5 Critical Go-to-Market Lessons from Timescale’s Evolution to Database Leadership
Building a successful enterprise technology company rarely follows the original plan. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Timescale CEO Ajay Kulkarni shared insights from their journey from IoT platform to database innovation. Here are the key go-to-market lessons that emerged from their experience:
- Listen for Customer Pull, Not Just Product Push
The most significant pivot in Timescale’s journey came from intense customer observation. While selling their IoT platform, they noticed an unexpected pattern: prospects were more interested in their underlying database technology than the platform itself.
“When we talk about the database, people would literally kind of lean forward and be like, ‘oh, hey, wait, what was that thing?'” Ajay recalls. This customer reaction signaled a larger market opportunity than their original focus.
- Build Community Before Monetization
Timescale’s approach to market entry focused on building a strong developer community before pushing monetization. “Everything we built was open source, everything was free,” Ajay explains. “The way we built it is we just tried to really help.”
This strategy extended to hands-on involvement from leadership: “Myself, my co-founder, would be really active in it, our engineers are active in it… let’s build something for free, build a community and provide a ton of value and then we’ll figure out how to monetize it.”
- Recognize and Act on Growth Signals
Sometimes the best opportunities aren’t where you’re focusing. Ajay shares a crucial insight from late 2019: “I had this on-prem business and this cloud business and the on-premises business was bigger, but the cloud business was growing like a weed and we weren’t even paying attention to it.”
This observation led to a strategic pivot to cloud-first in early 2020, demonstrating the importance of following growth signals even when they diverge from your current focus.
- Choose Your Go-to-Market Model Based on Customer Behavior
Timescale opted for a product-led growth strategy based on their understanding of developer purchasing behavior. “We’re really targeting an individual developer who cares more about what their peers say on hacker news and Twitter and Reddit than what Gartner says,” Ajay notes.
This insight led them to prioritize community engagement and bottom-up adoption over traditional enterprise sales approaches. They’ve reached over 1000 customers with minimal sales infrastructure: “We’re more bottoms up. We’re more PLG. We just added our first sales leader at the end of last year, so we got this far without a real sales team.”
- Don’t Let Pride Prevent Pivots
One of Timescale’s key strengths has been their willingness to change direction when data suggests they should. As Ajay puts it, “We try to be very thoughtful and have opinions, but we also believe in intellectual honesty and clarity, and we try not to be stubborn.”
This mindset helped them navigate crucial decisions about their business model. When faced with mediocre results, they asked themselves tough questions: “Either we’re building the wrong thing or we’re building the right thing but at the wrong time or the right thing at the right time, but we’re the wrong people to build.”
The key lesson here isn’t just about being willing to pivot, but about maintaining the intellectual honesty to recognize when change is needed.
For founders navigating their own go-to-market decisions, these lessons highlight the importance of staying close to customers, following growth signals, and maintaining the courage to pivot when necessary. As Ajay emphasizes, “Success is about the grind… Most people don’t appreciate that.” The journey from idea to market success rarely follows a straight line, but keeping these principles in mind can help navigate the inevitable twists and turns.
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