“Cybersecurity for the 99%.”

That’s how Kyle Hanslovan, CEO of Huntress, distills his company’s category in just four words. But creating this category was anything but simple.

When Huntress started, the conventional wisdom was clear: chase enterprise clients, that’s where the money is. Kyle recalls, “When I came out to the Beltway or out of the Beltway and ended, like, the Bay Area, every single meeting was, I like the approach. Let me show you how to take it to enterprise.”

But Huntress saw something others missed: a vast, underserved market of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) desperate for accessible cybersecurity solutions.

The Power of Conviction

For five long years, investors didn’t believe in Huntress’s go-to-market strategy. Kyle remembers, “From the Angels to the series A all the way, believe it or not, into series B was the first time I got conviction for SMB.”

Lesser founders might have pivoted. Huntress didn’t. Why? Data-backed conviction.

“I had the people telling me the stories, people showing. I had the data that I was building from the bottom up on saying, look, this is how big the total addressable market is. That kept me going,” Kyle explains.

Redefining the Channel

Huntress’s category creation wasn’t just about who they served, but how they reached them. Instead of targeting SMBs directly, they focused on managed service providers (MSPs).

“We’ve got about 4000 of those. And they bring us to about 110,000 of those SMBs,” Kyle shares.

This approach allowed Huntress to scale rapidly without an enormous sales team. But it required deep market understanding. Kyle’s solution? “I ended up pitching my first handful of customers and was like, I will work for free one day a week in your office to learn more about MSPs. And I did that for probably the first two and a half years just to learn.”

The TCO Advantage

As the SMB cybersecurity market heated up, Huntress maintained its edge through an often-overlooked metric: total cost of ownership (TCO).

Kyle breaks it down: “Even though my product isn’t the cheapest, if you combine the cost of acquisition plus the cost of the operations or humans to manage it, plus that opportunity that you could be doing other things and those three things into TCO or total cost ownership. I am the lowest total cost of ownership and we just disproportionately win our deals.”

This focus on TCO rather than just upfront cost became a key differentiator in Huntress’s category.

The AI Question

As AI reshapes the cybersecurity landscape, Huntress is evolving its category definition. But they’re not jumping on the AI hype train blindly.

Kyle sees AI as a tool for augmentation rather than replacement: “We found very few cases where AI truly replaces, but many cases where it augments.”

This nuanced approach to AI integration is shaping the next phase of Huntress’s category evolution.

Lessons for Category Creators

• Embrace the unsexy: The biggest opportunities often lie where others aren’t looking.
• Data-backed conviction is key: When everyone tells you you’re wrong, your data should tell you you’re right.
• Redefine your go-to-market: Sometimes, the best way to reach your end customer is through an unexpected channel.
• Look beyond price: Focusing on total cost of ownership can set you apart in a crowded market.
• Evolve thoughtfully: As new technologies emerge, integrate them in ways that truly serve your category.

Huntress’s journey shows that category creation isn’t just about identifying a new market—it’s about having the conviction to serve that market in the face of skepticism, the creativity to reach it in novel ways, and the flexibility to evolve as the landscape changes.

As Kyle looks to the future, his ambitions for the category are clear: “You’re protecting 300 or 400,000 of us SMBs. How do you protect the 34 million that are in the US alone, let alone the hundreds of millions across the globe?”

In the end, Huntress’s category creation story is a reminder that sometimes, the best way to win is to play a different game entirely.