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From BlackBerry Apps to Database Innovation: How Timescale’s Product-Led Growth Strategy Evolved

Success in enterprise technology rarely follows a straight line. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Timescale CEO Ajay Kulkarni shared how his journey from building BlackBerry apps to revolutionizing database technology has been shaped by market adaptability and deep customer listening.

The path to Timescale’s current success wasn’t obvious from the start. The company began as an IoT platform in 2015, but something felt off despite having paying customers. “Why isn’t this thing more successful?” Ajay recalls questioning. “It’s successful. It’s almost the worst. I think bad ideas are easy to kill, great ideas are easy to recognize. But when you have a good idea, you’re like, ‘Why isn’t it great?'”

This middling success forced the team to confront three possible scenarios: “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 breakthrough came through intense customer observation. While selling their IoT platform, they noticed a pattern: customers were more interested in the database technology powering their solution 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 explains.

This customer pull led to a pivotal decision in 2016. Rather than persist with their original vision, they pivoted to focus entirely on their database technology, relaunching as Timescale in early 2017.

The company’s go-to-market strategy has evolved significantly since then. They initially experimented with different monetization approaches, including selling support and on-premises enterprise installations. But it was their cloud offering, launched in 2019, that showed extraordinary promise despite minimal attention from the team.

“I remember at the end of 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,” Ajay shares. This observation led to another decisive pivot: going all-in on cloud in early 2020.

Their product-led growth strategy has been particularly effective in the developer community. As Ajay explains, “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.”

This approach aligns perfectly with their target audience: “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.”

The strategy has paid off. Today, Timescale serves over 1000 customers, with a community 50 times larger than their customer base. Their success in building this community came from a deliberate focus on providing value before monetization. “Everything we built was open source, everything was free,” Ajay notes. “The way we built it is we just tried to really help.”

Their commitment to customer service extended to hands-on involvement from the leadership team: “Myself, my co-founder, would be really active in it, our engineers are active in it. And so it’s kind of like, hey, 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.”

Looking ahead, Timescale’s vision extends beyond their current success. “I think the database needs to be reimagined,” Ajay asserts. “I think the database in the cloud will look very different.” This forward-thinking approach continues to guide their strategy as they work to redefine how companies interact with their data.

For founders navigating their own GTM journeys, Timescale’s story offers valuable lessons about the power of customer listening, the courage to pivot when necessary, and the importance of building community before monetization. As Ajay puts it, “Success is about the grind… Most people don’t appreciate that.”