It is extremely difficult to do good marketing and sales and they did it.
Solve a customer problem while building a healthy business... a success story in my book.
There is so much work to running a successful business, especially at that scale. Marketing, Sales, Implementation, Support, on top of G&A, and that's not even touching on HR and retaining employees in a competitive market.
There is a reason some people are known as the "business" guys, I think expertise in that area is underrated, especially among people who've only worked at smaller companies or startups.
Edit: Genuinely curious to know why I'm being downvoted. Care to elaborate on why you're downvoting?
Basically I'm in complete agreement with you, and feel this is a hard learned lesson.
A good example is some of the comments that software folks make about the sales department.
They are different skillsets and people have varied abilities in each. The business aspect is not actually easy. It is also not always done well. The software end isn't always done well, either.
My guess would be that is why you were being downvoted. I notice a number of votes are emotional in nature. They aren't based on logic. I see some that are most easily explained as, "I don't want to know." The comment is factual, not confrontational, and topical. The vote is still negative.
Meh... I don't mind it when it happens to me. I have karma to spare and don't actually make comments for the points. I say what I feel needs to be said and try to stick mostly within the guidelines. (I do meander off topic sometimes.)
But, no... I don't comment for the points. I comment for the replies and thoughts. They are usually quite brilliant and insightful.
There are plenty of reasons to write good quality code (it's more maintainable, moves faster, more secure, requires less resources, more fun, etc) but "because you won't be successful if you don't" really isn't one of them.
It's not like they were just a vendor of some other product. They actually spent money on the product, on evangelism (kind of marketing, but also kind of development), on so much.
Stripe's technical achievements at first were basically "a nice button" and a slightly friendlier risk model. Yet they are lauded (as they should be!). We can cut Mongo some slack given how we act about other companies.
To make such an assertion, you're going to have to provide evidence that the people using Mongo and it's services, are, in fact too stupid to know what's good for them, and that they are absolutely better off using something else.
That said, I do think they made a way of handling a data model pleasurable. Different paradigm++
Except that Mongo didn't find success through "simply being successfully marketed". So many people in this thread cannot seem to understand how to look at the business as a whole. Software devs are blasting the software for not being a mind-blowing piece of technology, while not understanding that it has its niche and - apparently - a good business strategy.
You cannot (typically) succeed by only having an amazing product. You also (typically) cannot succeed by dumping millions into sales and marketing for a truly garbage product. The product itself and the business behind it are both necessary elements for success.
There are a lot of developers in this thread trying very hard to appear smart by jumping on the "Mongo is a joke" bandwagon.
Imagine if everyone using MongoDB had to pay for it, you know, like most things in the world?
I suggest they are giving away their cake and picking up a few crumbs after the fact.
Builders don't typically give away homes to sell a few cabinets.
The "product" of a startup is a sustainable business model that can scale fast. The core technology may or may not be a key element part of that model.
So they solved a customer problem with interesting technology - regardless of arguments if it ACID compliant, or as good as <replace with whatever you think is "better">.
Where they sustainable at the beginning? No. Are they sustainable now and did they scale appropriately? Yes.
As a startup that went through it stages, they did it. This is not easy because it requires all the elements to work properly (market need, sales, marketing, engineering, operations, etc).
So what if RethinkDB/or_other has a feature that is better? Irrelevant.
Even better they did this ethically, which is more than I can say about other "startups" with insane funding and dubious and questionable strategies.