Snowflake's CMO explains how the company entered the market as a cloud data warehouse to fit existing budgets, then shifted to the broader "data cloud" category as customers demanded more. Naming your category right means starting where buyers already understand you, then growing into what they actually need.
How do you think about naming your category so that your customers can understand and buy the right tools? In the early days, Snowflake was so much more than a traditional data warehouse of absolutely no credibility. To try to go out and say, oh, we're this enterprise data platform and it was better for us to really break into a category that people that already existed, a category that people understood, a category that there were budgets in a fortune. Again, sort of our nuance then was that, okay, this is the data warehouse built for the cloud. And all the differentiation of Snowflake and all the things you could do now that you've never been able to do before came from the fact that we were built from the cloud. Right. And those traditional on premise or those have been just migrated into the cloud. They just had major limitations. You need to also go after a market where there are budgets and actually people buying those products, and they will spend 30 minutes trying to understand, say, what we do. And then the customers say, oh, so you're like a data warehouse, right? So let's do that from the beginning. And that worked incredibly well. I think it's much better to kind of break into an already existing category with something significantly better than in the early days. Of course, you know, we grow a lot. And then again, our customers kind of pulled us into this. Like, we really need, like a data cloud, right? That's what we need. We need a data platform that across the clouds. And that's kind of how we then more evolved into become the data cloud company, the data cloud positioning, you know, we have today. But again, we say the most important thing. I would say that we did well.
