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From Developer Pain to Enterprise Success: How Tonic Built a Category Around Synthetic Data

Most startup founders dream of changing the world, but few understand how to start small enough to make that dream a reality. For Tonic co-CEO Ian Coe, the path to transforming how companies handle sensitive data began with a laser focus on a single, crucial insight: developers needed a better way to work with test data.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Ian shared how this focused approach shaped Tonic’s journey from addressing a specific developer pain point to building a broader platform for data security and productivity.

The origin of Tonic’s mission stems from a common frustration Ian experienced firsthand at Palantir. “If you were having an issue on site, you couldn’t just send that data over the wire back to Palo Alto, where maybe someone, a developer, was sitting,” Ian explains. This challenge of securely sharing sensitive data for development and testing would become the foundation for Tonic’s initial product focus.

Rather than trying to solve every data privacy challenge at once, Tonic made a strategic decision to start with developers. “When we’re first starting and had this idea that Synthetic Data could really change the world, it’s a very important point of where you start, right? Because you can’t change the entire world at once,” Ian notes.

This choice wasn’t just about market size – it was about finding the fastest path to delivering concrete value. The team specifically avoided expanding into data science and analytics early on because, as Ian puts it, “our sense was that was a little bit more of a research problem. And that to add that nugget of value to a customer would require a much longer, uncertain process.”

The focus on developers shaped everything from their product development to their marketing approach. Despite operating in the serious realm of data security and privacy, Tonic embraced an authentic, developer-friendly brand voice. They even started calling themselves “the fake data company” – a playful twist that helped them stand out in a crowded market.

This authenticity extended to their marketing strategy. Rather than relying on traditional enterprise software marketing tactics, Tonic built credibility through substance. “What we’ve come to believe is that being generally honest and direct and also producing really high quality content is the best way to reach our audience,” Ian explains. “We do blog posts that attach to open source projects that we think are genuinely useful to the community. We try to do blog posts that are actually instructive and help people level up.”

This approach has driven powerful word-of-mouth growth. “A lot of our customers have found us through referrals,” Ian notes. “We’ve even had customers where they were working somewhere, they moved somewhere else, and they brought us into the new company.”

Working with enterprise customers required a delicate balance between maintaining their developer-friendly approach while meeting enterprise requirements. “The most important thing you can do with a customer that’s significantly larger than you is do the things you say you’re going to do,” Ian emphasizes. “If you are a 50 or 100 person company and you’re working with a 10,000 person company, they’re going to have a lot more complexity.”

Looking ahead, Tonic’s vision extends far beyond their initial focus on developer productivity. “It’s really about basically making it so that developers, data scientists, those folks, don’t spend time on data problems,” Ian explains. Success for Tonic means enabling technical teams to “focus entirely on the intellectual challenges of their work and not on the painful data privacy, data cleanliness, data portability, challenges that plague so much of work that touches data today.”

For founders building developer tools, Tonic’s journey offers valuable lessons in the power of starting narrow and earning genuine trust before expanding to broader use cases. Their story shows that sometimes the best way to change the world is to start by solving one specific problem extremely well.