Calamu’s Market Education Strategy: Changing Minds Without Boiling the Ocean
Most founders creating new categories obsess over product complexity. They build elaborate demos. Create exhaustive documentation. Hire armies of sales engineers to explain every feature.
But the real challenge in category creation isn’t getting people to understand your product. It’s getting them to unlearn what they already believe.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Paul Lewis, CEO and Co-Founder of Calamu, revealed something counterintuitive about market education: the greatest GTM challenge in creating the cyber storage category wasn’t technical complexity—it was convincing people to question decades of infrastructure-first thinking. More surprisingly, once that mental model breaks, education happens faster than expected.
Naming the Real Challenge
Paul is direct about Calamu’s primary go-to-market obstacle, and it’s not what most founders would anticipate.
“The single greatest challenge for us is it’s a change in mindset, right? So nobody really before was thinking about protecting the data at the data layer. They were thinking about protecting the infrastructure. And there’s billions, trillions of dollars spent protecting the infrastructure.”
The challenge isn’t ignorance—it’s established belief backed by massive investment. When trillions of dollars have been spent on a particular approach, questioning that approach becomes psychologically and financially threatening.
This is the education trap that kills most category creators: they treat their challenge as information deficit when it’s actually belief displacement. You’re not filling an empty space in someone’s mind. You’re asking them to evict a tenant that’s been living there for decades.
The Strategic Framing That Reduces Resistance
Understanding that mindset change is the challenge, Paul structured Calamu’s messaging to minimize psychological resistance.
“So we’re not saying you don’t need to do that, but we’re saying, look, that’s not working as well as we all hoped it would work. So let’s look at protecting the data. Even if the data is removed from your control.”
This framing is strategically crucial. Rather than attacking existing infrastructure security investments (which would trigger defensive reactions), Paul validates them while pointing out their limitations. This is education as addition, not replacement.
The messaging goes further by accepting reality rather than promising the impossible: “We start with the premise that the bad actor has reached the data. So there’s been a failure somewhere in the system and they’ve actually reached the data.”
By starting with breach acceptance, Calamu sidesteps the entire conversation about prevention effectiveness. The question shifts from “does your current security work?” to “what happens when prevention fails?”—a much less threatening framing.
The Surprising Speed of Mental Model Breaking
Here’s where Paul’s experience challenges conventional wisdom about category education timelines.
“Changing that mindset is really the greatest thing, the greatest challenge that we’ve had partly education, not a lot of education, because as soon as we kind of talk through it and explain the process and how it works, people kind of get it right away, and then they get excited about it.”
Read that again: “not a lot of education…people kind of get it right away.”
This reveals a critical insight about mindset shifts in category creation. The challenge isn’t the duration or complexity of education—it’s getting someone to consider an alternative mental model in the first place. Once they’re open to questioning the old approach, the new model clicks quickly.
The education barrier is psychological, not intellectual. It’s not that protecting data at the data layer is hard to understand. It’s that people won’t consider it while they’re still committed to infrastructure protection as the answer.
Positioning Around What the Old Model Can’t Solve
The fastest way to break an old mental model is showing it can’t solve a critical problem.
Paul positions Calamu around double extortion—the ransomware threat that infrastructure protection fundamentally cannot address.
“We think about things like ransomware, and everybody has a solution for ransomware. Most of those solutions are simply just restore from some form of a backup, which is not ideal. Right. And in my opinion, it’s not good enough. But ransomware doesn’t address the problem really, that ransomware is all about when we talk about these backup store solutions, which is double extortion.”
He continues: “So we have double extortion where data is actually stolen from the network and that data is then weaponized back against the company and used against the company and threatened to be released. And that’s really where we see the biggest growing kind of pain that we’ve got around ransomware.”
Backup solutions restore data. Infrastructure protection tries to prevent access. Neither solves data theft and weaponization. The old mental model has no answer.
This creates the opening for the new model. When the established approach can’t solve a critical problem, people become willing to question it.
Working with Analysts as Educators, Not Marketers
Calamu’s analyst relations strategy treats Gartner and others as education partners rather than marketing channels.
“I think analyst relationships are very important and we are working with different analysts. We’re trying to educate. Right? So we’re not trying to obviously we’d love to get market, we’d love to see if we can get exposure in market, but it’s really more trying to educate because what we’re going through is a change in mindset,” Paul explains.
The goal isn’t getting mentioned in the Magic Quadrant. It’s shaping how analysts think about the problem space.
“We’re changing from this layered security model where we’re layering on more and more security onto the infrastructure, into we don’t have to worry about that so much because we’re really now just trying to protect the data, especially if the data gets into the hands of third party or someone that shouldn’t have it.”
When Gartner recognizes cyber storage as an emerging category, they’re not just validating Calamu—they’re educating the entire market on a new way of thinking. That’s orders of magnitude more valuable than any single mention.
The Anti-Fear Education Approach
While most cybersecurity companies use fear to create urgency, Paul recognized that educated buyers are numb to doom and gloom.
“It’s not about doom and gloom and it’s not about trying to scare people into buying our product. It’s about understanding that there is a better way, right? And there’s a better way to protect your data.”
This educational tone reflects understanding of the audience. “Maybe it worked 15 years ago, but I think today everybody knows all the stats, everybody knows all the problems. Everybody’s tired of hearing about the problems. We know what they are. So it’s innovative solutions that I think they’re getting the attention and the CEOs are responding.”
The education isn’t about the severity of the problem—executives already know that. It’s about the viability of a different solution approach. This shifts the conversation from fear to possibility, making the mindset change feel empowering rather than threatening.
The “Boil the Ocean” Trap
Paul’s reference to “boiling the ocean” reveals a critical tension in category creation: the temptation to showcase every benefit of your new approach.
“We’re kind of multifaceted with benefits that we bring. So we feel like we bring so much benefit, but we can’t boil the ocean. So what we’re trying to do is we’re really trying to zone in on the one thing that is really going to allow us to get to scale.”
When you’re creating a category, you’re naturally excited about all the problems your new approach solves. But comprehensive education is the enemy of mindset change. People can’t shift mental models while simultaneously processing ten different value propositions.
The discipline is focusing education on the single problem that makes the old approach obviously inadequate—for Calamu, that’s double extortion—and letting the other benefits emerge after the core mindset shift has occurred.
The Market Education Playbook
Calamu’s approach distills into a repeatable market education strategy for category creators:
- Name the real challenge: mindset change, not product understanding
- Frame as addition, not replacement, to reduce resistance
- Accept uncomfortable realities rather than promise impossible prevention
- Position around problems the old model cannot solve
- Treat analysts as education partners who reshape market thinking
- Use empowering messaging instead of fear-based urgency
- Focus on the one mindset shift that matters most
The lesson for founders isn’t that market education is easy. It’s that the challenge isn’t where most people think it is. You’re not teaching people about your product. You’re giving them permission to question what they already believe. Once you understand that distinction, education becomes faster and more effective than conventional wisdom suggests.
As Paul discovered, the education curve is shorter than expected—but only once you’ve helped someone unlearn the old approach first.
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