From Developer Tool to Enterprise Platform: InfluxData’s Bottom-Up GTM Strategy
“For me, talking to a CIO is an exercise in vanity,” says InfluxData CEO Evan Kaplan in a recent episode of Category Visionaries. This seemingly counterintuitive statement encapsulates InfluxData’s entire go-to-market strategy – one that has helped them secure 1,900 enterprise customers including Tesla, Lucid, and Salesforce.
The Developer-First Philosophy
InfluxData’s approach started with a fundamental insight about how modern enterprise software is adopted. “You don’t go to a CIO and say, hey, listen, you need a new time sharing,” Evan explains. Instead, “You start with a developer, you win an architecture, and then you explain to a CIO or CTO why this is important, why it will scale with their business.”
This bottom-up strategy required rethinking everything about their product and go-to-market approach.
Removing Friction for Developers
The key to winning developer adoption was making the product incredibly easy to use. “What Paul got right completely was that approach to the time series category by making it schema list, by building the capabilities directly in, by allowing it to scale horizontally… Just a bunch of stuff that made it really easy for developers to engage quickly, learn, install.”
This focus on developer experience created a stark contrast with traditional databases. “The hurdle that you see with most databases, whether it’s traditional mysql or postgres, of coming over, having to get over a big wall just to use it, didn’t exist with it. It was very easy to start working with, and then it was pretty easy to stay working.”
Multiple Paths to Growth
Understanding that different organizations have different needs, InfluxData created multiple deployment options: “We offer the product, we offer it in a serverless form in the cloud, so people can just pay you go serve. We offer a dedicated form in the cloud, and then we offer it on prem, so we offer it all three ways.”
This flexibility allowed them to meet developers where they were, whether working on personal projects or enterprise applications.
The Enterprise Evolution
The transition from developer tool to enterprise platform wasn’t without challenges. The company had to make tough decisions about their business model, including moving their clustering feature to the enterprise offering. “We had planned on keeping the clustering and the high availability in the open source… But we were faced with kind of an existential threat as we couldn’t keep funding the company and building the database if we didn’t find a way to monetize.”
Building Through Enrollment
Critical to their success was what Evan calls “enrollment” – bringing people along rather than dictating direction. “If I have to tell somebody to do something, I’ve already lost. So my view is I have to enroll people in whatever we’re doing, whatever big change, whatever pivot, whatever dynamic we’re doing.”
This philosophy extended beyond their internal team to how they engaged with their developer community and enterprise customers.
The Future Vision
Today, InfluxData’s bottom-up strategy has positioned them at the intersection of two massive trends: the explosion of sensor data and the rise of AI. As Evan explains, “We want our systems to be smarter and smarter, but we want them to be, at a minimum, correctable. Then you want them self healing, and then you want them autonomous. Well, it turns out every stage of that journey is about instrumentation over time.”
This vision resonates with both developers building the future and executives planning for it.
For founders building developer tools with enterprise ambitions, InfluxData’s journey offers several key lessons:
- Make your product irresistible to developers before thinking about enterprise sales
- Create multiple paths to adoption and monetization
- Focus on enrollment rather than enforcement
- Build bridges between developer adoption and enterprise value
As Evan notes, “My philosophy after my three long stints as a CEO is if you can get 60-65% of the stuff you’re doing right, you’re going to have an amazing company.” In InfluxData’s case, getting developer experience right first proved to be the key to enterprise success.