Grow a Database Business from Scratch - Part 4
In Part 2 and Part 3, I covered the first two phases: winning developers with low-altitude messaging and frictionless onboarding, then unlocking enterprise deployments with security features and compliance certifications.
If you survive both, you're either public or preparing to be. The game changes completely.
The Goal
You're no longer selling a database. You're selling a vision of how the industry should work. The goal is network effects and data gravity that make you nearly impossible to leave.
The Language
High altitude. Vision, narrative, transformation. You're talking to CIOs, analysts, and the market itself.
The abstract language that would have killed you in Phase 1? Now it works. "The Data Cloud." "Break down data silos." "Single source of truth." These phrases are meaningless to a developer trying to solve a specific problem, but they resonate with executives trying to articulate a strategy.
The shift is from "here's what our product does" to "here's what the future looks like, and we're the path to get there."
The Product
Platform, ecosystem, consumption economics.
Pricing becomes strategic. The industry has moved toward consumption-based models - you pay for what you use, not for servers sitting idle. Snowflake's insight was decoupling compute from storage: store as much data as you want cheaply, pay a premium for compute only when you query. This creates data gravity - once your data lives there, moving it is painful.
The credit model abstracts this further. Customers pre-purchase credits consumed by operations. This lets you optimize backend costs (cheaper instances, better compression) without lowering prices. Your margins improve while the customer sees stable pricing.
The other play is ecosystem. Snowflake's Data Share lets organizations share live data with partners without copying it. If a retailer is on Snowflake, their suppliers want to be on Snowflake too. Network effects kick in - the platform becomes more valuable with each new participant. App marketplaces follow the same logic: let third parties build on your platform, take a cut, create an ecosystem that's hard to leave.
Snowflake's Phase Three
Snowflake's IPO was the validation. They shifted messaging from "columnar data warehouse" to "The Data Cloud." They stopped talking about query performance and started talking about breaking down data silos. They targeted the C-suite with stories about business transformation, not technical specs.
At IPO, their net dollar retention was 158% - customers naturally spent more each year as their data grew and they found more use cases.
What Breaks
Most failures across all three phases come from trying to skip steps or doing them out of order.
Hiring enterprise sales before developers love you means your sales team burns through leads with no internal champion to close deals. Every conversation is a cold start. Revenue flatlines, you run out of runway.
Having developer love but never building the boring stuff means your champions advocate internally, but security blocks production deployment. You become the database people prototype with, then abandon for something "production-ready."
Trying to sell vision before you have enterprise customers means you're designing marketplace features while paying users are fighting basic operational issues. Your messaging sounds hollow because you haven't earned the credibility to make big claims.
The pattern I see most often is founders who try to do high-altitude marketing before they've earned it. They want to "reinvent how data works" when they should be saying "here's a docker-compose file that solves your specific problem."
Abstract messaging without concrete proof creates friction, it's not unusual to see poor reactions to "premature enterprise messaging" on Hacker News, when marketing to developers it's very important to be realistic and match the prevailing perception, when you're early don't pretend otherwise, it won't work.
Closing thoughts
That's the framework: three phases, each with its own altitude of messaging, product priorities, and go-to-market motion.
The sequence matters. Earn trust with developers first, then earn trust with enterprises, then define the category. Go out of order and you'll spend years pushing a very big rock up a hill and ultimately fail to gain traction.