How Railway Uses the Octolens API to Stay Close to 2.6 Million Developers

Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider that makes deploying applications effortless. From hobby projects to Fortune 500 companies like Automattic and TripAdvisor, over 2 million builders use Railway to ship code without thinking about infrastructure.

The company has grown predominantly through word of mouth powered by a product-led growth engine and a developer community that loves the product.

Company info (March 2026):

• Size: ~30 employees

• Funding: $124M total ($100M Series B, January 2026)

• Headquarter: Remote

For this case study, we interviewed two people with different Octolens workflows:

• Mahmoud Abdelwahab, Senior DevRel Engineer: on the frontlines, responding to mentions and building content around community conversations

• Sarah Krasnik Bedell, Founding Growth Marketer: zoomed out, tracking trends, correlating mentions with signups, and measuring the awareness flywheel that drives Railway's growth

Together, they show how Octolens powers both the day-to-day and the big picture.

Railway's biggest monitoring challenge? Their name is a very common English word.

Source: X (link)

"Our brand is a word. When we tried to do this on our own, there were just so many false positives. Like, 'my train from Berlin to wherever is late'" Sarah explained.

Mahmoud has firsthand experience: "My most popular tweet of all time is me replying to someone who had just mentioned us. He's like, 'Oh, I'm having issues.' I said, 'What's wrong?' And he's like, 'My train is late.'" The screenshot went viral. While a funny post, it was a genuine problem to get real signal posts for their brand.

Source: X (link)

As if that wasn’t enough, a K-pop song called "Railway" added yet another wave of irrelevant mentions. And on LinkedIn, people claim they work at "railway" when they actually work for a train company, making platform-level filtering a huge pain.

Before Octolens, Railway only tracked direct Twitter mentions. Even that required a blocklist of accounts to reduce noise from people tagging @railway when they meant something else. The rest of the internet, Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, Hacker News, was too noisy.

"We just missed out on all mentions across all platforms, that was life before Octolens."

The switch to Octolens gave Railway visibility across every platform that mattered, with AI filtering to tell the difference between a cloud platform, a K-Pop song and a commuter train.

But what makes Railway's setup unique is how differently their two teams use the same tool.

Mahmoud doesn't use the Octolens dashboard, he uses it as infrastructure.

Using the Octolens API, he built a custom service (deployed on Railway) that pipes mentions into dedicated channels and creates custom digests. Each major platform gets its own channel plus a miscellaneous channel to catch everything else and a dedicated issues channel where problems surface at a glance.

“Built on top of the Octolens API, I use Railway as a service to pipe all of the mentions to different channels. Then there's a cron job that does a daily digest for us," Mahmoud explained.

The digest was needed due to the volume of posts coming in. With Railway's mention volume, stepping away for a weekend could mean returning to 200+ unread mentions. So Mahmoud built a daily digest that runs on a cron schedule via the Octolens API summarizing mentions into a single summary.

His day-to-day is built around speed. Every alert is a direct link to the original conversation. One click, and he's responding.

"Previously, I would search three platforms. Now it's just one click, and then I'm there, and then I talk to people."

What he cares most about are the silent mentions, people talking about Railway without tagging the brand. "We have two types of feedback: when someone directly mentions us and when people just silently mention us. I care a lot about the latter because it allows me to jump into conversations: someone having a good experience, I tell them 'thank you.' Someone having a bad experience, I can ask what went wrong."

Those conversations also become content signals. When he sees people confused about a feature, he knows it's time to create content around it. When he spots someone excited about an unexpected use case, he reaches out to learn more.

"It's just part of the day to day at this point. I set it up, and for me, it just powers the infrastructure behind my workflow."

He's also experimented with Octolens' MCP integration to pull mentions into Claude and generate content ideas. "You could just be very vague with the request, and it would work. Without needing to write code."

Mahmoud also forwards relevant mentions to engineers across the company. Whether it's positive feedback on a feature they shipped or an issue that needs attention, the whole team stays connected to what users are saying.

While Mahmoud focuses on real-time alerts, Sarah focuses on trends.

"What I care about is: why are things happening and what can we do more of?" she said. "The way I think about it is much more in aggregate."

Her rhythm is a weekly review. Monday mornings she dives into mention volume, platform breakdown, and sentiment trends in the Octolens analytics page. She's looking for trends, not individual posts.

For Railway, this isn't just nice-to-have analytics. It's how they measure their most important growth channel.

Railway is a product-led growth (PLG) company with no top-down sales. Revenue comes from bottoms-up adoption, driven by word of mouth. 78% of their signups come from organic channels. Sarah’s goal is to understand what’s driving those signups.

"When our signups started growing 40% month-over-month, we saw the same growth among Reddit mentions in a specific set of subreddits," Sarah wrote in a recent article on the topic. "That's not content optimization driving the growth. That's awareness compounding."

That correlation between community mention volume and signup growth turned Octolens from a monitoring tool into a strategic instrument. It's how Sarah proves that word-of-mouth is actually working, even when it doesn't show up in UTM tracking or referral links.

Railway had always invested heavily in Twitter. Mainly because their founder Jake Cooper tweets regularly, and the platform is deeply embedded in their brand presence. But Octolens revealed a new signal: organic Reddit mentions were increasing.

"Octolens allows us to surface other channels that we maybe wouldn't have engaged in or thought about otherwise," Sarah said. "We saw organic Reddit mentions start to creep up, and then that's something we should think about."

With this data the team could confidently prioritize relevant awareness channels to fuel growth further.

Sarah also uses Octolens to measure the impact of brand moments. When Railway announced their $100M Series B in January 2026, the mention spike was immediately visible giving the team a way to assess reach beyond just their own post impressions.

"We can see on the day of the announcement — here's the spike. You can assess impact beyond just post impressions, because there are so many other people mentioning us. That would be really hard to do without Octolens."

As Railway ramps up brand campaigns in 2026, this becomes a repeatable measurement framework: launch something, watch the conversation, learn what resonated.

One of Sarah's favorite outputs from Mahmoud's API setup is the subreddit-level breakdown. Different subreddits represent different topics, and the data tells a clear story about what's driving Railway's growth.

"Most of them are some sort of vibe coding subreddits, as opposed to a back-end subreddit," she said. "That gives us a signal: we should talk more about this, make sure the experience is better. This is what's top of mind for people."

For a PLG company where community platforms dominate how users discover you, knowing which communities are talking about you and what they're saying is the difference between spending time on the right things and guesswork.

Mahmoud put it plainly: "Octolens has become really, really important for us."

The reason comes down to how Railway grows. Social has always been one of their most important awareness channels. Their users discover Railway through community conversations, YouTube tutorials, Reddit threads, and increasingly, through AI coding tools that suggest Railway as a deployment target.

Sarah sees the monitoring data as part of a larger flywheel. Community discussions feed LLM training data. Those LLMs then recommend Railway to new developers. Those developers talk about their experience online which creates more community discussions.

Source: Sarah’s Newsletter on Substack (link)

Octolens helps shed light on the flywheel, making visible where the conversations are happening and where Railway needs to act. When mention volume in vibe coding subreddits spikes, that's a signal to invest in that use case. When a sponsorship generates community discussion, that's proof the spend was worth it. When a launch falls flat in conversation, that's a sign to iterate.

"Because we're a PLG-driven company and social has always been a very important awareness channel — that's why Octolens is important," Mahmoud said. "It helps us track one of our most important channels."

• Full platform coverage: From Twitter-only to every channel that matters

• Common-word filtering: AI filtering smart enough to separate a cloud platform from the common word usage

• API-powered workflows: Custom notification channels, daily digests, and automated routing built on the Octolens API

• Growth correlation: Connecting social mention spikes to 40% month-over-month signup growth

• Campaign measurement: Visible mention spikes tied to launches like their $100M Series B announcement

• Company-wide visibility: Engineers, growth, and DevRel all connected to real community conversations

Octolens monitors your brand in real-time. Receive AI-vetted alerts for keyword mentions and growth opportunities so you can act fast and stay ahead of your competition.

Get started for free or book a demo to see how Octolens can help you stay on top of the conversations that matter.