New technology products are being introduced every day. With that, a variety of development and marketing strategies are employed by different firms, from incumbent IT vendors like Microsoft to cutting-edge startups. In fact, competing companies often use opposing strategies for their products.

When building technology products reaching corporate users, there are two development and marketing strategies:

• The top-down approach, where you make a product attractive to CIOs and executives.
• The bottom-up approach, where you make a product appealing to enthusiasts at home, and then they bring it to work.

Large vendors such as IBM, Microsoft and Oracle use the former approach. Others such as Cloudflare, Ubiquiti and Ubuntu use the latter approach. I believe the bottom-up approach is superior for various reasons which I’ll explain.

Here, I will give a case study of one player’s bottom-up approach: Ubiquiti’s UniFi line of wireless equipment.

Ubiquiti’s Growth Vessel

Ubiquiti was founded by Robert Pera, an ex-Apple engineer. Ubiquiti initially built low-cost equipment for wireless ISPs with great success. However, starting in the mid-2010s, the shift to UniFi began to occur.

The problem is, how would Ubiquiti carve a niche in the Wi-Fi market?

Historically, there were two categories of networking gear:

• Enterprise: vendors such as Cisco, Juniper, Aruba, Huawei, et al.
• Consumer: vendors such as Linksys, Netgear, TP-Link, Eero, et al.

Enterprise customers are incredibly loyal. There’s a reason why “nobody ever got fired for buying Cisco,” which implies that if there’s an issue, you blame Cisco instead of the decision maker. Home users, however, buy whatever is the cheapest or is provided by their internet company.

Before Ubiquiti’s rise, most networking geeks used third-party firmware such as OpenWrt on consumer-level routers for affordability. Some used secondhand desktop computers running specialized distributions such as pfSense.

Ubiquiti could’ve been yet another enterprise or consumer brand. Instead, they did something completely different: create a middle-ground category and dominate it.

As Wi-Fi became more important and the number of devices increased, a single Wi-Fi router couldn’t handle a large home. Average consumers turned to plug-and-play “mesh” devices like Amazon’s Eero or Netgear’s Orbi. But starting with rave reviews including one 2015 Ars Technica review, networking geeks abandoned modded consumer routers for UniFi setups with dedicated wired access points and firewalls.

Ubiquiti didn’t just make equipment. They made commercial-grade Wi-Fi almost plug-and-play. They have sleek dashboards to configure a network centrally. And the equipment is pretty good.

So how do you win over businesses? Many consumer UniFi users are IT professionals. When they install an office network, they know UniFi so they use that. Not all UniFi users are network engineers, many work in other fields (i.e. programming) whose peers use a rented Comcast router. But even those users build hype.

With the hype, Ubiquiti expanded into security cameras, desk phones, network storage, smart doorbells, cellular fallback and even cable modems.

Heck, Ubiquiti made a video poking fun at enterprise sales vessels. And this strategy worked: Ubiquiti became worth more than HPE, a long-established and supposedly ‘safe’ vendor who most recently purchased the equally safe Juniper.

Today, I see UniFi access points in many hotels, coffee shops, bars, parks and grocery stores. This includes the convenience store close to my home. Even I use UniFi access points in my home and know others who do so too.

Conclusion

As I mentioned, in the competitive IT vendor market, multiple approaches to marketing technology exist. For instance, Ubiquiti’s bottom-up approach built cutting-edge commercial Wi-Fi equipment based on good user experience rather than quick sales.

And it’s not just Ubiquiti. Cloudflare became the #1 web application firewall from a generous free tier. Ubuntu became the go-to server Linux distribution for startups by making desktop Linux easy to use. And Raspberry Pi dominates embedded computing by selling $35 boards to hobbyists.

While the top-down approach is still considered the gold-standard to marketing IT products, one problem is the focus of marketing to CIOs. CIOs are managers who don’t interact directly with the product they’re buying. In turn top-down-marketed products are often difficult to operate.

Cisco is safe today with a large talent pool of network engineers and support contracts for mission-critical networks. After all, Cisco still has a superior, albeit expensive product preferred by corporate office buildings and hospitals, among other things.

But UniFi could become ‘good enough’ for most, relegating Cisco to service provider and legacy networks. Or more likely, UniFi becomes a de-facto middle-ground while Cisco continues dominating high-end enterprise purchases.

Likewise, with cloud computing and virtual private servers, the safe option might be a mainstream cloud such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. But unlike the aforementioned clouds, Fourplex’s Ryzen VPS lacks the bloat and complexity for mainstream use cases. This lets us pass on the savings to our customers.