Will Rackspace Partnership Save FathomDB?

Disclaimer: I work for Rackspace and know the FathomDB team well.

This topic is interesting to me in general though and this is a good example to use for a talking point.

First, my opinion on this specific case -- I don't think partnering with us "saved" the company. I do think it certainly helps them to reach an additional audience.

So now to use this as a more broad example case of the real question here, "As a startup how do you pick the proper defensible niche so you can grow enough to compete in broader open markets?"

I believe Fathom has done this by slicing up AWS instances going down to a smaller starting point. Amazon isn't likely to enhance RDS to target the tiny customers but the "tiny DB" market can be enough for a startup to reach the elusive "ramen profitable".