5 Critical Go-to-Market Lessons from Vali Cyber’s Journey
Success in enterprise cybersecurity isn’t just about building great technology – it’s about earning enough trust to protect your customers’ most critical systems. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Vali Cyber’s CTO Austin Gadient shared hard-earned insights about bringing security products to market.
- Don’t Rush Your Product Launch
The temptation to get to market quickly can be strong, but in high-stakes industries, premature launches can be fatal. “I think that something that we did as a mistake was trying to go to market too early,” Austin reveals. “To be able to compete with a mature product like that, your product can’t just be better. It has to be significantly better, and it has to be pretty much error and bug free.”
- Make Claims Verifiable, Not Just Believable
Technical buyers are inherently skeptical of marketing claims. Vali Cyber’s solution was to create open-source tools that allowed potential customers to verify performance claims independently. “We built some tools that make it easier for someone to validate our claims. One of them is called security perfect… Because that tool is open source, anyone can go with the code, you can run it themselves. They know exactly what we’re testing.”
- Avoid Category Creation Early On
While many startups try to create new market categories, this can backfire by confusing potential customers. “The last thing we want to do is try to come up with another three or four letter acronym to describe what we do,” Austin explains. “The customer and the buyer are already very inundated with lots of different messages, so you don’t want to make it too complicated for them and try to pitch something super new.”
- Tailor Messaging to Different Decision Makers
Enterprise sales require convincing multiple stakeholders. “You have to be able to speak to all those different folks,” Austin notes. “The CISO is typically the person you have to intrigue first because they’re the one that sets the agenda and the overall strategy for the organization… Then you need to be able to message to those folks that are doing the testing kind of in the trenches.”
- Build Trust Through Radical Transparency
In cybersecurity, overselling capabilities can destroy credibility. “I think it was very important to be transparent and truthful about what we’re providing and what our product could and could not do,” Austin shares. “You definitely don’t want to oversell. I think that’s very easy way to lose a customer early on if you try to promise things that aren’t true.”
The challenge now is scaling beyond their initial success with relationship-based selling. “I think relationship based selling is great, especially for us starting out, but we need to figure out how to scale beyond that as the company grows and build our messaging in a way that will attract organizations to reach out to us as opposed to us reaching out to them.”
For founders building enterprise products, particularly in high-stakes markets like cybersecurity, these lessons highlight a crucial truth: earning customer trust requires more than just superior technology. It demands patience in product development, transparency in capabilities, clarity in market positioning, and the ability to speak convincingly to multiple stakeholders.
Success comes not from rushing to market or making bold claims, but from methodically building credibility through verifiable results and honest communication. As Vali Cyber’s experience shows, this approach may take longer, but it builds the foundation of trust necessary for long-term success in enterprise markets.
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