

Kilo Code's story is just beginning, and I couldn't be prouder of what we've built together.

Gratitude

None of this was achieved alone. I'm leaving behind an incredible team and community. Special thanks to:

To our investors - Without you, none of this would have been possible. You believed in this vision before it existed, and I'm forever grateful.

JP - Your ruthless prioritization and contrarian thinking challenged me daily. You taught me that saying no to good ideas is how you say yes to great ones.

Kevin - Without your dedication, Kilo Code would be merge-locked abandonware. You kept us true to our open-source promise when it would've been easier not to.

Darko - From pattern recognition to marketing avalanches, you turned our scrappy startup into a brand developers actually recognize (and trust).

Brendan - You were genuinely sad when people didn't use their credits, and genuinely stoked when they did. Vibe Thursdays became our community's favorite tradition because of you.

Olesya - For being the glue that held us together across continents and time zones. Your work behind the scenes made everything else possible.

To the early believers who dropped everything to join this journey: Johan, Chris, Ron, Omar, Sebastian, Eamon, Jonno and James, your faith meant everything. To Coen (collaboration #4!), Chris, Catriel, Brian, and our entire technical team who built something remarkable. To everyone who contributed to workshops, community support, and late-night problem-solving: Aleks, Remon, Mark, Christiaan, Eric, Jord, Ewa, Job, Tirumari, and so many others—you made Kilo Code more than just code.

Thank you to everyone who supported this impossible journey.

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