The Timescale Community Strategy: Building a Developer Base 50x Larger Than Your Customer Count
Most developer-focused startups face a critical choice: prioritize revenue or build community. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Timescale CEO Ajay Kulkarni shared how they chose both – but in the right order.
The Bold Bet on Community First
In the first couple years after Timescale’s 2017 launch, they made an unconventional choice: “Everything we built was open source, everything was free,” Ajay explains. Instead of rushing to monetize, they focused entirely on providing value to developers.
This wasn’t a passive strategy of simply making code available. The entire leadership team committed to active community engagement. “Myself, my co-founder, would be really active in it, our engineers are active in it,” Ajay notes, describing their hands-on approach to community support through their Slack channel.
From Support to Strategy
Their community approach wasn’t just about providing technical support. As Ajay describes it, their philosophy was simple but powerful: “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.”
This “value first” mindset shaped their entire go-to-market strategy. Rather than pushing for quick conversions, they focused on building trust through consistent engagement and support.
The Bottom-Up Growth Engine
The strategy aligned 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,” Ajay explains.
This deep understanding of developer behavior informed their entire approach. Instead of traditional top-down enterprise sales, they built a product-led growth motion that put developers first: “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.”
Monetization Experiments
The path to monetization wasn’t immediately clear. Timescale experimented with different approaches, including selling support and on-premises installations. But it was their cloud offering, launched in 2019, that showed the most promise.
“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 recalls. This observation led them to go all-in on cloud in early 2020.
The Power of Community Scale
Today, Timescale’s community is 50 times larger than their customer base. This ratio might seem concerning to traditional business metrics, but it’s actually a powerful advantage. The large community provides:
- A constant source of product feedback and use case discovery
- Organic advocacy and word-of-mouth growth
- A robust pipeline for future customer conversion
Lessons for Technical Founders
Timescale’s community-first approach offers several key insights for technical founders:
- Value creation must precede value capture
- Leadership engagement in community building is crucial
- Understanding and aligning with developer buying behavior is essential
- Community size can be a leading indicator of market opportunity
The results speak for themselves: Timescale has built a community that’s not just large, but highly engaged and converting to paid customers at a sustainable rate. As Ajay emphasizes, success in the developer tools space isn’t just about building great technology – it’s about building trust through consistent value delivery and authentic community engagement.