Evidencing the Birth of a New Category

We feel the momentum. But how do we prove it to investors?

Local-first software

At ElectricSQL we're building a local-first software platform. Local-first is a new paradigm where your app code talks directly to a local embedded database and data syncs in the background through database replication.

You take the network off the interaction path, so apps feel super snappy and instant to use. They naturally work offline and support real-time multi-user collaboration. And they support user ownership of data and privacy by design.

We feel the momentum

From our standpoint, we see and feel a new category emerging around local-first. We see it as the endgame in the evolution of state transfer and the natural successor to today's cloud-first SaaS. But how do we convince investors that the tipping point will come? That local-first will become the default way of building software?

Proving it to investors

As an open-source startup, we want to evidence:

1. developer engagement with our product and platform; and

2. wider developer demand for local-first as a paradigm.

We have a number of community touchpoints, such as our:

• GitHub: where developers engage around the code
• Discord: where we have an open developer community
• Twitter and Mastodon: where we're sharing content and engage in conversations
• Website and documentation

We connect these platforms to crowd.dev. This allows us to track the quantity and quality of engagement on these platforms and present a picture of increasing interest over time.

But more than just our touchpoints, we also want to show the wider category emerging around us. For this, crowd.dev's Eagle Eye product has been crucial for discovering content and conversations about local-first across the Internet.

We plug in keywords, like local-first, CRDTs, and OPFS, and Eagle Eye collates a feed of content that we can track, building an evidence base of the increasing interest in local-first. This is crucial for us to not only demonstrate the emergence of our category but also to build plausibility and conviction that the tipping point will come.

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