Timescale’s Pivot Playbook: How Customer Conversations Transformed an IoT Platform into a Database Company
The hardest decisions in startup leadership often come not from clear failure, but from moderate success. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Timescale CEO Ajay Kulkarni revealed how customer conversations led to a pivotal transformation of their entire business model.
The Challenge of “Good but Not Great”
In 2015, Timescale launched as an IoT platform with promising initial traction. “It was moderately successful. We had paying customers for tracking over 100,000 devices,” Ajay shares. But something felt off despite the positive metrics.
“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?'”
The Three-Question Framework
This uncertainty led the team to develop a critical decision-making framework. As Ajay explains, they had to consider three possibilities: “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.”
This framework forced them to examine their business from multiple angles rather than just doubling down on their current path.
Listening for Market Signals
The breakthrough came through intense customer observation. While selling their IoT platform, they noticed an unexpected pattern in customer reactions to their internally-built database solution.
“When we talk about the database, people would literally kind of lean forward and be like, ‘oh, hey, wait, what was that thing?'” Ajay notes. This physical reaction from prospects became a crucial market signal.
The Power of Intellectual Honesty
Making such a significant pivot required what Ajay calls “intellectual honesty.” As he explains, “We try to be very thoughtful and have opinions, but we also believe in intellectual honesty and clarity, and we try not to be stubborn.”
This approach helped them recognize that their database technology was solving a much larger problem than their IoT platform. “We’re like, ‘oh, this is solving a much bigger problem than this IoT thing,'” Ajay shares.
Executing the Pivot
By fall 2016, the decision was made to pivot entirely to focus on their database technology. They relaunched as Timescale in April 2017, but even then, they hadn’t fully grasped the scope of their opportunity.
“Initially, we thought it was IoT. Then we thought it was this thing called time series, which is like, IoT and finance tick data, and maybe metrics data,” Ajay recalls. The market would soon show them their potential was even larger.
Lessons for Founders
The Timescale pivot story offers several crucial lessons for founders facing similar decisions:
- Success metrics alone don’t tell the whole story – sometimes you need to look deeper at customer engagement and market signals.
- Physical and emotional reactions from customers during sales conversations can be more telling than verbal feedback.
- Having a framework for evaluating pivot decisions helps remove emotion from the process.
Today, Timescale serves over 1,000 customers, with a community 50 times larger than their customer base. Their pivot story demonstrates how careful attention to customer signals, combined with the courage to make bold changes, can transform a good business into a great one.
Their experience shows that sometimes the best opportunity isn’t your original vision – it’s the solution you build along the way to solving your own problems. For founders facing similar pivot decisions, the key is maintaining what Ajay calls “intellectual honesty” while staying hyper-focused on customer reactions and market signals.
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