How Rockset pioneered a category: an interview with CMO & CPO Shruti Bhat

We love it when good stuff happens to clients — especially when we get to play even a small part in it. 

We worked with Shruti Bhat when she was Chief Product & Marketing Officer at Rockset, a real-time database company that pioneered the Real Time Analytics category. (She’s now CMO at Observe Inc.)

So when OpenAI announced they were acquiring Rockset last year, we called Shruti to A) remind her she’s our favorite client, and B) get the story of how she and her team launched a category, built an audience and marketed towards an acquisition.

Luke: What were your early priorities in building Rockset’s marketing function?

Shruti: I was one of the first five people at Rockset — acting as both Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Product Officer. 

Our first year was about figuring out our target markets, positioning, messaging and product-market fit (PMF) as quickly as possible, so we focused most of our energy on getting 100 customers building production applications on Rockset.

Anyone who’s ever tried to build a database will know it takes a minimum of 10 years to build something really rock solid. So the question became: what audience segment would care so much about the problem we solve that they were willing to tolerate the inevitable funkiness and rough edges of an early stage search and AI database product?

We defined a tight segment of early adopters — innovators with a high risk tolerance, who feel the pain we solve so acutely they’d crawl over glass for a solution. Those were our people.

Luke: Marketers in high-growth start-ups need to pivot pretty fast from positioning and product-market fit to building demand and enabling Sales. How did that go for you?

Shruti: I’ve spoken to a lot of marketing leaders about why it’s common for startups to have a revolving door of CMOs. I think it ultimately comes down to how successfully you can build alignment between Sales and Product in the early stages.

Winning credibility with Sales ultimately comes down to revenue accountability. If Marketing and Sales share that responsibility, then their goals are automatically aligned. It cuts through any squabbling about the quality of MQLs or Sales’ ability to close.

So we built a culture incentivised on quality, and compensated based on qualified pipeline and revenue, rather than something like lead volumes.

As we focused on scaling demand and generating inbound interest in our second year, it was helpful to distinguish between leads, who might’ve wandered by our conference booth, and hand-raisers, who walk into discovery calls asking to start a PoC. Obviously, hand-raisers convert way faster — but they’re rare. You still scale with leads.

Luke: Category creation is notoriously perilous — we often advise clients against it. What were the signals that the “Real Time Analytics” market was real?

Shruti: Language was a huge indicator. There was a new problem that couldn’t be solved with old tech, but no common vernacular to describe it. I was speaking to CDOs and CIOs who effectively solved their structured data challenges, but struggled to articulate the challenges of building intelligent apps on their semi and unstructured data.

That made bidding on search terms really difficult, because everyone described their problems differently. We spent a long time talking to customers to understand the “hands on keyboard moment” — what did our target persona Google when they were trying to solve this new and undefined challenge?

We also embraced competitor comparisons to legitimize the category. People think category creation is about owning something unique. But it’s really about proving something exists. So we created a lot of content naming our rivals and peers to prove we weren’t the only company solving this problem called Real Time Analytics.

Luke: How do you develop that gut feel for how customers think, what terms they search and what messages resonate with them?

Shruti: There’s no substitute for listening. I did a ton of roadmap presentations and discovery calls, but I also spent a lot of time binge-listening to Gong calls on 2x speed — focusing on the words customers use to describe the problems and use-cases they’re thinking about.

I think being CMO and CPO is an unfair advantage here, because I get to shape marketing around the product and vice-versa.

What I mean by that is that it might take 3-6 months to build new product functionality — so I need to know what customers want as early as possible. And on the marketing side, I can start talking about planned product updates immediately, so by the time we launch new capabilities, our audience is already hungry for them.

This is a huge unaddressed silo in high-growth companies. Product builds something in the dark and then says “go market this thing”. If marketing doesn’t prime the audience — by giving them language to describe the problem it solves — it’s really hard to make them care. And it’s so gratifying when your customers come back and describe their problem using the terminology you’ve put into the market.

Luke: Technical customers endorsing marketing terms feels like a huge success metric. What are some other ways you measured marketing effectivness?

Shruti: Ultimately, the business wants to know marketing budget invested versus revenue generated. To them, everything else is noise. 

Of course, it’s more nuanced than that. We understood effectiveness by leading and lagging indicators.

A leading indicator might be that customers are repeating our messaging back to us. It might also be that we tend to be in the right rooms and conversations. Lagging indicators might be how much demand we’re generating, and whether that demand turns into opportunities and pipeline.

We had a particular focus on qualified opportunities — so not just web visits and content consumption, but defined journeys across specific pages and content. Someone moving from a product page to a pricing page to an architecture whitepaper indicates a much greater degree of interest than simply clicking on a few social posts.

Ultimately, you want to build a qualified pipeline that you can track all the way to revenue.

Luke: Did focusing heavily on qualified leads impact the volume you were able to pass to Sales?

Shruti: To be honest I’ve never seen the “throw leads over the fence to Sales” approach work.

It invites too many unproductive questions. “70% of our leads didn’t convert — is that because Marketing gave us crap, or because Sales can’t convert?” Who the hell knows? It’s the wrong question to ask.

For us it was always a shared endeavor. We said “let’s identify our segment, pick our target accounts and both go after them”. We developed a list of target accounts and the personas within them with the explicit target of “get these accounts into our pipeline and develop case studies with them.”

Building that shared relationship is easy to say and hard to do. There’s a natural gravitational pull for Sales and Marketing to drift apart and work in swimlanes. It’s a cultural challenge that starts with leadership. If the company isn’t successful, there’s no such thing as a successful team, and if the team isn’t successful, there’s no such thing as a successful individual.

We fostered a relationship and a mindset where Marketing and Sales put revenue first together, every day.

Luke: What about product marketing? What role do they play?

Shruti: That’s much harder. Ultimately I held PMM accountable for any friction we saw in the sales cycle. Friction at the top of the funnel might indicate we need to make better content, adapt pricing or optimise our website and messaging. If prospects are getting stuck in the middle, maybe there’s sales enablement issues, or maybe we haven’t defined our PoC tightly enough. And if deals are getting bottlenecked before close, you might need better discounting structures

Luke: How did you think about building Rockset’s brand?

Shruti: Brand is critical. But we didn’t start out with big awareness plays because the category was so nascent. It would’ve been premature to plaster our name on billboards down Route 101. 

Instead, it was about building belief in the category and trust in the company. We power mission critical applications — if buyers don’t see Rockset as a credible and reliable partner for that we’d be dead in the water. 

In fact we identified credibility deficiency as one of the biggest sources of friction in the early sales cycle. Who’s going to build a mission critical application on a database from some no-name startup? 

Building that trust and belief has been primarily a content play. We put out a lot of content with very intentional goals — not just to raise awareness, but to build credibility via thought leadership aimed at an expert audience. The goal was content that made people feel like we understood their incredibly specific problems at the deepest levels. 

It’s hard, expensive and time-intensive to produce content like that. The only way is to involve your engineering team. Even our CTO contributed. But that’s the cost of building a successful brand.

Luke: That sounds like a very intentional way to focus content production around only the issues your buyers care about most

Shruti: Building technical content is all about intentionality over volume. We spent a lot of time understanding which bottlenecks in the buying journey existed, which were most important to solve, and what kind of content would solve them. 

Rather than optimizing for air coverage, we found the most success in ranking in the top 3 results for a few very niche, high-intent audiences and keywords.

Sales were an invaluable partner in helping us know where to focus. I’d listen to Gong calls and hear them say “I know my Marketing team is listening, can you tell us how you found us?” And we’d immediately use that information to put more fuel into fewer fires. 

The worst thing you can do as a marketing team is spread your efforts like peanut butter. Say no to more, and focus on fewer things that make the flywheel spin. 

Luke: You’ve talked a lot about shared goals and joint ownership. How much of its growth does the business attribute to marketing? 

Shruti: I think — particularly for a start-up — that the perception of success between one team or another sort of misses the wider view that the whole business needs to be working in concert. Marketing has to be effective, yes, but the product has to be amazing too, and our sales conversations have to be dialed in as well. Everything has to be just right for the company to win.

I’m less concerned with how folks think marketing is performing, than I am that everyone is pulling in the same direction. For me, growing a start-up is a team sport. So long as everyone agrees on the immediate goal for the current phase of the company — whether that’s product-market fit, demand generation, revenue, awareness or customer marketing — then ultimately I don’t think it matters.