Excel to Enterprise: Onyxia’s Strategy for Turning Manual Pain Points into Product Opportunities

When a Fortune 500 CISO shows you their Excel sheet for managing security operations, you’ve stumbled upon either a massive oversight or a massive opportunity. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Onyxia founder Sivan Tehila revealed how she discovered and validated one of enterprise security’s most pervasive yet overlooked problems.

Finding the Hidden Pain Point

The journey began with a startling pattern. “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 explains. This wasn’t just about outdated tools – it represented a fundamental gap in how enterprises managed their security programs.

Validating the Problem

Rather than immediately building a solution, Sivan dug deeper into why this manual approach persisted. She discovered that “companies bring external consultants to map their environment, and then they leave them with a nice report with all the recommendations, but no one really knows what’s relevant and what to do, and it’s really hard to track that.”

Three Core Problems to Solve

Through these conversations, Sivan identified three critical challenges: “First, the ability to make decisions based on reliable data. We’re collecting data from different resources in the company to help security leaders understand their security posture, basically. And on top of that, we’re also helping them manage projects end to end, optimize ROI, and communicate their security programming to business outcomes.”

Targeting the Right Customer Segment

Instead of trying to serve everyone, Onyxia made a strategic decision to focus on more mature organizations. “We’re focusing on mid sized companies and enterprises,” Sivan notes. “Companies that are less mature usually don’t have enough security products, so we can’t give them the value they need.”

Leveraging Domain Experience

Sivan’s background as a CISO provided crucial insights into solution design. “I was very frustrated as a CISO that I need to handle a lot of manual work around measuring security programs and security performance and automate things,” she shares. This firsthand experience helped shape Onyxia’s approach to automation and usability.

Building for Mobile-First Enterprise

In a departure from traditional enterprise software design, Onyxia prioritized mobile access. “One unique thing that we did, and we don’t often see that in security products, is that we built everything not only as a web app, but as a mobile app,” Sivan explains. This decision reflected a deeper understanding of how modern security leaders work.

Validating Through Regulatory Changes

The emergence of new SEC regulations provided additional validation. As Sivan notes, “Companies need to disclose their security programs and strategies, and to have at least one board member with cybersecurity expertise.” This regulatory pressure made the need for better security program management even more acute.

Looking Ahead

The vision extends beyond just replacing Excel sheets. “My dream was to be able to wake up in the morning, like I’m asking Alexa ‘how’s the weather today?’ To be able to go to one place and ask ‘what are the top three things I should be afraid of today?'” This vision of seamless security management demonstrates how Onyxia is thinking beyond just digitizing manual processes.

For B2B founders, Onyxia’s approach to problem identification and validation offers valuable lessons. Start by identifying manual processes that persist even in sophisticated organizations. Validate the problem through deep conversations with potential customers. Focus on customers who can derive immediate value from your solution. And perhaps most importantly, build for how modern enterprises actually work, not just how they’re supposed to work.

The most valuable enterprise opportunities often hide in plain sight, masked by the assumption that “this is just how things are done.” By challenging these assumptions and focusing on real user needs, founders can transform seemingly mundane pain points into significant product opportunities.