Beyond Gartner: How Onyxia Charts Its Own Course While Building a New Category

When you’re creating a new category, should you follow analyst definitions or forge your own path? In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Onyxia founder Sivan Tehila revealed a nuanced approach to working with industry analysts while staying true to customer needs.

The Challenge of Category Creation

When Onyxia started, they faced a fundamental challenge: “When I started, no one was talking about security performance at all,” Sivan explains. The existing categories – primarily GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance) and traditional risk quantification – didn’t capture what they were building.

Finding the Balance

Rather than conforming to existing categories, Onyxia chose to prioritize solving real problems. “We don’t want to build a product that is aligned necessarily with what Gartner’s defined category. We want to solve a problem,” Sivan emphasizes. This customer-first approach shaped their relationship with industry analysts.

Working with Analysts Strategically

While maintaining independence, Onyxia doesn’t dismiss analyst relationships. “Obviously, Gartner and similar firms can really help with boosting awareness around specific categories,” Sivan acknowledges. However, she notes a crucial caveat: “But on the other end, it sometimes can be very tricky because we don’t want to build a product that is aligned necessarily with what Gartner’s defined category.”

Focus on Customer Problems

Instead of trying to fit into analyst frameworks, Onyxia focuses on solving specific customer challenges: “We’re trying to stay very focused on our mission to solve this specific problem and not to necessarily build a product that is aligned with someone’s specific definition of a specific category.”

Validating Through Customer Pain Points

This approach is validated by their discoveries about how enterprises actually operate. “Almost any Fortune 500 CISO I spoke with showed me an Excel sheet that they’re managing since they started their position as a CISO in any company,” Sivan reveals. This focus on real problems over category definitions helps maintain product clarity.

Building for Multi-Category Future

Onyxia recognizes that innovative solutions often transcend traditional category boundaries. “We often see that many companies can really fit in multiple categories,” Sivan notes. This flexibility allows them to evolve based on customer needs rather than predefined market segments.

Leveraging External Validation

While maintaining independence from analyst definitions, Onyxia benefits from external validation through regulatory changes. “Many companies I spoke with a while ago got back to me recently and they told me, ‘hey, Sivan, we’re thinking about your product with their relation to the SEC regulation,'” she shares.

Looking Ahead

The vision extends beyond any single category: “Were talking about performance, or performance management, but the way I see Onyxia is really becoming a platform that combines different solutions for security leaders to manage all their security efforts in one place.” This broader vision allows them to evolve beyond traditional category constraints.

For B2B founders, Onyxia’s approach offers valuable lessons in navigating analyst relationships while building new categories. Rather than rejecting analyst relationships entirely or conforming completely to their frameworks, the key is to maintain a clear focus on solving customer problems while strategically leveraging analyst relationships for market awareness.

The most successful category creators often aren’t trying to create categories at all – they’re focused on solving problems that existing categories have failed to address. By maintaining this problem-first focus while engaging thoughtfully with analysts, founders can build solutions that transcend traditional market definitions while still benefiting from analyst relationships.