Founder Stories: Value Creation at Tinybird

Javi Santana is the co-founder of Tinybird, a data platform for real-time analytics that allows customers to ingest batch and streaming data so they can build fast data products, faster.

From Product Obsession to Value Obsession

When we started Tinybird, we were engineers building for engineers. All the founders, including me, came from deeply technical backgrounds, and we didn’t know much about go-to-market or sales. We could talk about the product — what it did, how fast it was, how elegant the architecture was — but translating that into business value took us a lot longer to figure out.

In the early days, everything we said about Tinybird was framed in technical terms. We talked about real-time data ingestion, query performance, scalability — all the things that matter to developers but not necessarily to decision-makers.

We knew we were solving real problems, but we didn’t yet know how to communicate them in a way that connected with customers outside of the technical team. So we decided to start by doing what we knew best: talking to people and building.

Acting Like a Consultancy to Learn Like a Startup

At the beginning, we positioned ourselves almost like a consulting company. That made it easier to start conversations. We’d go to potential customers and say, “We can help you fix this data problem,” and charge a small consultancy fee.

The truth was, we always planned to be a product company — but this approach helped us learn quickly. It opened doors and let us ask detailed questions about what people were struggling with. We solved high-priority problems one by one, and when we saw the same pain points appearing across different companies, we turned those solutions into features in the product.

Most of the systems we built through that process are still part of Tinybird today.

For example, every time we ran a proof of concept, we created a dedicated Slack channel that all the founders could access. Customers filed Jira tickets, we tagged them, and then exported that data into Tinybird itself so we could analyze patterns in feature requests.

That loop — listen, analyze, build, release — became our DNA. And because our customers were so tightly involved in the process, new features were adopted immediately, often the same or next day. It showed us that value wasn’t theoretical. It was about solving the next problem someone actually cared about.

The Turning Point: Speaking to Senior Stakeholders

But we also learned something else: if we wanted to scale, we had to change how we talked about value — especially with senior stakeholders like CTOs or Heads of Engineering.

As technical founders, our instinct was always to code more, ship more, explain more about the technology. But when we started pitching bigger deals, that approach stopped working. Senior leaders didn’t want to hear about features or frameworks — they wanted to understand economic impact.

It took a few painful losses to realize that. After one big opportunity fell through, we started interviewing the prospects who had told us “no.” We wanted to know why. Over and over, we heard the same thing: “We like the product, but you didn’t explain the value to the business.”

That was the moment we shifted our mindset. We began mapping out who our Champions were, who our Economic Buyers were, and what each of them really cared about.

Understanding Our Champions

Our Champions are usually team leads — the people responsible for getting new data products or analytics features out the door.

For them, the biggest pain wasn’t just performance or ease of use. It was time.

They needed their teams to ship new functionality faster, but without Tinybird they often couldn’t. They were stuck writing complex pipelines, stitching together infrastructure, or scaling systems that weren’t designed for real-time analytics.

Tinybird let them deliver new features quickly — sometimes in hours instead of weeks. That speed mattered, because it meant they could hit deadlines, satisfy internal stakeholders, and avoid hiring more engineers.

So for our Champions, the value story became simple:

“Tinybird helps you ship the features you’re responsible for, on time, with fewer people.”

That message landed immediately.

Understanding Our Economic Buyers

For our Economic Buyers — usually CTOs or senior engineering executives — the conversation had to be different. For them, it was about Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

We’d show them how existing tools like Snowflake, BigQuery, MongoDB, or Elasticsearch were designed for batch analytics, not real-time performance. Running them in a real-time environment made costs skyrocket.

Tinybird, by contrast, was purpose-built for real-time workloads. Because of that, it was consistently faster and cheaper.

When we compared TCO — including compute, storage, and people costs — the difference was huge. In one benchmark we ran for a prospect, alternatives came out between $600K and $650K a year. Tinybird’s cost was around $180K.

That kind of delta changes the conversation. Suddenly we weren’t just talking about a cool product. We were showing a clear economic argument — faster time-to-market, fewer hires, lower infrastructure cost, and, in many cases, higher revenue potential.

Finding the Right Questions

Once we learned how to frame value, we started asking better questions.

With Champions, we’d ask:

• What are your top requirements?
• What other tools are you evaluating?
• What do you like or dislike about them?
• What does the ideal solution look like for you?

And with Economic Buyers, we’d go deeper into outcomes:

• Why is this project important to your business?
• What’s your timeline, and what happens if you miss it?
• What financial impact will this solution have?
• How are you evaluating your options?

We always brought TCO into those conversations early — before discussing price. If we didn’t, buyers would fixate on a number without context. They might say, “This can’t cost more than $100K,” when the alternatives were three times that.

Once we framed the conversation around total cost and business value, we could stand behind our pricing confidently.

Connecting the Dots

Over time, we built a framework for capturing and presenting what we’d learned. We compared Tinybird against alternatives — feature by feature, cost by cost — and summarized everything in one view.

That table told the story better than any slide deck. Tinybird wasn’t just technically elegant — it was economically unbeatable for real-time analytics.

Quantifying the Value

As our customer base grew, we started tracking value more formally.

• Cost Savings: How much less customers spend compared to their previous stack.
• Hiring Efficiency: How many engineers they don’t need to hire.
• Revenue Uplift: For customers who monetize analytics, how Tinybird directly increases sales or product usage.
• Performance Gains: Latency improvements, scalability, uptime — metrics that translate to user experience and retention.

The key insight was that every stakeholder defines value differently. Developers talk about milliseconds; CTOs talk about dollars; product leaders talk about velocity. Our job is to connect all three into one story.

Staying Curious

Even today, we still interview customers who don’t buy Tinybird. We want to know why. What didn’t we solve? What did someone else do better?

It’s uncomfortable, but it’s how we keep improving our message and our product.

I often tell new founders: you can’t assume you know what value means to your customers. You have to ask, over and over, at every level of the organization.

Final Thought

In the early days, we thought Tinybird’s value was purely technical — speed, scalability, simplicity. Now I see that the real value is time and impact. We help teams build faster, launch faster, and grow faster — all while reducing cost and complexity.

That’s the story that matters to every stakeholder, from the engineer writing SQL to the CTO signing the contract.

This interview is adapted from Value Creation Explained by Rav Dhaliwal and Ben Wright, published by Crane Venture Partners.

Learn more at tinybird.co.