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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
15 Data Technology Founders
Positioning and Messaging Lessons
Challenge the Core Assumption Your Category Was Built Around
Most categories carry an inherited assumption that nobody questions. In data access, that assumption was that protection requires restriction. Rina articulated the existing logic precisely: “Up until now, data access included security and privacy solutions that aim to restrict and limit users, which makes sense because existing data protection solutions are not technological. You have a set of techniques and practices like anonymization, masking encryption. So basically, let me hide or remove your data because I don’t want to risk a data breach.” PVML’s positioning flipped that assumption directly: “The first technology that actually helps unlock more data for analysis without altering it and without risking it.” Rina described the resulting position as “an oxymoron because of the security and enablement combination.” When you can credibly challenge the assumption that defines your entire category, that contradiction becomes the sharpest positioning available.
Reframe Your Messaging Around the Bigger Problem You Actually Solve
Michel recognized that the “data integration” label Airbyte operated under was accurate but limiting. The frame he was pushing toward was “data movement,” and he had a specific reason for it: “I think data movement is a stronger way to think about it because the term is not completely fully understood. It still has this concept of it’s more than just connecting to a data cycle.” The existing category described a narrow version of the problem. The broader frame opened up adjacent territory around data quality, contracts, and expectations between systems: “It’s just how do you get companies to exchange data in a smoother way? How do you make the data possible? What kind of contract do you need to put on top of your data, what kind of quality, what kind of expectation you can have on top of that? This is not so much in the data integration space.” When your current category label captures only part of the problem you solve, the label itself becomes a ceiling on how buyers understand your value.
Let Your Customers Reframe Your Core Narrative
DataGrail’s early messaging was built around continuous compliance, staying current with GDPR, CCPA, and the regulations coming behind them. Daniel recognized that framing was too narrow. “We realize that the reality is it’s a lot more than that,” he said. “And businesses in reality are looking at the brand reputation of what it means to be exposed to risk or not be transparent with their consumer or their customer. And that is really about trust.” The shift didn’t come from internal debate. It came from a single customer conversation. “That started with a conversation that we had with a CISO and he kind of shaped for us how we should think about the narrative for our category. And that was an inflection point in the business that I would say led us to the narrative we have today. And a lot of the success that we’ve seen thus far.”
Stay Committed to Your Core Framing Even When the Market Resists It
Dan DeMers, CEO of Cinchy, cycled through multiple messaging iterations over several years, introducing new terminology before ultimately returning to where he started. “We actually went through a bunch of different iterations where we started with a kind of core messaging and then we evolved and introduced this concept called dataware. So hardware, software, dataware. And then while that’s still part of our narrative, our core is back to its roots, which is data collaboration.” The experimentation wasn’t wasted, but the lesson that emerged was about timing as much as language. “What’s clear to me is that the world has changed where they are more receptive to our framing than they were back in 2017, 2018, 2019.” The principle Dan drew from this was direct: “Framing that doesn’t work today may suddenly find itself working three, four years later.” Early market resistance to a framing is not always evidence that the framing is wrong.
Address Job Security Fears Directly When Messaging Around Automation
Saket identified a specific messaging problem that slowed Nexla’s early traction: prospects heard “automation” and immediately worried about their jobs. “When we first started talking about, hey, we’re bringing automation to data engineering, it was like, oh, you can automate my job away.” The response required reframing the value proposition around enablement rather than replacement: “[in] every function out there, automation is going to help do that job better and that’s essential. We can’t scale without that.” Getting that message to land was harder than building the product. Saket described the core GTM challenge as having “such little opportunity to get the attention of someone and have them listen to you,” making every word of positioning count. When your product automates work that people do today, the fear of displacement will surface before the efficiency argument lands, and your messaging needs to address that fear first.
Lead With the Problem You Solve, Skip the Technology Label
Crowded technology categories punish companies that lead with the underlying tech rather than the outcome they deliver. Ryan drew a sharp distinction when describing his positioning approach: “the real way to differentiate is not to be an AI business at all. The real way to differentiate is to solve a problem that happens to be using AI.” He anchored Zenlytic’s mission entirely in the customer outcome, not the mechanism behind it: “our mission, our goal is to pass that Turing test. It’s to make that conversation feel like an instant. Always on data analyst.” When your category is noisy, the company that owns the problem beats the company that owns the technology.
Anchor Your Positioning to a Company Your Buyers Already Trust
When Ariel Katz needed to explain what Sisense was becoming, he reached for an analogy his target buyers already understood. “In the past, it was very hard for developers or creators to build communications. Then came Twilio and just solved that problem. They said, “And now here’s an API, the same way we’re going to do, you know, sending an SMS and boom, all of a sudden that became a commodity.” From there, the positioning became a single sentence: “let’s call it Twilio for embedded analytics.” The analogy did the heavy lifting that a feature explanation never could. Instead of asking buyers to learn a new category from scratch, it gave them a trusted reference point and let them fill in the rest. Ariel’s goal was to “abstract away all the complexities. I really want to abstract, democratize and really bring it to the hand of every creator,” If your buyers already trust a company that solved a similar problem in a different space, borrowing that reference point can make a complex positioning story land faster than any product description.
Borrow a Market Moment to Collapse Your Buyers' Learning Curve
Before ChatGPT went mainstream, Sarah struggled to get anyone to grasp what Seek did. “I just remember almost no one understood what I was building. Like, I would try to explain to people, but there was just too much going on.” When ChatGPT launched publicly, it gave her a shared reference point she could borrow directly in conversations. “I’m so grateful for ChatGPT because people tried it out and they got it instantly. And then I was just hey, we’re not that different from ChatGPT. We can help you work with the data in your data warehouse. And people really got that in larger amounts.” When a market moment creates a concept your buyers now understand, connecting your product to that moment collapses the education burden immediately.
Test Outbound Copy Until You Find the Words Buyers Already Use
Datalogz did not develop their core message in a brand workshop. Logan tested more than 30 different cold outbound openers before finding the one that worked. The winning line was simple and direct: it got “data leaders from massive enterprises, Fortune 50s, Fortune 100s to take meetings with us” at a rate that other messages could not match. The message worked because it mirrored how buyers already thought about their situation, not how Datalogz wanted to position itself. Once validated through outbound volume, Logan committed fully: “it just stuck. And it’s been our team’s motto and messaging.” Your best marketing copy already exists in your sales conversations. The job is to run enough tests to find it.
Build Your Positioning Around the Customer's Problem Description
Barr grounded her early positioning entirely in the language and lived experience of her target customers rather than in product capabilities or competitive comparisons. The principle she kept coming back to was direct: “Your customers don’t care about your company, they don’t care about the category, they don’t care about the fact that you’re trying to create a category, they care about their problems. And so focusing on that and narrowing down on that is where we sort of found the truth, if you will.” The practical implication was that her team spent significant time listening to how customers described their own situation before writing a word of positioning. The questions she asked were specific: “What is the language that our customers are using? What words do they use to describe their own problem? If you were to ask them about what keeps them up at night, how do they describe that?” She believed that “that kind of ability to capture that in the moment is very powerful.” Positioning built from the customer’s words, not the founder’s, is harder to dismiss and easier for buyers to recognize as relevant to their actual situation.
Lead With a Label Your Buyers Cannot Forget
Ian and his co-founders made a deliberate choice to lean into an irreverent brand identity after wrestling with whether it was appropriate for their market. The reasoning came down to a clear-eyed diagnosis of their actual problem: “The biggest challenge for any company is being noticed and being detected in this very noisy world.” From that starting point, the calculus shifted. As Ian put it, “We felt that not only was it authentic, but that our biggest risk was not being not serious enough, but actually not being known.” The label they landed on was blunt and memorable: “We call ourselves the fake data company because we think that’s amusing. And in reality, that’s what all these things are, as there are various versions of fake data.” Invisibility kills more companies than a playful brand ever will. When your market is crowded, being remembered is a strategic advantage.
Frame Your Messaging Around the Job Your Buyer Wants Done
Ajay Kulkarni framed Timescale’s positioning around the developer’s actual job, which had nothing to do with the database itself. “If I’m a developer, I don’t want to think about the database. I want to focus on my application. I want to focus on my user, on my customer, and I want the database to work. I just want a place where I can write data, store data, analyze data that’s reliable, scalable, fast, easy, cost effective so that I can focus on my application.” The entire database industry had been positioning around what the technology does rather than what the buyer is trying to accomplish. Ajay connected this explicitly to his repositioning strategy: “we’re redefining the database category by really taking advantage of the cloud and really focusing on the developer and the jobs to be done in particular.”
Name the Hidden Cost Buyers Have Already Normalized
Sean pointed to a cost that most data teams had stopped questioning: the engineering time consumed by integration work. The real drain, he argued, wasn’t the tools themselves but everything required to connect them. “The majority of the time and energy spent is 80 plus percent of your time wrapping all of these technologies in the construction of a modern data platform on top of all those.” That framing made the status quo look expensive rather than just familiar. “That’s where the biggest challenge and opportunity exists in the market today is in removing what is really just a lot of wiring up and integration of these technologies.” When buyers see the time they’re already spending as the problem, the case for change makes itself.
Use Familiar Language to Name What You Sell
When Alation needed to explain what it sold to executive buyers, technical precision was a liability. Satyen described the problem with the previous generation of terminology directly: “you would never go up to a CEO and be like, hey, you need a metadata management tool.” The word that replaced it was catalog, chosen because it translated immediately. The logic Satyen used to defend that choice was simple: “hey, you have a lot of data, you need a catalog for it. And in the same way that the iPhone is so much more than a phone, I think we really wanted to deconfuse people and call it something simpler than it actually was.” A buyer who understands what you sell in the first sentence is a buyer who can move forward. Familiar language opens doors that technically accurate language keeps closed.
Adapt Your Messaging to Business Buyers as You Move Upmarket
Collate’s founding team built their early traction by speaking directly to technical practitioners, a natural fit given their own backgrounds. Suresh acknowledged the limitation that created as the company grew: “Both the founders and the founding team are made of technical people who have seen this problem, who had this problem, who solved this problem. We can speak the language of the technical folks and communicate with them and connect with them.” Reaching the next tier of buyers required a different kind of communication. “As we grow, we also need to talk to the business leaders, communicate the problems at the business level. The business impact it creates and the problem it solves.” Suresh looked for a CMO who had already done that work: “Having done that and knowing this field and having a message to the business leaders is very important.” Technical founders who can only sell to technical buyers will hit a ceiling the moment a business leader controls the budget.