5 Critical Go-to-Market Lessons from IriusRisk’s Journey to Triple-Digit Growth
When transitioning from services to product, the conventional playbook often emphasizes rapid scaling and optimistic projections. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, IriusRisk CEO Stephen de Vries shared how breaking from this convention led to sustainable growth – offering valuable lessons for technical founders entering the enterprise space.
- Create a Clean Break When Transitioning from Services to Product
The most immediate lesson from IriusRisk’s journey comes from what they got wrong. “We essentially founded the company as a consulting firm, 2008, ran it as a consulting firm, and then 2014 decided to start building a product,” Stephen explains. This decision to maintain the same company structure became what he calls a “really silly, stupid mistake.”
The impact? “When you then apply for some of the grants that are available in the EU…or when you apply for things like startup accelerators, they will just ask you a very simple question, how old is your company?” The result was being treated as a mature company despite having a nascent product business.
- Prioritize Expansion Revenue Over New Logos
IriusRisk’s consistent triple-digit growth wasn’t driven by aggressive new customer acquisition. Instead, they focused on expansion within existing accounts. As Stephen notes, expansion revenue is “the most satisfying growth that we can have, because it’s not essentially a customer who’s gone through a demo and a pov and they maybe see through rose colored glasses.”
This approach requires coordination across the entire organization: “When a customer does expand…it’s something that the product team did to build a feature that the customer needed or solve a problem that they had. It’s our customer success team that listened to what they needed and responded to. It’s our support team, it’s our sales team, it’s our marketing team.”
- Maintain Authenticity in Enterprise Sales
Counter to typical startup advice, Stephen advocates for authenticity over manufactured optimism when dealing with investors. “I think investors expect an overly optimistic Founder to always come through with, we’re going to change the world…And my personal style isn’t to present that way, so I’ll just present the numbers as they are.”
- Adapt Your Analyst Relations Strategy to Your Market
IriusRisk’s experience reveals the importance of tailoring analyst relations to your target market. Stephen observes, “If you’re selling to the enterprise space, I think the analysts play a bigger role. If you’re selling to maybe directly to engineers or a b to C space or even B2B in mid market, probably not so much.”
- Listen and Learn Beyond Your Core Expertise
Technical founders often face knowledge gaps in crucial business areas. Stephen admits he “knew zero about sales, almost nothing about marketing, customer success and all these other aspects of a business.” His solution? “You got to be a good listener…You need to essentially know that you don’t know and say, okay, I don’t know enough about marketing. Let me go and find out.”
This willingness to learn enabled IriusRisk to adapt as market conditions evolved. The company recognized early shifts in enterprise needs, moving from infrastructure security to application security as “Companies were still sending us IP addresses, but increasingly they were sending us URLs.”
These lessons come at a crucial time for the security software industry. As Stephen notes, “the act of writing little bits of code, little units of computation, microservices, functions, all of those things are going to become commoditized. What’s going to become less commoditized and where the interesting problem space is, how do I connect all that stuff?”
For founders building enterprise software companies today, IriusRisk’s journey offers a blueprint that challenges conventional wisdom: focus on sustainable growth over rapid scaling, prioritize existing customer expansion over new logos, and maintain authenticity even when it breaks from startup traditions. The result? A path to consistent triple-digit growth that doesn’t require compromising your approach or values.
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