7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Scaling an iPaaS to $40M ARR

7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Scaling an iPaaS to $40M ARR

Building an integration platform against MuleSoft, Boomi, and Informatica sounds like a suicide mission. Right-Hand Cybersecurity did it anyway—and reached $40 million in ARR by breaking every conventional playbook rule.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Rodrigo Leme, Marketing Director of Right-Hand Cybersecurity, revealed the GTM strategies that allowed a Brazilian startup to compete with billion-dollar incumbents. These aren’t theoretical frameworks—they’re battle-tested lessons from actually doing it.

Lesson 1: Let Customer Traction Override Your Original Strategy

Right-Hand Cybersecurity launched targeting SMBs in Brazil. That lasted approximately five minutes before reality intervened.

“We started as a developer tool, low code tool for developers, and our first customers were SMBs in Brazil,” Rodrigo recalls. “Then all of a sudden we got traction with big enterprises, big companies in Brazil.”

Most founders would dismiss early enterprise interest as distracting outliers. Rodrigo did the opposite. When Carrefour and Yamaha came knocking, he recognized a signal stronger than any market research: customers voting with budgets.

The lesson isn’t “always go enterprise.” It’s more nuanced—be religious about your ICP until the market tells you otherwise, then be equally religious about following that signal. Right-Hand Cybersecurity’s willingness to abandon their SMB strategy when enterprise traction materialized saved them years of grinding in the wrong market.

Lesson 2: Partner-Led Growth Is Your Equalizer Against Incumbents

When you’re competing against companies with 10x your resources, you don’t win by copying their playbook. You win by playing a different game entirely.

“We decided to do a lot of co-selling and a lot of partner business because we were competing against big companies like MuleSoft, Boomi, Informatica,” Rodrigo explains. This wasn’t Plan A—it was strategic necessity.

But necessity bred innovation. Today, “50% of our revenues come from partners,” Rodrigo notes. That’s $20 million in ARR flowing through system integrators, consulting firms, and technology partners who were already embedded in target accounts.

The math is compelling. Building a 50-person sales team to cover enterprise accounts costs millions in salary, benefits, and ramp time. Building relationships with 20 system integrators who collectively touch hundreds of accounts? Far more efficient.

The deeper insight: partner-led growth works best when your product integrates into existing transformation projects. System integrators don’t sell Right-Hand Cybersecurity as a standalone purchase—they include it in larger digital transformation initiatives where integration is a component, not the headline.

Lesson 3: Start SOC 2 Before You Think You Need It

Ask Rodrigo what he wishes he’d known earlier, and his answer is immediate: “Start working on SOC 2 early on.”

This isn’t generic compliance advice. It’s hard-won wisdom from watching deals stall. “It takes time to build the processes and the culture around it,” he emphasizes. Right-Hand Cybersecurity waited until enterprise customers demanded SOC 2, then scrambled to get certified while deals hung in limbo.

The tactical takeaway: if you’re building B2B infrastructure software and targeting enterprises, start your SOC 2 Type II certification when you hit $2-3 million ARR, not when you land your first Fortune 500 prospect. The certification takes 6-12 months minimum. Your sales pipeline won’t wait that long.

Lesson 4: Vertical Integration Creates Geographic Leverage

Right-Hand Cybersecurity’s Brazil roots could have been a limitation. Instead, they became a GTM advantage.

“We were able to go really deep in retail, for example,” Rodrigo shares. Landing Carrefour in Brazil gave them a reference customer they could leverage globally. “It helped us to build a really good understanding, expertise in those verticals.”

The pattern: dominate a vertical in your home market, then use that expertise and customer references to expand geographically within the same vertical. It’s easier to sell “we’re the retail integration platform with 50 retail customers” than “we’re a general integration platform.”

Vertical depth also shortens sales cycles. When your team understands retail-specific integration challenges—POS systems, inventory management, omnichannel commerce—you spend less time educating and more time solving.

Lesson 5: Modern Architecture Is a Moat, But Only If You Move Fast

Every startup claims their modern tech stack is a competitive advantage. Rodrigo makes it tangible: “We are able to launch new features way faster than the big competitors.”

This speed advantage compounds. Legacy platforms like MuleSoft carry decades of technical debt from acquisitions and backward compatibility requirements. They can’t move fast without breaking existing customer implementations.

Right-Hand Cybersecurity, built on modern infrastructure from day one, ships features in weeks that would take incumbents quarters. “The platform itself, it’s really good,” Rodrigo notes—but the real moat isn’t the current feature set, it’s the velocity of improvement.

For founders: modern architecture is only a moat if you actually move faster. If your release cycles match the incumbents despite better technology, you’ve wasted your advantage.

Lesson 6: Position for the Next Wave, Not the Current One

While competitors fight over existing integration budgets, Rodrigo is positioning for what’s next: AI-driven integration demand.

“Every single company will build AI systems, AI apps. They will need to integrate the AI apps with the other systems in the company,” he explains. This isn’t speculation—it’s pattern recognition.

The insight: “We help our customers integrate AI systems with the systems of record, with the legacy systems.” As enterprises deploy AI agents and applications, those systems need data from dozens of legacy sources. Someone has to build those connections.

By positioning as the integration layer for AI initiatives, Right-Hand Cybersecurity isn’t just growing their existing market—they’re capturing budget from AI transformation projects that dwarf traditional integration spending.

Lesson 7: Category Creation Is Overrated

Despite operating in a crowded space, Rodrigo has zero interest in creating a new category. “I don’t think we are creating a category,” he states plainly. “We are in the iPaaS category.”

This runs counter to Silicon Valley’s category creation obsession, but the logic is sound. Buyers already understand iPaaS. They already have budget allocated for integration platforms. They’re already evaluating solutions.

Creating a new category means educating the market, fighting for budget, and convincing IT leaders they have a problem they didn’t know existed. Competing in an existing category means convincing them your solution is better than alternatives they’re already considering.

For Right-Hand Cybersecurity, being a better iPaaS was a clearer path than inventing a new category. Sometimes the best strategy is just better execution on a proven model.

The Compounding Effect

These lessons don’t work in isolation—they compound. Partner relationships provide enterprise access. Vertical expertise shortens sales cycles. Modern architecture enables faster feature development. SOC 2 compliance removes deal friction. AI positioning opens new budget pools.

Right-Hand Cybersecurity’s path to $40 million ARR wasn’t about doing one thing exceptionally well. It was about executing multiple strategies that reinforced each other, creating momentum that became increasingly difficult for competitors to match.