7 GTM Lessons from Building a $10M Infrastructure Company Without Outbound Sales

7 GTM Lessons from Building a $10M Infrastructure Company Without Outbound Sales

Every B2B playbook tells you to simplify your product, hire SDRs, and scale outbound. Jacob Moshenko ignored all of it.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Jacob Moshenko, CEO and Co-founder of Authzed, shared how his company reached 25 enterprise customers and approximately $10M in ARR by deliberately choosing the harder path. No cold outreach. No dumbed-down positioning. No compromise on product complexity. Here are the seven GTM lessons that emerged from building an authorization platform the unconventional way.

Lesson 1: Outbound Isn’t Universal—Know When to Skip It

The pressure to build an outbound machine is intense in B2B, but Jake discovered it was the wrong motion for Authzed entirely. “We don’t do any outbound whatsoever. We’ve tried it a couple of times and it really doesn’t work for us at all,” he explained.

This wasn’t a temporary strategy or a resource constraint—it was a fundamental recognition about their market. Infrastructure products solving complex technical problems require buyers who already understand the pain. Cold outreach to developers who haven’t experienced the authorization rebuild cycle simply didn’t convert.

Instead, Authzed invested everything into inbound channels. The result was a sales process where prospects arrived pre-qualified and pre-educated. By the time someone reached out, they’d already downloaded SpiceDB, experimented with it, and validated it internally. The sales cycle was longer, but the close rates were dramatically higher.

The lesson isn’t that outbound never works—it’s that founder-market fit extends to go-to-market strategy. If your product requires deep technical understanding and your buyers are engineers who hate being sold to, forcing an outbound motion wastes resources and credibility.

Lesson 2: Open Source as GTM Infrastructure, Not Marketing

Most companies treat open source as a lead generation tactic. Authzed built their entire GTM motion around it. “We have something like 4500 stars on GitHub now for our main open source product, SpiceDB,” Jake shared.

Those stars represented more than vanity metrics—they were qualified prospects at various stages of evaluation. Some were individual developers experimenting. Others were engineering teams at enterprises running production workloads. The open-source project created a natural qualification funnel without requiring sales intervention.

The key insight was treating SpiceDB not as marketing collateral but as the actual first product in their portfolio. Jake described the typical customer journey: “They’ll come and they’ll find us through looking for authorization or looking for some kind of Google Zanzibar type thing. They’ll download our open source project, they’ll mess around with it for a little bit, and then they’ll decide they need support or they need the SaaS version of it.”

This approach only works if you’re willing to give away real value. SpiceDB wasn’t a limited trial or a stripped-down version—it was production-grade infrastructure that companies could use forever for free. The commercial offering provided managed hosting, support, and enterprise features, but the core technology was fully accessible.

Lesson 3: Product Complexity Can Be a Feature, Not a Bug

Every growth consultant tells founders to simplify their positioning and make their product easier to understand. Jake took the opposite stance: “I actually fundamentally disagree with that advice for what we’re building. The problem that we’re solving is one of the hardest problems in infrastructure.”

He acknowledged the trade-off candidly: “It’s actually very, very difficult for us to get someone new into a call and have them understand what we do and why it’s valuable in 30 minutes or less.” But rather than simplifying the product to fix this, Authzed focused on finding buyers who already understood complexity.

Their ideal customer profile crystallized around experience: “The people who really benefit most from our product are people who have already been burned once or twice trying to build something in house.” These buyers didn’t need the pitch simplified—they needed confidence that Authzed had solved the problem correctly.

The complexity became a moat. Competitors couldn’t easily replicate their approach, and buyers who understood the problem immediately recognized the depth of Authzed’s solution. The challenge was patience—accepting that the addressable market was smaller but the product-market fit was stronger.

Lesson 4: Content for Authority, Not Traffic

Authzed’s content strategy prioritized depth over reach. Jake described their approach: “We’ve written a ton of blog posts. We’ve tried to generate as much content as we can. We speak at conferences, we try to go to meetups as much as possible.”

The content wasn’t optimized for viral growth or maximum traffic. Instead, it focused on establishing authority with a specific technical audience. Jake noted that search visibility came from targeting high-intent, technical queries: “If you search for Google Zanzibar, which is the paper that kind of kicked all this stuff off, there’s a good chance that we’re on the first page of that.”

This strategy aligned perfectly with their no-outbound approach. Rather than interrupting developers, they positioned themselves at the exact moment when engineers were researching authorization solutions. The content served as both education and qualification—readers who engaged deeply with technical content were more likely to become customers.

The investment required patience. Blog posts explaining distributed authorization systems don’t generate the traffic that generic “10 tips” posts do. But for Authzed’s target audience of senior engineers and architects, depth signaled competence.

Lesson 5: Embrace Long Sales Cycles with High Intent Buyers

Most SaaS companies optimize for velocity—shorter sales cycles, faster time to value, quicker revenue recognition. Authzed optimized for fit. Their sales process was deliberately slow because their product required deep integration into critical infrastructure.

Jake explained their customer’s decision-making process: infrastructure purchases involve multiple stakeholders, extensive evaluation, and significant implementation effort. Rather than fighting this reality, Authzed designed their GTM motion around it.

The open-source model supported long evaluation cycles naturally. Prospects could spend months testing SpiceDB in development environments before ever talking to sales. By the time commercial conversations began, technical validation was complete. The remaining sales process focused on procurement, pricing, and support terms rather than convincing buyers the product worked.

This approach dramatically reduced churn. Jake noted their retention: “The churn in the people we actually sell to is pretty much zero.” When customers took months to evaluate and validate before purchasing, they didn’t leave after a few months of usage.

Lesson 6: Scale Through Ecosystem, Not Just Direct Sales

Beyond selling their own product, Jake invested in building the broader authorization ecosystem. “We built a language called the authorization language that other people are trying to adopt, even if they’re not using our product,” he explained.

This ecosystem play represented long-term strategic thinking. By establishing standards and best practices in authorization, Authzed positioned itself as a category leader regardless of specific product adoption. If their authorization language became an industry standard, it created natural gravitational pull toward their commercial offering.

The approach required giving away intellectual property and supporting potential competitors. But it also meant that every company adopting their concepts, even with different implementations, expanded the market and educated buyers on approaches that Authzed pioneered.

Lesson 7: Hire for Enterprise Only When You Understand Enterprise

As Authzed grew, they faced the classic transition from product-led growth to enterprise sales. Jake was transparent about the challenges: “It’s been very painful to try to figure out what does that look like to bring on more of the sales assist type motion, especially when we haven’t historically had one.”

The company brought on experienced enterprise sellers, but the transition required more than hiring. It demanded new processes, different customer engagement models, and cultural shifts. Jake acknowledged the learning curve: “We are all engineers. Nobody on the team actually has done this before.”

The lesson wasn’t to avoid enterprise sales—it was to approach the transition deliberately. Authzed waited until they had approximately 25 enterprise customers and clear patterns in their sales motion before hiring dedicated sales talent. This foundation of repeatable success made it easier to transfer knowledge and scale the motion.

The Contrarian Path Forward

Authzed’s journey demonstrates that the conventional B2B playbook isn’t universal. For complex infrastructure products sold to sophisticated technical buyers, a patient, education-first, open-source-driven approach can outperform traditional enterprise sales motions.

The strategy requires discipline. No shortcuts to revenue through aggressive outbound. No simplification of complex problems for easier sales conversations. No premature scaling of teams before the motion is proven. But for founders building deep technical products for technical audiences, Jake’s approach offers a compelling alternative to the standard playbook.