7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building Elastiflow in a Crowded Infrastructure Market

7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building Elastiflow in a Crowded Infrastructure Market

Building infrastructure software means fighting on two fronts: expensive incumbents above you and open-source alternatives below. Most companies get crushed in between. Robert Cowart’s path with Elastiflow shows how to survive that squeeze.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Robert Cowart, CEO and Co-Founder of Elastiflow, shared tactical lessons from building a network observability company through multiple pivots and market shifts. These aren’t theoretical frameworks—they’re patterns extracted from years of difficult decisions about product direction, positioning, and sales strategy.

Lesson 1: Open Source Downloads Don’t Equal Business Model

The open-source playbook sounds elegant: release powerful technology for free, build community, monetize the edges. Elastiflow tried this approach and discovered the gap between usage and revenue.

“We had released a network flow collector as an open source project that was based on Elastic and Logstash and got a fair amount of traction with that,” Robert explained. “One of the challenges with that is that it doesn’t necessarily build a business on its own and you need to figure out a way to monetize.”

The trap is seductive for technical founders. GitHub stars accumulate. Slack channels fill with users. But conversion rates from free to paid remain stubbornly low, especially when your open-source offering solves the core problem well enough.

Robert’s lesson: open source can be a wedge, but only if you’re explicit from day one about what stays free and what requires payment. Without that clarity, you’re just building features for competitors to fork.

Lesson 2: Market Timing Beats Product Quality

Elastiflow’s initial product focused on network detection and response for security use cases. The product was solid. The problem was real. But the timing was wrong.

“We realized that we were probably a little bit early to that market,” Robert noted. “There was a lot of competing solutions already that were taking the oxygen out of the room.”

This is the nuance many founders miss about timing. Being early doesn’t mean the market doesn’t exist—it means someone else already has momentum. Breaking through requires either overwhelming capital or a different vector entirely.

For Elastiflow, that vector came from cloud-native infrastructure. Rather than fight established security vendors, they repositioned toward emerging container and Kubernetes environments where visibility gaps were acute and solutions were immature.

The tactical takeaway: if you’re hitting resistance in your primary market, examine adjacent spaces where infrastructure is shifting. These transition moments create temporary vacuums that startups can fill before incumbents adapt.

Lesson 3: Positioning Isn’t Marketing Theater—It Changes Who You Compete Against

Early positioning matters more than founders realize because it determines your competitive set. Elastiflow learned this through painful comparison conversations.

“We’ve also expanded our messaging to talk about cloud native network observability and network detection and response,” Robert shared. “That helps us from a marketing standpoint to better align with the problems that people are trying to solve.”

The shift from “network visibility” to “cloud-native observability” wasn’t semantic. Network visibility put them against established players with entrenched relationships. Cloud-native observability positioned them as the native solution for modern infrastructure—a category where traditional vendors were playing catch-up.

Robert connected this to practical technology choices: “There’s a massive problem of lack of visibility in containerized and Kubernetes environments. eBPF is the latest, coolest buzzword that everybody wants to talk about. So being able to talk about how we use eBPF to provide that visibility definitely helps capture mindshare when we’re talking to prospects.”

The lesson: your positioning should make prospects think “this was built for my world” rather than “this might work for my use case.” The former creates urgency; the latter creates evaluation paralysis.

Lesson 4: Architecture Decisions Are GTM Decisions

When Elastiflow committed to rebuilding for cloud-native environments, it wasn’t just a technical choice. It was a go-to-market bet about where they could win.

“We realized that to really effectively do observability for those types of environments, we need to build a solution that is designed from the ground up to actually run in those environments, be deployed with the same CICD, GitOps type automation tools that devops teams are used to using,” Robert explained.

This required fundamental rearchitecture—not adding Kubernetes support to an existing product, but rebuilding the entire deployment model. For a bootstrapped company, this decision carried existential risk.

But the payoff was differentiation. Competitors could claim Kubernetes compatibility. Elastiflow could claim to be Kubernetes-native. In sales conversations with DevOps teams, that distinction mattered.

The broader principle: your technical architecture should match how your target customers actually deploy and operate software. If there’s friction between your deployment model and their workflows, you’ll fight that friction in every deal.

Lesson 5: Product-Led Growth Needs a Sales Assist Layer

Elastiflow runs a hybrid motion that combines self-service with direct sales. This isn’t compromise—it’s recognizing that different customer segments need different buying experiences.

“We have a product led growth motion where people can download and try our community edition free of charge,” Robert described. The free tier generates pipeline and lets users validate the technology before engaging sales.

But conversion at scale required humans. “We’re primarily focused on direct selling. So we have an outbound motion. We also have a good amount of inbound that we get through our website, through people that are downloading and trying our community edition.”

The model works because they’re not forcing enterprise buyers through a self-service checkout, nor are they requiring small teams to book demos for simple deployments. Each segment gets an appropriate path.

For founders building infrastructure products, the lesson is clear: PLG and sales-led aren’t opposing strategies. They’re tools for different deal sizes and organizational complexities. The key is knowing when each motion applies and building systems to route leads accordingly.

Lesson 6: Category Keywords Matter More Than You Think

Robert’s candid observation about buzzwords reveals an uncomfortable truth: the language you use determines whether prospects even evaluate you.

“eBPF is the latest, coolest buzzword that everybody wants to talk about,” Robert noted. This might sound cynical, but it’s pragmatic. When buyers have budget for “eBPF-based observability” but not for “network visibility,” the terminology you use determines whether you’re even considered.

This doesn’t mean chasing every trend. It means understanding what language creates budget in your target accounts. If CFOs approve “cloud security” spending more readily than “network monitoring,” your positioning should connect to security outcomes even if the underlying technology is similar.

Lesson 7: The Old Way Stops Working Before the New Way Is Obvious

Perhaps the most useful lens Robert shared was about infrastructure transitions. “What we saw was there’s a massive shift going on from traditional VM based and appliance based workloads to cloud native container and Kubernetes based workloads.”

The opportunity wasn’t that cloud-native was fully adopted—it was that old approaches were breaking while new ones were emerging. “The old way of doing things doesn’t work in these new environments,” Robert observed.

This is the window where startups can compete. Incumbents have revenue tied to legacy approaches. New entrants can build exclusively for the emerging paradigm. The customers in the middle—trying to bridge old and new infrastructure—need solutions that work in their hybrid reality.

For GTM strategy, this means timing your entry for when the pain of the old way is acute but before the new way has consolidated around winners. Too early and prospects aren’t ready. Too late and positions are entrenched.

The Pattern Across All Seven Lessons

What connects these lessons is a willingness to read market signals clearly and act on them, even when it means abandoning previous work. Elastiflow didn’t succeed by executing their original plan better—they succeeded by recognizing when the plan wasn’t working and finding angles where their capabilities met genuine market gaps.

For technical founders navigating similar journeys, Robert’s experience offers practical wisdom: your initial positioning probably won’t be your winning positioning, open source alone won’t build your business, and the best opportunities often emerge during infrastructure transitions when old solutions stop working and new ones aren’t yet established.

The hard part isn’t understanding these lessons intellectually. It’s recognizing in real-time when they apply to your specific situation and having the discipline to act on them before running out of runway.