Supabase measures sales by incremental customer growth

Transcript

From the transcript Latent Space publishes with the episode.

1. 41:41

   Like, what, what are-- What is that story apart from, like, give me a dashboard? Well, first of all, we should talk about sales strategies. Okay. So Supabase is a very famously P&G company. [laughs] Like, we give a shit about... We have 60% of every YC batch use Supabase. We focus almost all of our attention on this, like, becoming an index company. Basically, our role model here is Stripe. We wanna follow in their footsteps. They're one of the only developer tools that we've ever seen that has withstood more than a decade of moving our market and still keeping that developer love.

2. 42:15

   So that's the first thing. So to do that, all we started doing when we did sales was layer on what we call product-led sales. So we look instead for, like, product triggers. It could be, like, a, a logo, someone who we think is really important, but more importantly, they could be scaling up. They could be hitting some limits, having some errors, paying a certain amount. We've got a bunch of these triggers, and then AI came along, and we're like, "Oh, we can do some interesting stuff from this." So let's say we have 1,000 product triggers every single week.

3. 42:47

   We send off a thousand emails to people who are having problems, and say five hundred of them respond. We take the cohort who don't respond, and we use them as a control group. Okay. And we measure how much they grow. Turns out they grow twenty-five percent m-month over month. Then we take all those who do respond, and we say to our sales team, "The only thing you need to do is get on a call with these people and help them."

4. 43:10

   And because we've got all their traffic patterns, we can give them a script, we know what their problem is. AI's been great on this. And, uh, we give them a script just to help out, and it turns out just getting on a call and helping people out, their account then grows a hundred and twenty-five percent. So that a hundred percent uplift, the incremental uplift, is what we compensate our salespeople.

5. 43:30

   Traditionally, you would say, "Get on a call with th-these people and just sell them shit," and s- then you get the full quota. But because we know our database grows, our platform grows at twenty-five percent month over month on this cohort of users, then we know that our sales force are adding this one hundred percent incremental uplift. So that's how we do our sales function. It's always focused on these logos or very specific, uh, product needs.

6. 43:57

   So yeah, the likes of the enterprise is usually coming in because they're wanting to launch lots and lots of databases, or almost never it'll be a transfer of their production database. So migrating databases from, say, MySQL to Postgres or from, say, one scalable database to another scalable database almost never happens. And that was the core thesis of Supabase at the start. We knew that every single Postgres company we had looked at or database company we had looked at in the past that had tried to do migrations had failed over time. You just can't convince people to migrate.

7. 44:34

   Even if you build a bigger, better, more scalable Postgres, what you have to do is land with them on day one and then make sure that they stick around to day one thousand, day ten thousand. So all of our focus is winning these enterprise logos on, on day one. Greenfield. Greenfield, yeah. They're still not migrating? I guarantee they'll almost never migrate. Wow. There's a cohort that will need Multigress.

8. 44:56

   We talked to some logos who are looking at using it open source. They're very interested on making sure that, um, they can basically help us direct because they're running into problems of Postgres at scale. But for the next, say, five years, almost all of our focus on the enterprise side is making sure that we can handle greenfield use cases, which now in the enterprise it turns out to be a very- Hmm...

9. 45:22

   prolific use case because they want all of their product people to be developing, innovating as much as they can. So again, it's kind of perfect timing for us because that's what we've been focused on for so long. This control tower is, like, one of our biggest things. Multigress of course gives us the, the opportunity to win these large workloads if and when they want to ever migrate. But it won't ever be one of our core focuses, or at least not for the next, say, five years. We're gonna have to focus really heavily on just landing inside these enterprises and then expanding up.

10. 45:55

    The other thing that's changed is we obviously put in the past all of our focus into developers. So it was like selling to the developers, enable them as a champion, they help you sell internally.