From Microsoft to Market Leader: Inside Hyperproof’s Strategy for Creating a New Category in Enterprise Compliance

Category creation is often painted as a dramatic declaration—plant your flag, claim your territory, and wait for the market to follow. But Hyperproof’s journey tells a different story. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, CEO Craig Unger revealed how they’re pioneering the ‘compliance operations’ category through strategic evolution rather than revolution.

The Genesis: Personal Pain Points The seeds of category creation were planted during Craig’s time at Microsoft, managing authentication systems that served “100 million unique users a month.” During an FTC audit, he faced a stark reality: “I had to do these really very deep audits, very little tooling help or infrastructure and of course I was really just a product person at that time. I didn’t know anything about compliance and so it was a very scary time.”

Identifying the Category Gap Rather than building another GRC tool, Craig saw an opportunity to fundamentally reshape how organizations approach compliance. “Every workload at some point when it becomes important, serious and very high value will evolve out of a spreadsheet,” he notes. This evolution was accelerated by market shifts: “One of the reasons I actually started the company was the Facebook Cambridge analytics, that whole debacle that happened back in 2018. And I’m like, look, the more tech that comes out, the more threat there is to our personal information, security, et cetera. This is just going to spiral.”

Strategic Category Positioning Hyperproof took a measured approach to category creation. As Craig explains, “I think our goal is to create a new category, a different way of thinking about it. At the end of the day, I think people will end up looking at it as an evolution of what previously before was GRC.” This strategic positioning allowed them to push innovation while maintaining market relevance.

Building Category Awareness Instead of relying on traditional analyst relationships, Hyperproof focused on targeted market education. Craig drew parallels to security’s evolution: “Compliance is following the historical track of security where it started. Also as a small group of people, they may do penetration tests and send reports to the board and then you think your organization is secure.”

They invested in relationships with independent analysts who could help shape the narrative: “When you’re a smaller company, it’s more beneficial to build relationships with smaller analysts, folks who work individually, they tend to have more unique viewpoints and they can kind of bring you into more unique situations.”

Redefining Trust in Technology At the heart of their category creation strategy was a radical proposition about trust. “The compliance and security world hasn’t really adjusted to that. In other words, they’re still laboring under the belief that in order to do well in the market, everybody that they serve needs to be convinced that they’re perfect and they don’t make mistakes.”

Instead, Hyperproof advocated for transparency and continuous compliance, even when things go wrong. The company’s tagline—”bringing trust to life”—reflects this broader mission to transform how organizations build and maintain stakeholder trust.

Expanding the Category Vision Looking ahead, Craig sees the category encompassing more than just compliance. “We have additional software modules in the area of risk, third party risk management, but there’s other pieces around policy, different kinds of reporting that we want to build and really just other pieces that help organizations be more transparent about the trust that they have.”

For B2B founders contemplating category creation, Hyperproof’s journey offers valuable lessons. Success isn’t about making the loudest declaration—it’s about understanding market evolution, building strategic narratives, and having the patience to let the category emerge organically. Sometimes the most enduring categories are built through evolution rather than revolution.