7 Go-to-Market Lessons From a Company That Stayed Hidden for Years and Still Raised $47M

7 Go-to-Market Lessons From a Company That Stayed Hidden for Years and Still Raised $47M

Want to know the worst possible answer when investors ask about your competitors? “We don’t have any.”

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Will Wilson, Co-Founder of Antithesis, an autonomous testing platform, shared a go-to-market playbook that violates every growth hacking guide ever written. Yet here they are with millions in funding and customers who can’t get enough. Here are the seven unconventional lessons that made it work.

Lesson 1: Stealth Can Be Strategic (If You Do It Right)

Most founders treat stealth mode like a necessary evil—something to endure until launch day. Antithesis weaponized it.

“We were in stealth for an incredibly long time,” Will explained. “Even after we got that first paying customer, we actually stayed in stealth for, like, another three years, just, like, making the thing better, iterating on it, like, slowly growing our customer base through word of mouth.”

But here’s what separated this from just hiding: they created mystique. “We did try to, like, cultivate, like, an aura of secrecy,” Will shared. “We sort of tried to make it, like, a badly kept secret that many people in Silicon Valley whispered about and that when you learned about it, you felt like you were sort of being given access to a special club.”

The tactical principle: Stealth isn’t about invisibility—it’s about controlled visibility to the right people. Make discovery feel like gaining access to something exclusive. “That actually worked super well. That made it sort of irresistible to a lot of people,” Will noted.

Lesson 2: No Competitors Is Actually Terrifying

Here’s the counterintuitive truth about category creation that nobody talks about.

“We basically believe that the category doesn’t exist yet,” Will explained. “Often when we’re talking to investors or potential employees or whatever, they ask us, who are your competitors? And the answer is we don’t think there are any.”

Most founders would celebrate this. Will sees it differently. “Having competitors is great. Like if you have competitors, that’s like evidence that somebody else thinks this problem is worth solving. That’s like other people who are out there educating the marketplace about what you’re doing and like creating a budget category for what you’re doing.”

The reality check: “Having zero competitors, having a brand new greenfield area is like terrifying. It does mean that the potential upside is really big, but I actually think it makes the problem strictly harder.”

The lesson for founders attempting category creation: You’re not just building a product. You’re educating an entire market about why they need a solution to a problem they didn’t know they had. That’s exponentially harder than entering an existing category.

Lesson 3: Focus Maniacally, Even When Your Tech Could Do Everything

Despite building technology with nearly unlimited applications, Antithesis made a critical decision: extreme focus.

“Autonomous testing is an insanely broad category, and the technology we’ve built fundamentally could be used to test anything,” Will explained. “But, like, we didn’t want to go to market trying to sell the sun and the earth and the moon and the universe.”

They chose one narrow wedge: reliability and fault tolerance testing for big backend systems. The logic was strategic: “One, our founding team has a background in that stuff. Two, everybody’s kind of got one. And so it’s a pretty large niche, as niches go. And then three, the existing tooling and existing solutions for this problem are insanely bad.”

The principle: Pick the battlefield where you have the deepest expertise, the lowest competition, and the highest pain point. Win there completely before expanding. “In terms of keeping our go to market energy focused on a particular customer profile and keeping our product focused on a very particular, you know, problem domain, it’s really paid off,” Will reflected.

Lesson 4: Lead With Weaknesses When Selling to Developers

Traditional sales training tells you to emphasize strengths and minimize weaknesses. When selling to developers, this backfires catastrophically.

“My number one piece of advice is developers are incredibly cynical people,” Will explained. “They by nature assume that everything has a catch. And so if you make your pitch, like, paradoxically, I think if you make your pitch too good, like they’re not going to believe it.”

The problem? They’ll spend all their energy looking for what you’re hiding. “They’re just going to think that they can’t spot the catch and they’re going to spend all their time trying to think of all the reasons your thing might not work well,” Will shared.

The solution flips the script: “If you just tell them what the catch is or like, tell them what the weaknesses of your approach are or like what situations you might not want to use it in. Be a little self deprecating and a little humble and be like, look, my thing is great in this situation. It totally won’t work in this one. Which situation are you in?”

The result? “I think that actually smooths the sale process tremendously.” By acknowledging limitations upfront, you signal authenticity and build trust instantly.

Lesson 5: Content Marketing Needs Substance, Not Just Strategy

Antithesis has never paid for an ad. Their entire marketing approach is content-driven, but not in the way most B2B companies do it.

“Once we came out of stealth, our marketing approach has been 100% content driven,” Will revealed. “We’re working on a lot of very cool things, and they are cool to our target audience, which, fortunately for us, is people who are pretty similar to us. We just sort of, like, write blog posts about cool stuff that we work on and, you know, challenging problems that we’ve overcome and crazy ways we’ve used our software and, like, they go viral and people love them.”

When asked how to make good content, Will’s formula was deceptively simple: “Have something interesting to say, and then number two, say it well and think about who your audience is.”

He acknowledged the difficulty: “Just step one, having something interesting to say is like a thing that, you know, many people in the world are not able to pull off.” The key? Start with genuinely cool work. “I do firmly believe that the starting point should be having something really cool that you want to share with the world, not like, how do I dupe people into clicking on my blog post.”

Their Nintendo games strategy exemplifies this perfectly—creating videos of their software destroying classic 1980s games provided both technical demonstration and nostalgic entertainment.

Lesson 6: Be Brutally Honest With Investors About Moonshots

Most founders polish their pitch to minimize perceived risk. Will took the opposite approach, and it built unshakeable investor relationships.

“With our investors, we told them from very early on, look, this is a moonshot,” Will shared. “Like, it’s probably not going to work. You’re probably going to lose all your money, and it’s going to take a very long time to find out whether it’s working or not. You’re not going to know in a year whether this is taking off or not. So, you know, buckle in for the long haul because that’s what it’s going to be.”

The payoff wasn’t just honesty—it was alignment. “I think the fact that we were just totally upfront about that from the very first meeting, you know, and never shied around that issue is the foundation of us having a good relationship with our investors. They really appreciated that we weren’t bullshitting them on that.”

When the timeline stretched exactly as predicted? “When indeed things took a long time to figure out if it was working or not, they weren’t surprised or upset.”

The principle: Misaligned expectations destroy founder-investor relationships. Radical honesty about risks, timelines, and probability of failure creates durable partnerships with patient capital.

Lesson 7: Welcome the “Impossible” Objection

When prospects tell you your product is impossible, most founders get defensive. Will sees it as the best possible objection.

“That’s actually the most common objection, which is great,” Will explained. “There were naysayers who were like, that product that you’re describing is impossible. And that’s the best possible objection to get, I think, as a startup.”

His reasoning reveals a powerful reframe: “They’re conceding that if it were possible, it would be really useful. If they thought it was useless, they would just say it’s useless. But they’re not saying it’s useless, they’re saying it’s impossible.”

This transforms the sales conversation: “That means we think you’re lying, but implied if you’re not lying. Yeah, I do want to buy that. So, great. Now all I have to do is convince you that I’m not lying and I’m not. So that actually makes it really easy.”

The lesson: The “impossible” objection is actually a disguised statement of value. If prospects believe your solution would be valuable if it worked, you’ve already won the hardest battle—proving the problem matters.

The Contrarian Playbook

Antithesis’s go-to-market journey won’t work for every company. Fast-growing SaaS businesses with proven models need different strategies. But for founders building genuinely novel technology that requires deep technical work and patient capital, these lessons provide an alternative playbook.

Stay in stealth longer than comfortable. Build mystique, not hype. Accept that creating categories is harder than entering them. Focus ruthlessly on one beachhead, even when your technology could conquer the world. Lead with weaknesses when selling to technical audiences. Create content from genuinely interesting work, not content strategy. Be brutally honest with investors about moonshot odds. Welcome the “impossible” objection as validation.

These aren’t growth hacks. They’re principles for building durable companies that change how entire industries work. And sometimes, the smartest go-to-market strategy is having the discipline to let revolutionary technology prove itself—even if it takes years.