How to Be a Disruptor
MySQL's CEO shares his tips for how to build scale with an emerging model and compete against incumbent enterprise software vendors.
By Marten Mickos, MySQL AB
Sep. 10, 2007
It isn't difficult to be a disruptor: Simply do the opposite of what the establishment is doing. What can be difficult is to be successful at it.
At MySQL, we believe you should act with caution when mimicking the enterprise software industry's traditional business models. We are one of many companies representing the next generation of software vendors, trying to succeed by running highly-efficient, open and customer-focused businesses.
Here are some of the "disruptive" guidelines we are experimenting with in order to scale, grow revenue and be more agile than our predecessors.
Follow No Model
There used to be a well-worn path to software success: build a proprietary product, sell a perpetual license, make service contracts imperative, and release a new version every few years in what amounted to a "mandatory" upgrade. This model worked for more than two decades.
What changed? IT buyers have taken over the driver's seat. As CIOs demanded change from their vendors, many new software vendors stepped up to deliver new types of efficient solutions with demonstrable ROI and no "hard sell".
At MySQL, we've set out to be a new type of company. We realized immediately that we couldn't look to other software vendors for a model for success. We took our cues from other industries - from Southwest Airlines to find out how to make customers happy in a cost efficient way, and from Ikea to learn how to build a high-volume, high-quality model, for example. Bringing these cross-industry best practices to the software arena has helped us fine-tune our offering.
Get Rich Slow
When I see the fantastic growth MySQL is experiencing now, I never forget that it took us 12 years to get here. I like to call it a "get rich slow" scheme. Of course, it is easy for us to say now that we followed the right path to success. But over the past 12 years, there were many times when it wasn't evident that this would happen.
For the first six years, the team focused exclusively on perfecting the product. It takes time to create precision instruments - that's why the Swiss are best at watch-making - and we spent a lot of time on our product. During this time, MySQL had no sales reps, no marketing staff, no consultants, and only a small number of paying customers.
Startups wanting to copy our success need to be aware of the significant ramp-up we invested in. Because the MySQL database is an infrastructure product, that growth probably took longer than it would have for an application or consumer product. But the growth phase of the company really did not start until after the product was fine tuned and I was brought in as CEO after five years.
Make Adoption Easy
People always ask me about how we market MySQL differently. The fact is that we created a great product and we gave it away free to everybody. It wasn't really rocket science, but it was a very revolutionary model for software. At the same time, there were other disruptive vendors creating great products too and we had to prove that our offerings were superior on more than just price.
Our "secret sauce" for building scale has always been to make adoption easy. We set out to make MySQL the easiest database on the planet to use. When the product launched, we were one of the first open source companies to place an emphasis on a thorough user manual. We responded to every email from users and included a reference to the user manual in every response to be sure the answer was contained in the document.
Traditional software companies have always made it somewhat difficult to deploy their solutions -- so that customers would need to purchase support contracts and consulting services, in addition to licenses. Vendors only got away with that model because customers accepted it as a fact of life that they were "locked in". As soon as CIOs realized that they had other options, and that a new breed of software vendors were responsive and created products that were feature-rich yet easy-to-use, it has forced traditional vendors to start to change their ways.
At MySQL, we believe you should act with caution when mimicking the enterprise software industry's traditional business models. We are one of many companies representing the next generation of software vendors, trying to succeed by running highly-efficient, open and customer-focused businesses.
Here are some of the "disruptive" guidelines we are experimenting with in order to scale, grow revenue and be more agile than our predecessors.
Follow No Model
There used to be a well-worn path to software success: build a proprietary product, sell a perpetual license, make service contracts imperative, and release a new version every few years in what amounted to a "mandatory" upgrade. This model worked for more than two decades.
What changed? IT buyers have taken over the driver's seat. As CIOs demanded change from their vendors, many new software vendors stepped up to deliver new types of efficient solutions with demonstrable ROI and no "hard sell".
At MySQL, we've set out to be a new type of company. We realized immediately that we couldn't look to other software vendors for a model for success. We took our cues from other industries - from Southwest Airlines to find out how to make customers happy in a cost efficient way, and from Ikea to learn how to build a high-volume, high-quality model, for example. Bringing these cross-industry best practices to the software arena has helped us fine-tune our offering.
Get Rich Slow
When I see the fantastic growth MySQL is experiencing now, I never forget that it took us 12 years to get here. I like to call it a "get rich slow" scheme. Of course, it is easy for us to say now that we followed the right path to success. But over the past 12 years, there were many times when it wasn't evident that this would happen.
For the first six years, the team focused exclusively on perfecting the product. It takes time to create precision instruments - that's why the Swiss are best at watch-making - and we spent a lot of time on our product. During this time, MySQL had no sales reps, no marketing staff, no consultants, and only a small number of paying customers.
Startups wanting to copy our success need to be aware of the significant ramp-up we invested in. Because the MySQL database is an infrastructure product, that growth probably took longer than it would have for an application or consumer product. But the growth phase of the company really did not start until after the product was fine tuned and I was brought in as CEO after five years.
Make Adoption Easy
People always ask me about how we market MySQL differently. The fact is that we created a great product and we gave it away free to everybody. It wasn't really rocket science, but it was a very revolutionary model for software. At the same time, there were other disruptive vendors creating great products too and we had to prove that our offerings were superior on more than just price.
Our "secret sauce" for building scale has always been to make adoption easy. We set out to make MySQL the easiest database on the planet to use. When the product launched, we were one of the first open source companies to place an emphasis on a thorough user manual. We responded to every email from users and included a reference to the user manual in every response to be sure the answer was contained in the document.
Traditional software companies have always made it somewhat difficult to deploy their solutions -- so that customers would need to purchase support contracts and consulting services, in addition to licenses. Vendors only got away with that model because customers accepted it as a fact of life that they were "locked in". As soon as CIOs realized that they had other options, and that a new breed of software vendors were responsive and created products that were feature-rich yet easy-to-use, it has forced traditional vendors to start to change their ways.
