Grow a Database Business from Scratch - Part 3
In Part 2, I covered Phase One: winning developer mindshare with low-altitude messaging and frictionless onboarding. MongoDB rode the MEAN stack. CockroachDB borrowed Postgres's ecosystem. The goal was design wins and word of mouth.
But at some point, the developers who love you want to ship to production. And they start getting blocked.
The Wall
Your champions have been prototyping with your database for months. They're ready to deploy. And then they hit their CTO, their security team, their ops team.
One user interview captured this perfectly. A technical lead at a bank wanted to use TypeDB in production, but the security team blocked it: "Wait a minute, I can't... It has to stay for research." The missing pieces? RBAC, LDAP integration, audit logs.
The exciting stuff that wins developers doesn't matter if security can veto the purchase.
The Goal
Unlock production deployments at real companies. Convert prototypes into production systems, and prototyping teams into paying enterprise accounts.
The Language
Medium altitude now. Risk reduction, compliance, operational maturity.
You're no longer talking to hackers at 11pm; you're talking to the people who have to say yes before your champions can deploy. The shift is jarring. In Phase 1, you're saying "here's how to solve your problem in 5 minutes." In Phase 2, you're saying "here's why you won't get fired for choosing us."
The messaging shifts from gains to risk mitigation:
- "SOC 2 Type II certified"
- "LDAP and Active Directory integration"
- "Point-in-time recovery"
- "24/7 support with 15-minute SLA"
The Product
You're paying what I think of as the "enterprise tax" - boring features that unlock budgets.
Your engineers will hate this. They want to work on the query optimizer, not SAML XML parsing. But enterprise licenses command 10-100x the price of developer tiers, so you make the trade-off.
The checklist:
- Identity & access management (LDAP, Okta, SAML)
- Audit logs - who did what, when
- Encryption at rest, key management
- Backup and disaster recovery
- Prometheus/OpenTelemetry endpoints so ops can monitor you
- SOC 2, HIPAA if you want healthcare, GDPR if you want Europe
The Go-to-Market
These features don't just unblock deployments - they give your sales team something to sell. Without them, every conversation stalls at "we love it, but security won't approve."
Pure bottom-up isn't enough anymore. You need what people call "product-led sales" - developers use the free tier to build prototypes, but you have sales reps engaging leadership to convert usage into company-wide contracts.
You're instrumenting the product to identify signals: teams hitting connection limits, integrating with corporate identity providers, inviting lots of users. These become your leads.
MongoDB's Phase Two
MongoDB's evolution is the textbook case. In Phase One, they won hearts with schemaless flexibility. But as they moved upmarket, they got criticized for insecure defaults - open ports, no authentication by default.
They responded by prioritizing security, launching Atlas (their managed service), and eventually Atlas became the majority of their revenue. The developers who loved MongoDB in 2012 became the CTOs who signed Atlas contracts in 2018.
What's Next
If you survive Phase Two, you're either public or preparing to be. The goal stops being "sell databases" and becomes "define the category."
In Part 4, I'll cover Phase Three: how Snowflake shifted from selling a data warehouse to selling "The Data Cloud" - and why that kind of high-altitude messaging only works after you've earned it.