6 Go-to-Market Lessons from RisingWave Labs’ Unconventional Journey

Most deep tech startups begin with a hefty marketing budget and enterprise sales team. RisingWave Labs threw out that playbook entirely. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, founder Yingjun Wu shared how his streaming database company achieved over 5,000 deployments and 100 long-running clusters globally through an unconventional approach.

Here are five critical go-to-market lessons from their journey:

1. Technical Excellence Can Drive Initial Growth When most startups invest in marketing teams, RisingWave Labs bet on engineering. “Last year we don’t really have any marketing person and what we have is basically engineers,” Yingjun revealed. “But we use Rust… everyone is talking about, okay, I should build something new, rebuild something in Rust, and we build a system in Rust. And we actually gained a lot of attention from the Rust committee.”
2. Reduce Learning Curves Through Familiar Tools Rather than forcing users to learn entirely new systems, RisingWave Labs built on existing knowledge. “You can just use SQL because everyone knows SQL, everyone knows how to use SQL. And all SQL is also postgres style SQL,” Yingjun explained. “Basically every single developer knows how to use postgres, so there’s no learning curve.” This approach made advanced technology accessible through familiar interfaces.
3. Customer Conversations Should Precede Code Yingjun’s biggest regret was not talking to customers early enough. “When I started a company, what I thought is that what I’m building is stream processing database system… At the time I saw that, okay, I don’t need to talk to your customers. I can probably just write a code and build a system.” This assumption led to missed insights about integration requirements and user workflows.
4. Move Beyond Surface-Level Customer Research Surface-level customer conversations aren’t enough. “Don’t just talk to them about big ideas because if you just talk about the big ideas, they will say that it’s a cool idea and I fully support you,” Yingjun advised. “Talking about big idea doesn’t really work. You should talk to them about the details of your product even if you haven’t implemented it.”
5. Balance Feature Requests with Focus As RisingWave Labs grew, they faced mounting feature requests. “Every single people, every single user asking for different things,” Yingjun shared. Their solution? Maintain laser focus. “We want to be focused within the next three to five years probably. We are not spin across different domains. We will not do AI and we are not do RAM… We will have focus.”
6. Evolve Marketing Strategy with Market Maturity While technical excellence drove initial growth, RisingWave Labs evolved their approach as the market matured. “This year we actually spend more time on educating people about stream processing because what we heard is that essentially more and more company cares more about how to generate router main sites,” Yingjun explained.

For deep tech founders, RisingWave Labs’ journey offers a compelling alternative to conventional wisdom. Their success demonstrates that with the right approach, technical excellence combined with deep customer understanding can be more effective than traditional marketing tactics.

The key lies in finding the right balance between building and listening. As Yingjun emphasized, you need to “talk to customers early, as early as possible. Even if we just had an idea, we should talk to our customers what they really want and talk to them in detail.”

This customer-first philosophy shapes not just their product development but their entire company vision. Looking ahead, Yingjun remains committed to this approach: “We’ll also be focusing on the customers and we hope that within the next three to five years when you talk to all customers, our customers should tell you that we are so customer obsessed.”