Unfortunately, after a short while I stopped hearing from them. It doesn't look as though they ever brought in any marketing help since then.
IMO, no. Sales and marketing are pretty different things.
Marketing isn't "sales without people", and sales isn't "marketing done in person". They target different problems, and you may need one, the other, or both to be convincing, depending on the product or service.
The next step is marketing. Unless your target market is so tiny you or your sales team can do a direct outreach.
Gaining users and customers is extremely difficult, often unpredictable and potentially expensive. While a bad product/technology/service can set you back there is no guarantee the best will get you success. Users can be unpredictable and the adoption curve for anything new is long.
Sometimes marketing is earlier in the market identification and product building stage so you know the market you are going after, gaps, segments and the value proposition to customers or users. This is product strategy. You can completely botch this step and expend effort on a product/service that is not clearly differentiated and has no market case.
B2C (business to consumer) marketing typically use large budgets to reach a wide potential customer base using traditional advertising channels, and now online and social channels. Even 'lucking' out with hype, viral marketing and rapid adoption requires someone or a team to fuel this hype.
B2B (business to business) marketing is more hands on and about building a predictable pipeline for your sales team to target and close. In some b2b business the sales cycle can be hugely long and expensive and the cost per lead and opportunity measured in thousands of dollars.
Both are done to sell more stuff.
IMO marketing is all about getting a good fit between what the company sells and what the market outside the company wants. It could be creating demand, so that the market changes to fit what the company creates; or it could be shaping the company's offerings to what the market is asking for; or it could be advertising, to make the market more aware of how the company's current offerings are a good solution for what the market is asking for. One way or another, it's about bridging the gap.
Sales is the process of completing profitable transactions. It's typically high-touch, one to one, and involves taking prospects, qualifying them, figuring out what they need and how the company's current offerings solve that problem in a personalized way, and managing the process to completion, and potentially further to upselling in the future. It's a pipelined process and is ultimately a numbers game, where the odds of proceeding to completion depend on both the value proposition and the salesperson's skill in communicating it.
And I do think that strategy was working to some degree; at least on channels like HN where we frequently saw posts related to RethinkDB.
Guess what - database vendors like Oracle, MongoDB (to a much smaller extent) that get a bad rep on HN actually sign deals for real money.
And we see how that worked out. Pricing is an important component of marketing, but it's not a marketing strategy in itself.
