7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building a Security Data Platform in a Crowded Market
Most founders in crowded markets make the same mistake: they build another point solution and hope better features will win. Christian Almenar, CEO and Founder of Monad, a security data platform that’s raised $19 million, took the opposite approach—and the strategic decisions that followed offer a masterclass in differentiated positioning.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Christian shared the tactical GTM lessons learned from building Monad. Here’s what actually worked.
- Position as Infrastructure, Not a Replacement
The easiest path in cybersecurity is building another security tool. The smarter path is making existing tools more valuable. Christian identified this after observing customers struggling with their security stack: “What we kept running into is that customers really what they really struggle is like they have too many security products. They can’t really handle all the data these tools generate, yet they can’t really act on the data they generate easily the same way they act on when they get a lot of sales data or product data.”
This insight drove Monad’s core positioning: “We don’t try to replace really any particular security tool out there. We want to empower customers to really take the most value out of the tools they currently have.”
The GTM advantage here is significant. When you position as infrastructure rather than replacement, you eliminate a massive objection. Customers don’t need to rip out existing tools or justify switching costs. You’re not competing with their current vendors—you’re making those vendors more valuable.
This positioning also changes your sales conversation entirely. Instead of convincing security teams to abandon tools they’ve invested in, you’re helping them maximize those investments. The economic case becomes additive rather than substitutive.
- Design Your Product for Where You’re Going, Not Where You Are
Most enterprise companies design enterprise products. Christian did something counterintuitive: “We want the product to look the way we’re designing it, even like how it looks. It looks more like a segment or a stripe and less than a typical security product.”
This decision wasn’t about aesthetics—it was strategic optionality. While Monad focused on Fortune 500 customers initially, the product experience was built for eventual self-service adoption. Christian explains: “We want to make it available to really any security engineer who wants to get more value out of the current tools they use.”
The lesson for enterprise founders is about avoiding lock-in to your current customer segment. If your product requires enterprise sales to be usable, you can’t pivot to PLG later without rebuilding. But if you design for self-service from day one, you maintain the option to add that motion when timing is right.
Christian acknowledges they’re “experimenting with smaller communities but starting to get more bottoms-up adoption” in the second half of the year. That experimentation is only possible because the product was designed for it from the start.
- Anchor Category Positioning to Observable Market Shifts
When asked about market categories, Christian offers unusual honesty: “I will lie if I say items exactly. I know exactly where it’s still early in the physical companies also early in the industry.”
Rather than forcing a clean category definition, he describes what’s happening as observable behavior: “Companies focusing more their attention and psycho kill it. Out of these five different tools that all kind of do similar things. Let us really understand which tools providing what’s the best ROI we get of these tools and then try to consolidate it.”
This approach—anchoring to what customers are already doing rather than inventing abstract categories—makes your positioning immediately credible. When Christian describes “an architectural shift and a little bit of consolidation,” he’s describing something security teams recognize from their own experience.
The tactical takeaway: if you’re in an emerging category, resist the temptation to over-define it. Instead, describe the customer behaviors and market trends that create the opportunity. Let the category crystallize around those observable shifts rather than trying to manufacture it through messaging alone.
- Use Analogies to Adjacent Markets as Proof Points
Christian’s most powerful positioning argument comes from drawing parallels to other domains: “As a tech industry, we’ve done amazing work at understanding who’s on the other side of the screen in order to show them ads, really targeted ads, we really understand who’s on the other side and able to sell them a lot of really awesome things.”
He continues: “It was almost striking that cybersecurity being so critical and so important for the world that it’s not Alipar with other industries. So we wanted to kind of our goal basically is like, how can we uplift the industry to at least be Alipar with what people do for sales data or marketing data?”
This framing is exceptionally effective because it does several things simultaneously. It makes the problem tangible by referencing capabilities everyone recognizes. It creates urgency by highlighting the gap between cybersecurity and other domains. And it positions Monad’s solution as bringing proven approaches to a new space rather than inventing something unproven.
When selling infrastructure or platform plays, showing how adjacent markets solved similar problems provides both social proof and a vision for what’s possible.
- Leverage Incubation for Customer Access and Market Validation
Christian’s approach to early-stage development differed from typical venture paths: “We started really incubating this company with Sequoia. In the beginning, we saw the success of the warehousing movement, south lakes of the world.”
The incubation model provided several GTM advantages. First, institutional credibility with early enterprise customers who might otherwise be skeptical of a startup. Second, the resources to work with design customers from day one rather than building in isolation. Third, the ability to validate product-market fit before committing to a specific go-to-market motion.
Christian attributes investor excitement to “the timing and the customer pool that we’re seeing.” The incubation approach allowed Monad to generate that customer pull evidence before needing to scale.
For founders considering this path, the lesson is about sequencing. If you can secure institutional backing for an incubation period, you buy yourself time to get positioning and early customer development right before the pressure to scale kicks in.
- Build Mission into Your Enterprise GTM
Enterprise software companies often focus exclusively on ROI and efficiency. Christian layers in mission: “We really like trying to build a company that does as best as possible because as we see more and more, this cybersecurity is more like such a critical piece and maintaining civil liberties and the privacy online.”
This isn’t just feel-good messaging—it’s strategic differentiation. Christian notes that “people in the company that came from companies like Palantir, for example. So we’re very kind of mission driven, very values driven.”
The mission framing serves multiple GTM purposes. It helps attract talent in competitive hiring markets. It creates differentiation beyond features when competing for enterprise deals. It provides a compelling narrative for buyers who increasingly evaluate vendors on values alignment.
Christian’s five-year vision extends this: “Hopefully five years will be like that, just larger, with a lot of amazing talented people, great customers working not just with big customers, but also governments and smaller companies.”
- Maintain Multiple Expansion Paths
Perhaps the most sophisticated aspect of Monad’s GTM strategy is how many doors Christian has kept open. The company started with enterprise sales but designed for self-service. They focused on commercial customers but built for government work. They serve large companies but positioned the product for eventual mid-market expansion.
This optionality is intentional. By designing infrastructure that sits below existing tools rather than replacing them, Monad can serve any organization struggling with security data—regardless of size or sector. The positioning isn’t constrained to a narrow use case or customer segment.
The principle here is about maintaining strategic flexibility while executing tactically. Have a clear target for your first motion, but don’t paint yourself into a corner with positioning or product decisions that prevent future expansion.
The Common Thread
What ties these lessons together is strategic clarity about positioning. Christian identified a fundamental shift—the need for data infrastructure in cybersecurity—and made every GTM decision in service of that position. The product design, category framing, sales approach, and even hiring all reinforce the same core thesis.
For founders building in crowded markets, this clarity is perhaps the most important lesson. Your positioning should drive your product, not the other way around. And that positioning should be grounded in observable customer behavior rather than invented categories or manufactured differentiation.
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