I believe the biggest mistake Couchbase is doing is that it doesn’t really care about their community. I am sure they think they do but is not really true. What they’re doing is the bare minimum.
Somehow Couchbase doesn’t understand the concept of the funnel. Meaning that in order to have high sales you need to have a very large community of people using your technology. And in order to do this, it is not just enough to have an opensource version of your software but to offer support to people which are really spending their time to learn your technology. Couchbase need to have " technical advocates" in every company to push for their technology.
My experience is that it is super frustrating to not find the correct documentation (look in the PHP documentation. There is absolutely minimum), to not have your questions answered on this forum ( I personally have more than 5-7 questions without an answer (or a useful one)) or to get an answer after one week when you have already found a solution (which maybe not the best one) or after you have become super frustrated.
Somehow Couchabse believes that if they keep documentation at a minimum you will pay for support, but they don’t understand that medium and large companies who can afford to buy their licenses would buy no matter if they have inside technical expertise, because they don’t want to risk a big project because of not having support. People in these companies don’t want to lose their jobs because they haven’t recommended buying a license to their manager. And a company who makes money would not risk to lose it for not buying a Couchbase license.
Also, having the community by their side, they will minimize the support costs as people will start to help each other.
My experience is that Couchabse is a super robust DB, I could not crash it and lose data, no matter what I did to the DB (from restarting servers in a middle of a rebalance, or adding servers in the middle of a rebalance, or with faulty nodes, etc) it always recovered flawlessly. So the technology is amazing, but the support is top shit (sorry for my expression).
I don’t know if anyone from Coouchbase will take my answer into account, and I don’t know how I can tag Couchbase CEO to this thread, but Couchbase would be 100 times better with more support for the community. I would let go the majority of the salespeople, make the ordering and renewal process online, and move all these resources into writing content and answer user questions. This way the end result is that Couchbase will have a larger pool of advocates and people using/loving this amazing technology.