The following interview is a conversation we had with Nicolas Hourcard, CEO of QuestDB, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $15M Raised to Build the Leading Open-Source Time Series Database.

Nicolas Hourcard
Thank you very much. Excited to be here.

Brett
No problem. So were joking there in the pre interview that you have a last name. That’s a little bit difficult to say. So let’s expand on my intro there. How do you say your last name properly? I’m glad I didn’t even really attempt to do that and insult you. That would be a rocky way to kick things off. Now, let’s begin with just going a little bit deeper into who you are and a bit more about your background.

Nicolas Hourcard
Sure. My background is finance and technology. I spend time at firms like Rothschild, Nasdaq, and also startups, mostly in fintech and crypto. And the backstory is as follows. A Rothschild, which is an investment bank. I was part of a new team, a bit like a startup, essentially very small team within a larger bank. And that team was focused on data and analytics, and we would uncover very cool insights from data and help our clients in m and A and transactions and ipos and stuff like that. And essentially all the data were analyzing was time series data. So that’s where my love for time series started. And then I joined this crypto startup in London, and this is where I met my co founder, and he was building QuestDB on the side sort of passion project.

Nicolas Hourcard
And we clicked and essentially we got to start a journey. So I personally always wanted to start a big business in a huge market. So this was a perfect opportunity. Obviously we clicked. We felt like it was the right time to start it. The market was growing and decided to make a business out of it. 

 
Brett
So you started in summer 2019, it looks like. Talk to us about those early days. What did the first three to six months look like?

Nicolas Hourcard
Yeah. So the first months were probably the toughest. So were in London. We thought that, hey, we should go the venture capital route, raise some money so we can build a product and start from there. But this being a very technical product, we actually struggle a little bit pitching local, sort of London based venture capitalists. And the first thing they told us was like, hey, just trying to get revenue and come back, we’ll take you seriously. And obviously were going to go the open source route and it’s really not what you should be doing at the beginning in open source. You should just put the product out there, get some users, get feedback, iterate on it, et cetera. So those moms were probably toughest in that respect. We’re just pitching one vc after the other. No, no.

Nicolas Hourcard
And eventually we found a believer and then the journey started for real. And then from there we applied to YC, we got into YC and then things became a lot easier for us.

Brett
At what stage did you start thinking about monetization? From my conversations with other founders, building open source tooling, that’s something they always struggle with is when do you turn it on? When do you start to monetize? What was your approach?

Nicolas Hourcard
Yeah, for us it was very late. So post series A actually, and it was, we thought he was a requirement in order to sufficiently be focusing on building a product. That requires a lot of work, that base built from scratch, it’s very hard to build and it requires 100% dedication just from an engineering perspective. And also it needs to be sufficiently good before starting to think about enterprise features to be building on top. Therefore, we spent a few years only focusing on adoption and building QUSD open source. And then after series A we started to understand the use cases better, where really there was a significant pull from users and where there was also a willingness to pay.

Nicolas Hourcard
And then we started to build those features on top of open source that became essentially closed source and that made it possible for us to monetize at that point. 

Brett
And when did you raise the series a? How long of a time was between launch of not monetizing and series a? 

Nicolas Hourcard
Yeah, that was towards the end of 21. Okay, so you know, pretty much two years essentially. 

 
Brett
What was that like when you turned monetization on? What was the reaction?

Nicolas Hourcard
It was surprisingly good. Essentially it was people coming to us already using quest db open source, and they’ve been asking us the same things over and over. So can I have a distributed setup with multiple database instances that can talk to each other? We call that replication and security features and stuff like that. And therefore we knew what we had to build. It was just about timing. When did we think that we had enough momentum and adoption so that we could start focusing on those features. And then from then we started to basically onboard new customers, one after the other. And then the great thing for us that we started to find some repeatability in the kind of customer. So we started to narrow it down a lot more.

Nicolas Hourcard
And that’s where you start to feel that hey, you’re edging into product market fit, you can just repeat things and start to see a pattern that is definitely happening for your business.

Brett
Is there an open source company that you really admire and look up to? I have a feeling I know who you’re going to say, given who your angel investors are, but what’s an open source company that you admire? How they’ve built and tried to model off of as much as possible or as much as you’d like.

Nicolas Hourcard
There are many of them. I think what elastic did was quite impressive. I spoke to a lot of people who’ve been there in the early days, actually. We also hired people who’ve been working there and yeah, they had this incredible open source adoption, so many people using their product and then they started to monetize in a similar fashion to what we started to do, essentially just bringing new features around, security, stuff like that, and then turned those users into customers and purely relied on inbounds at the beginning and that was enough for them to get started and reach critical mass very quickly. So yeah, elastic is a good example for us to follow and aspire to match as well in terms of traction and ultimately commercial success as well.

Brett
What about marketing? When it comes to marketing, how would you describe your philosophy and approach?

Nicolas Hourcard
Yeah, so we try to be very authentic. What we do tends to be very well received from developers essentially. So we try to do super authentic technical content that is going to resonate with a technical audience. So this might include a very detailed benchmarks or just stories about how we build specific features or even problems we faced, how we overcame these problems and etcetera. It can be very technical, a bit nerdy, but that’s what makes developers click sometimes. The most recent example is a sort of challenge that was made on how to process 1 billion rows as quickly as possible using Java. One of our engineers actually took part of this challenge. We wrote a blog post about it. It became super viral because people were generally interested understanding the journey that he went through.

Nicolas Hourcard
So we tried to do things like that, things that really resonate with our audience, so that people get to understand how we do things, why we do them, and also how we get the level of performance that we claim to have on the website with all the benchmarks so that they can really understand what’s the story behind it. So yeah, all the technical content, all the in depth benchmarks that sometimes took us weeks and weeks to compute just to make sure that people really took us seriously. And then being where developers are essentially. So those online communities where developers are meetups, conferences, et cetera, just trying to be where they are and to have a coherent message that resonates with them. So that is how we think about marketing. Highly technical left tool, open source company.

Brett
How do you engage in those communities without coming across as salesy and overly promotional?

Nicolas Hourcard
Yeah, exactly like what I described just now. So if you read our blog posts, it’s going to be incredibly technical. We’re never going to make bold claims, say we’re the best without evidence and without a very technical explanation of how we got there. So yeah, we just try to be as authentic as possible. And anyway, if you come as too promotional and yeah, without substance, those places can be pretty direct and pretty harsh. And therefore all those things are made by developers. At the end of the day, we don’t really have like marketing people in the firm. There is no like head of marketing or anything like this, just developers writing about the code they produce and all those techniques they use day to day and all the features they build.

Nicolas Hourcard
And this is why at the end of the day, developers can find that appealing. It’s because it was actually written by a developer. So that’s the thing, how we do approach those kind of things.

Brett
At what stage will you bring on a CMO or head of marketing? Will you never will always just be someone who’s kind of head of like developer relations, it sounds like.

Nicolas Hourcard
Yeah, we do have somebody looking at developer relations, extremely technical background, sometimes that spans multiple things that could go beyond developer relations. So sometimes we bring him for customer demos and et cetera. So it’s kind of a 360 role in that sense. But probably later as we scale the team further, probably around series b, something like that. But yeah, it’s not immediately. Anyway, now we’re really still focusing on building the best possible product and we just need focus on engineering as much as we can and devote as many resources as we can towards building. So that’s why also that we prioritize those kind of roles.

Brett
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Nicolas Hourcard
Yeah, it’s already happening. So we’re already selling to pretty large companies, listed companies worth more than $50 billion, market caps. So it’s already happening. It’s just that we don’t have a huge salesforce essentially to go out and pitch and do outbounds. So we mostly rely on inbounds coming through this open source, go to market motion. And then we have calls. Those people tend to be extremely technical, so having too many salespeople on those calls wouldn’t be that beneficial. Sometimes I bring my co founder CTO, sometimes we bring engineers as well in the calls because the questions are highly technical and this is the kind of thing they need to know about the product. So yeah, this is how currently is going and is going very well. So we tend to follow an advice from YC in that regard.

Nicolas Hourcard
Hire more as you make more ar, right? So the more ar, the more hiring, especially on the commercial side. And we hire when we feel like we desperately need to hire more. It’s not like, oh, I’m feeling a bit stretched, maybe we should hire a bit more here and there. It’s like, I cannot function like this anymore. It’s too much. We need to hire there. Okay, let’s go and do that. Hire. So it’s very thoughtful and we believe those were the right choices for us at the time.

Brett
As you think about the series b, which will be coming up at some point in the next few years, whats top of mind? What are you trying to hit? What metrics really matter to you? Outside of, I guess revenue obviously matters, but outside of that, what else are you thinking about?

Nicolas Hourcard
Obviously revenue growth is number one, but without open source adoption and without seeing that growing very fast, it would be difficult to maintain the go to market engine, especially running as quickly as it does. So we’re extremely focused on open source awareness and adoption, and this is essentially what drives usage of the product. And then eventually those users, a part of them, would convert into customers. So as key and as important as focusing on the revenue aspect, which is perhaps what makes building an open source company not super straightforward, because you really have to focus on the two things at the same time. And if you have a bit too much focus one, then the other starts suffering a little bit and vice versa. So both need a full sort of focus. I need to grow together.

Nicolas Hourcard
Otherwise I think it would become a little bit more difficult to keep growing ir the way we do. Now.

Brett
When it comes to your market category, is the market category a time series database or how do you think about the market category that you’re in and the market category that customers are buying?

Nicolas Hourcard
Yeah, definitely. So time series database is a category wherein if you think of the competitive landscape, essentially on the one hand you have this legacy competitor who is very present in financial services but also close source, and they are KDB. And on the other hand, you have several open source time series databases with different value propositions. InfluxDb as the first entrant, historically more focused on DevOps monitoring and then timescale DB, which is the type of postgres and positions itself as a super postgres with better analytical capabilities.

Nicolas Hourcard
What we’re here to do essentially is to bridge this gap between the two worlds, so bring a new level of performance that historically was not there in open source, we believe, and combine it with ease of use so that developers can get started immediately with a tool that fully integrates in their infrastructure stack and also using a language that they know and love already, that is SQL. So that is the premise of QuestB. In this competitive landscape, what do you.

Brett
Think has been the most important decision.

Nicolas Hourcard
That youve made to date, to be open source? Definitely.

Brett
Was that debated?

Nicolas Hourcard
Yeah, of course. We thought about it very early. So the project QuestDB was started before we started the company. It was open source. You didn’t get a tremendous amount of traction before we started the company. It was more sort of a side project from Vlad, who was essentially building this product, getting feedback from the places they worked at, which was great. So we could iterate very fast, but we didn’t get a lot of pull from open source communities yet. And therefore obviously the question was posed at the beginning, should we go open source? And then if we open source, which license should we go for? So, yeah, this probably was the most important decision that we took in the early days. And I guess overall, if you’re grabbing.

Brett
A coffee or grabbing a beer with a founder and they’re going to launch an open source product and project like this, based on everything that you’ve learned so far, what advice would you have for them?

Nicolas Hourcard
I would say focus on your messaging and focus on a narrow set of capabilities and use cases where you are most likely to shine rather than being too horizontal and can do it all, essentially. And I can relate that to the early days of QuestDB. We were comparing our feature set to those of our competitors, other databases that had been there for a while at all of those features, and it felt like, wow, we have maybe a 10th of those features and it’s going to be a very steep mountain to climb in order to catch them. And then very quickly after going to IC, etcetera, we realized that we cannot win by just catching up on features. Even if we match all those features and it takes us five years, we’re not going to win.

Nicolas Hourcard
But the way we would win is becoming ten x better than the competition on a much narrower set of use cases where most of those features are not even needed and essentially become the very best in your niche. So that is the advice I would give.

Brett
What about investing? Or I should say fundraising? So from the 15 million thats been raised so far, what would you say you’ve learned about fundraising?

Nicolas Hourcard
I would say its very important to select the right group of investors, especially in the early days. Finding the people who will be supportive and let you find part of market fit without interfering too much is also another very important thing. That would be my number one advice.

Brett
I see you have some not just impressive corporate investors, or I should say institutional investors, you also have a large number of angel investors from the open source world. How did you get them on board? What was that pitch like?

Nicolas Hourcard
The way this went, we started to pitch them just before the actual raise, and we got them on board just before were pitching those bigger institutional investors. And I think they were just excited about the potential, what could happen if we get this right. And also about the journey that we took to date. And perhaps some of those founders could see themselves in dirty days, what were going through. And probably those who joined thought that, hey, were thinking about the right things, focusing on community and products, on getting this very big open source adoption, first and foremost, building a very exciting product that fully built from scratch, not something that is out there that much, at least in our space, and also excited about the market, how the market would grow and the possibilities that would emerge by building such a product.

Nicolas Hourcard
So I think, yeah, those kinds of things altogether. But ultimately we would also click, just from a human perspective, right? I think we clicked. We liked each other, we enjoyed the conversation. Perhaps getting angel investor on board is a bit less clinical and a bit less numbers driven than institutional investors. So that also matters quite a bit. I’m sure. So, yeah, those would be the main things.

Brett
Are these angels helping you a lot in terms of promoting and getting in front of more people? Are they like very active angel investors or are they more passive?

Nicolas Hourcard
I would say they’re here when we need them. So if I think somebody, obviously I’m going to get a reply back and then I’m going to get help on those things. I don’t really think that angel investors are going to make a tremendous amount of difference introducing you to new customers. I mean, it could happen, I’m sure, but I think that would be quite rare. Anything can happen being a founder, like, unexpected things can hit you all the time. And actually what I found very helpful is maybe founders who were still building perhaps a little bit ahead in the journey than where were at the time. So say were just raised a series A, somebody who raised a series b, a series C.

Nicolas Hourcard
We still could remember some of the challenges that series A founders would go through, building, obviously, a commercial open source company, and that was particularly helpful. So anything about selling to developers, building remote setup, all those things, that was super helpful.

Brett
Final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision that you’re building here?

Nicolas Hourcard
The shorter term for us would be to become the go to database for storing financial market data and IoT sensor data at a petabyte scale. So that would be where we want to be in a couple of years and then longer term, more like five plus years. We plan to grow our market opportunity massively by essentially supporting more types, arrays, vector embeddings, stuff like that, so that we could be powering virtually any application in Genai and other fields, and eventually essentially bringing this performance that we currently have for time series data to more use case and applications as data explodes and performance requirements also evolve. So that would be the big vision for us.

Brett
Amazing. I love it. All right, we’re up on time, so we’ll have to wrap here before we do, if there’s any founders listening in that want to follow along with your journey, where do they go?

Nicolas Hourcard
They can go to LinkedIn, obviously. So Nicolas Hourcard, they will find me there on Twitter and then my surname and yeah, that probably would be the best places to go.

Brett
Awesome. Thanks a lot for taking the time to chat. That’s been a lot of fun.

Nicolas Hourcard
Thanks, Brett. Appreciate it.

Brett
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