The Counter-Intuitive Path to Building a Developer-First Open Source Business

Two years without revenue might seem like a recipe for disaster. But for QuestDB, it was a deliberate strategy that laid the foundation for their success in the time series database market.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Nicolas Hourcard shared how QuestDB took an unconventional approach to building their open-source business, waiting until after their Series A to begin monetization. This patience, while nerve-wracking, proved instrumental to their success.

The Early Struggles

The journey wasn't always smooth. "The first months were probably the toughest," Nicolas recalls. "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."

Those early rejections came with a consistent message: "Hey, just trying to get revenue and come back, we'll take you seriously." But Nicolas and his team knew that wasn't the right path for an open-source project. Instead of chasing early revenue, they focused on building a community and refining their product.

The Power of Focus

One of the most crucial lessons emerged from their early attempts to compete with established players. "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," Nicolas shares.

This realization led to a pivotal insight: "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." Instead, they chose to become "ten x better than the competition on a much narrower set of use cases."

Developer-First Marketing

QuestDB's marketing strategy breaks conventional wisdom. There's no CMO, no traditional marketing team, and no conventional marketing playbook. Instead, as Nicolas explains, "There is no like head of marketing or anything like this, just developers writing about the code they produce."

Their content strategy focuses on deep technical authenticity. "We try to do super authentic technical content that is going to resonate with a technical audience," Nicolas shares. This includes detailed benchmarks, technical deep-dives, and engineering war stories. A recent blog post about processing one billion rows in Java went viral simply because it provided genuine technical value to their audience.

The Sales Evolution

Even as they've begun selling to "pretty large companies, listed companies worth more than $50 billion market caps," QuestDB maintains their technical-first approach. Rather than building out a large sales team, they often bring engineers and their CTO to sales calls. As Nicolas explains, "The questions are highly technical and this is the kind of thing they need to know about the product."

Their hiring philosophy follows Y Combinator's advice: "Hire more as you make more AR." Nicolas elaborates, "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."

The Open Source Balancing Act

Managing an open-source business requires a delicate balance. "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," Nicolas explains. "If you have a bit too much focus one, then the other starts suffering a little bit and vice versa."

This dual focus on community growth and revenue generation creates unique challenges, but it's essential for maintaining the momentum that drives their go-to-market engine.

QuestDB's journey offers valuable lessons for technical founders building developer-focused products. Their story shows that sometimes the path to success means resisting conventional wisdom about early revenue, focusing intensely on product excellence in a narrow niche, and maintaining unwavering authenticity in your go-to-market approach.