Ant Wilson - Cofounder of Supabase (100th Episode!)
Supabase co-founder Ant Wilson explains why the company doubled down on the developer-led engine already working, how open source compounds across hiring and product development, and why enterprise trust simply takes time.
For the 100th episode, Jack welcomes back Ant Wilson, co-founder and CTO of Supabase — whose first appearance was the show's most-listened-to episode at the time.
They revisit Supabase's marketing playbook, its move from education to YouTube-led acquisition, the role of Postgres and pgvector, community-run meetups, and what four years of building an open-source developer platform taught Ant about reaching enterprise customers.
The Q&A below is experimental — extracted from the episode transcript with AI. If you spot a mistake, let us know at jack@scalingdevtools.com.
What did Supabase change after its early marketing success?
We interviewed around 35 experienced marketing leaders while trying to hire a head of marketing. Their advice was strikingly consistent: identify what already works and put more fuel behind it. For us that meant continuing to talk directly to developers, making memes and building around the online motion we had already discovered rather than replacing it with somebody else's playbook.
How did you build a team around that style of marketing?
We hired Craig Cannon, who had built podcast and YouTube programs at Y Combinator and had also run comedy hackathons. That combination of online content, developers, humor and self-deprecation matched Supabase unusually well. Alongside him is a four-person DevRel team skilled in YouTube, example applications, integrations and content partnerships.
How did YouTube shift from education to acquisition?
Originally our content mostly helped people who already knew Supabase. We began making videos for people discovering us through search and recommendations: more care went into titles, thumbnails and descriptions, while the subject might be building something with Next.js or Vercel where Supabase naturally appears. Marketing cannot be a feed of feature announcements; it has to participate in wider developer culture and earn attention first.
How do you balance humor with the needs of larger customers?
Humor and memes are useful for recognition, especially when brand awareness is difficult to measure. But they cannot be the whole identity. Larger customers care about stability, performance and security, so the job is to create an engaging hook and then communicate the evidence that matters to them.
Why does Supabase still describe itself through Firebase?
Supabase has grown beyond being an open-source Firebase alternative, but that comparison communicates something a generic phrase like backend-as-a-service does not: developers can connect from the client through JavaScript, Python and mobile libraries. Underneath, the database is Postgres. That lets a startup build quickly without fearing that success will force a painful database migration later.
How did pgvector become part of Supabase?
Greg Richardson was a community member who wanted to use pgvector for embeddings, RAG and AI workloads. He submitted the integration, we merged it and eventually hired him after he kept building excellent things. His educational YouTube work also became a major asset. It is a compact example of open source producing a feature, a teammate and developer education at once.
What did your first sponsored conference teach you?
Our marketing had been almost entirely online, but during the AI Engineer Summit we saw the highest number of recognizable company logos sign up in Supabase's history. Online activity can generate volume, while an in-person conference can tilt the mix toward larger organizations. Experiencing that directly changed how we thought about events.
Why let the community run Supabase meetups?
The community organized 55 cities in two weeks; we supplied money for food and drink, content and a lightweight format. The value is not primarily a top-of-funnel calculation. People help one another when they get stuck, share what they are building and may even meet future co-founders — just as Paul and I learned how to work together through hackathons before Supabase.
What is your strongest advice to a new DevTools founder?
If open source is genuinely an option, I would usually do it. It can create attention, align with developers, differentiate a startup from an incumbent and become an extraordinary hiring channel — I estimate roughly 40% of our team contributed in some way before joining. A fork is less threatening when you remain the team that understands the product best and keeps advancing it.
What finally makes enterprises comfortable adopting a young platform?
Open source helps because customers can contribute features that are urgent for them, even when those features are not yet high on our roadmap. But there is no shortcut for trust. Enterprise buyers need to see funding, infrastructure and support expertise, plus years of security and stability. Time in the market is what makes an internal developer's request to use Supabase easier to approve.