5 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building a Managed Intelligence Category Leader
Sometimes the most valuable GTM insights come from companies creating entirely new market categories. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Nisos CEO David Etue shared how they transformed from a consulting firm into a managed intelligence platform, offering crucial lessons for founders navigating similar transitions.
- Rethink Value Creation Before Pricing Strategy
The conventional wisdom says start with market size. But David discovered that a large existing market can actually make innovation harder: “I think it would be easier to build the managed intelligence market if the threat intelligence market was 1 billion, not 6 billion.” Why? Because “what’s fascinating about this $6 billion cyber threat intelligence market is that it actually doesn’t sell intelligence. It sells data or information.”
This insight led to a fundamental shift in how Nisos approached value creation. Instead of just providing data feeds, they focused on delivering “intelligence” – which David defines as “information that’s curated to enable a timely, actionable and relevant decision.”
- Use Pricing Structure to Accelerate Sales Velocity
When Nisos moved from hourly consulting to subscription pricing, they didn’t just improve predictability – they transformed their sales process. As David explains: “If someone calls you and said, ‘hey, can you solve this problem?’ And you’re like, ‘yes, maybe, let me go figure out how much that costs, let me ask you ten more questions’… versus ‘yes, we can solve that problem, here’s our offering and here’s what it cost.'”
The result? Their subscription revenue went “from nearly zero to 20% subscription revenue business to north of 90%,” while achieving over 108% net dollar retention.
- Focus Ruthlessly, Even When It Hurts
When asked what he’d do differently, David’s answer was immediate: “Focus. Hands down. Focus.” He elaborates that while their consulting roots provided valuable market validation, they “ended up supporting, even within managed intelligence, a number of different buying centers and use cases early in our journey.” The better approach? Pick one specific focus area and excel there before expanding.
- Find the Hidden Opportunity in Competition
Instead of viewing other platforms as pure competitors, Nisos found partnership opportunities. David notes that platform companies ultimately want “massive impact on their clients success.” This insight led to strategic partnerships where “when we partner up and they provide access to their platform and we provide the managed services to connect it, that we can really make transformational impact on our mutual clients.”
- Balance Scale with Expertise
While many B2B companies focus purely on technology scale, Nisos discovered the power of combining technology with human expertise. “Our products are combinations of people, process and technology. But in our case, it’s our people who are a superpower and it’s our people who enable our clients to be heroes,” David explains.
This approach required rethinking traditional SaaS metrics. Instead of pure automation, they focused on enabling their analysts to deliver better outcomes at scale – leading to stronger retention and expansion.
The broader lesson for founders? Sometimes the biggest GTM opportunities come not from building better technology, but from fundamentally rethinking how value is delivered to customers. Nisos’s journey shows that even in mature markets with billions in existing spend, there’s room for category creation when you solve fundamental problems in new ways.
Their success – evidenced by strong retention and growth – demonstrates that sophisticated buyers will embrace new approaches when they deliver meaningfully better outcomes. For founders building in crowded markets, this offers a powerful template: focus on solving core customer problems in fundamentally better ways, even if that means challenging established market assumptions about how solutions should be delivered and monetized.