5 Counter-Intuitive Go-to-Market Lessons from QuestDB’s Open Source Journey
Sometimes the most valuable lessons come from doing things differently. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Nicolas Hourcard shared insights from QuestDB’s journey that challenge conventional wisdom about building developer-focused companies.
- Delay Monetization to Build Something Great
While most startups rush to generate revenue, QuestDB deliberately waited until after their Series A. “Post series A actually, and it was, we thought it was a requirement in order to sufficiently be focusing on building a product,” Nicolas explains. “That requires a lot of work, that base built from scratch, it’s very hard to build and it requires 100% dedication just from an engineering perspective.”
This patience paid off when they finally introduced enterprise features: “It was surprisingly good. Essentially it was people coming to us already using quest db open source, and they’ve been asking us the same things over and over.”
- Win Through Focus, Not Feature Parity
Early on, QuestDB made a crucial realization about competing with established players. “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,” Nicolas shares. Instead, they chose to “become ten x better than the competition on a much narrower set of use cases where most of those features are not even needed and essentially become the very best in your niche.”
- Let Engineers Drive Marketing
QuestDB threw out the traditional marketing playbook. “There is no like head of marketing or anything like this, just developers writing about the code they produce,” Nicolas explains. Their content strategy focuses on “super authentic technical content that is going to resonate with a technical audience.”
This authenticity-first approach means their marketing materials are “incredibly technical. We’re never going to make bold claims, say we’re the best without evidence and without a very technical explanation of how we got there.”
- Scale Sales Based on Necessity, Not Speculation
Even while selling to major enterprises, QuestDB maintains a lean approach to sales hiring. Following Y Combinator’s advice, they “hire more as you make more AR.” As Nicolas describes, “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.”
- Balance Open Source and Commercial Success
Building an open-source business requires careful attention to both community and commercial success. “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 challenge of maintaining a thriving open-source community while building a sustainable business requires constant attention and balance.
The Future Vision
These lessons have positioned QuestDB to pursue an ambitious vision: “To become the go to database for storing financial market data and IoT sensor data at a petabyte scale.” Longer-term, they aim to “grow our market opportunity massively by essentially supporting more types, arrays, vector embeddings… bringing this performance that we currently have for time series data to more use cases and applications as data explodes.”
For technical founders building developer-focused products, QuestDB’s journey offers a valuable blueprint. Their success demonstrates that sometimes the best go-to-market strategy is to ignore conventional wisdom, focus intensely on technical excellence, and let your engineering-driven culture shape every aspect of your business.
These lessons aren’t just theoretical – they’re battle-tested insights from a company that’s successfully navigating the challenging path from open-source project to commercial success. By following these principles, QuestDB has built not just a product, but a sustainable business model that maintains the trust and engagement of their developer community.