From Building to Customer Education: How RisingWave Labs Found Its Path to Market

Jeff Bezos once said companies should focus on customers, not competitors. For Yingjun Wu, founder of RisingWave Labs, this philosophy became more than just inspiration – it shaped his entire approach to building a streaming database company.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Yingjun shared how his journey from AWS Redshift engineer to founder revealed unexpected lessons about product development and go-to-market strategy. His story challenges common assumptions about what it takes to launch a deep tech product successfully.

The conventional playbook for launching a database company typically starts with heavy marketing investment and enterprise sales. RisingWave Labs took a dramatically different approach. "Last year we don't really have any marketing person and what we have is basically engineers," Yingjun revealed. Instead of hiring marketers, they made a calculated bet on technical excellence, choosing to build their system in Rust, a trending programming language that would attract developer attention.

This unconventional strategy paid off. Within just 28 days, RisingWave Labs achieved over 5,000 deployments globally and established more than 100 long-running clusters. But the real insight wasn't just about technical choices – it was about understanding their market's psychology.

Rather than forcing developers to learn entirely new concepts, RisingWave Labs built on familiar foundations. "You can just use SQL because everyone knows SQL, everyone knows how to use SQL. And all SQL is also postgres style SQL," Yingjun explained. "Basically every single developer knows how to use postgres, so there's no learning curve."

However, this journey wasn't without its challenges. As the company grew, they faced the classic startup dilemma of prioritization. "Every single people, every single user asking for different things," Yingjun shared. "Some of users will ask about, okay, whether you can have integration with this system or that system... and some people will ask, okay, do you have, let's say, GCP support? Do you have Azure support?"

With limited bandwidth and dozens of engineers, they couldn't build everything. This forced them to make tough decisions about product direction and market focus. The solution? A return to Bezos's customer-first philosophy.

But perhaps the most valuable lesson came from what Yingjun considers his biggest mistake. "Talk to your customers early," he emphasized, reflecting on his initial approach. "When I started a company, what I thought is that what I'm building is stream processing database system... At the time I saw that, okay, I don't need to talk to your customers. I can probably just write a code and build a system."

This assumption proved costly. Without early customer conversations, they missed crucial insights about integration requirements and user workflows. "Don't just talk to them about big ideas because if you just talk about the big ideas, they will say that it's a cool idea and I fully support you," Yingjun advised. "Talking about big idea doesn't really work. You should talk to them about the details of your product even if you haven't implemented it."

Today, RisingWave Labs has evolved its approach. While maintaining their technical excellence, they've shifted focus to market education. "This year we actually spend more time on educating people about stream processing because what we heard is that essentially more and more company cares more about how to generate router main sites," Yingjun explained.

Looking ahead, RisingWave Labs remains focused on their core mission of making stream processing accessible. Their story offers a compelling lesson for deep tech founders: sometimes the best go-to-market strategy isn't about marketing at all – it's about making complex technology accessible through familiar interfaces while maintaining an unwavering focus on customer needs.

As Yingjun puts it, reflecting on his vision for the next three to five years: "We want to be focused... We will not do AI and we are not do RAM... We will have focus. We'll also be focusing on the customers and we hope that within the next three to five years when you talk to all customers, our customers should tell you that we are so customer obsessed."