Focus Your Product Strategy: SMB vs. Enterprise Success with Neo4j's CTO

Neo4j's CTO explains why companies must choose between SMB and enterprise by $10-20M ARR. Enterprise buyers demand long sales cycles and compliance features; SMBs want product-led growth and easy self-onboarding. Neo4j picked enterprise, but still serves SMBs as a secondary market.
Chapters
Number 2, also a choice. So it may be the case that your product is equally good at serving people inside of SMB and people inside of enterprises. And up until we were probably $20 million in ARR, we just catered to whoever's going to come knock at the door. And, you know, we're fine taking on both. And what we realized is These are materially different, certainly from a go-to-market perspective. So enterprise is much longer sales cycles, a lot more checkboxes, a lot more compliance kinds of things that actually ends up driving product significantly. So you end up doing a lot of stuff inside of your product that is undifferentiated. Users won't understand the difference, but that is table stakes for the enterprise. Whereas with SMB, you tend to have a more high-volume game, which means the product investment depends more on learning and good documentation, like in-product learning, make it easy of use, everything around the PLG motion. And that PLG motions are also very different than, than the enterprise motion. So My advice here would be, um, you know, probably somewhere around $10-20 million, if not sooner, you know, depending on how clear you are about who's going to buy your technology and where— what's going to fund the growth of your business to a larger stage, to just make a decision, focus on one, and then, you know, it doesn't— it's always possible to make small investments in the background to handle the other one, so, In our case, we chose enterprise. Our go-to-market is entirely enterprise. We won't say no, however, if an SMB comes in and we want those people to succeed. We just don't have all the motions in the company to do that. But we would, you know, it kind of had this slow burn on making the product easier to use, easier to self-onboard, etc., etc.
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