Openpath’s Geographic Concentration Strategy: Why Tech Hubs First Wins

Openpath’s Geographic Concentration Strategy: Why Tech Hubs First Wins

Every startup founder faces the same tempting delusion: if we just cast a wider net, we’ll catch more customers. Launch nationally. Sell to everyone. Maximize our addressable market from day one. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Scott Dorey, Co-Founder of Openpath, revealed why this thinking kills startups—and how ruthless geographic focus created the momentum that made national expansion not just possible, but inevitable.

The Counterintuitive Choice to Start Small

Openpath was building cloud-native access control for a massive market. Buildings everywhere needed better security systems. The logical move seemed obvious: sell everywhere, to everyone. Scott and his team chose the opposite path.

“We started off very much in the tech world, very much in San Francisco, New York, you know, the tech hubs,” Scott explains. Not a regional strategy with plans to expand. Not testing multiple markets simultaneously. A deliberate, exclusive focus on two specific geographies with specific customer psychographics.

This wasn’t about limited resources forcing narrow focus—it was a strategic choice about where concentration would create compounding advantages. Tech hubs offered something that couldn’t be replicated by spreading thin across the country: density of ideal early adopters who would actually understand and value what Openpath was building.

Why Tech Companies Made Perfect Early Adopters

The insight behind Openpath’s geographic strategy was understanding who would buy first and why. Tech companies in San Francisco and New York weren’t just convenient—they were structurally predisposed to value what Openpath offered.

These companies already lived in a cloud-native, mobile-first world. Their entire operations ran on SaaS applications. Their employees expected consumer-grade experiences from enterprise software. When Openpath positioned cloud-native access control with mobile-first design, tech companies didn’t need education about why this mattered. They already believed it.

This psychographic alignment accelerated everything. Sales cycles shortened because buyers didn’t need convincing about the category. Implementation moved faster because IT teams understood cloud architecture. Feedback loops tightened because customers could articulate exactly what needed improvement using the same technical vocabulary.

Geographic Density Creates Word-of-Mouth Velocity

The strategic power of concentration reveals itself in how customers talk to each other. In dispersed markets, word-of-mouth moves slowly. A successful implementation in Austin might never reach a prospect in Seattle. But in concentrated markets, word-of-mouth moves at network speed.

San Francisco and New York tech scenes operate like small towns despite their size. Founders know founders. CTOs talk to CTOs. Office managers compare notes. When one company implements Openpath successfully, their peers hear about it immediately—at conferences, in Slack channels, over coffee.

This density transformed customer acquisition economics. Openpath didn’t need massive marketing budgets to reach prospects. They needed successful implementations that created local champions. Each happy customer became a reference that unlocked multiple new opportunities within the same geographic and psychographic cluster.

Building Brand as Innovation Signal

In tech hubs, the products you use signal your values. Using Openpath wasn’t just about better access control—it was about being the kind of company that valued innovation, modern technology, and user experience. The product became identity.

This dynamic only works in concentrated markets where companies pay attention to what their peers are doing. A startup in San Francisco choosing Openpath over a legacy system made a statement about their culture. That signaling value created its own demand, as other companies wanted to project the same innovation-forward identity.

Geographic concentration allowed Openpath to become part of the tech hub zeitgeist. They weren’t just another vendor—they were the modern choice, the innovative choice, the choice that signaled you weren’t stuck in the past. This brand positioning would have been impossible if they’d diluted their presence across dozens of cities.

How Concentration Enabled Product Iteration

The hidden advantage of geographic focus was product development velocity. With customers concentrated in two cities, Scott’s team could visit sites, observe actual usage, and gather feedback without constant travel. This proximity accelerated learning cycles in ways that distributed customers never could.

When something didn’t work, they knew quickly. When a feature resonated, they could dig into why with in-person conversations. The tight feedback loops between product team and customers meant Openpath could iterate faster than competitors serving dispersed markets.

This wasn’t just convenient—it was a sustainable competitive advantage. Better product feedback led to better product decisions, which led to happier customers, which led to stronger word-of-mouth, which led to more customers in the same concentrated market. The flywheel spun faster because geography kept it tight.

The Expansion Playbook Geographic Focus Enabled

Concentration wasn’t the end strategy—it was the foundation for expansion. Scott describes how the market evolved: “We definitely started narrow and now we’re expanding into various verticals.” The narrow start made broad expansion possible by creating assets that only concentration could build.

Those assets included battle-tested product-market fit, comprehensive case studies from recognizable companies, refined messaging that worked, operational playbooks for implementation, and proof points that resonated beyond the initial market. None of these assets could have been built as effectively with resources spread thin.

When Openpath expanded beyond tech hubs, they brought overwhelming proof. They weren’t asking prospects to bet on an unproven solution—they were offering a product that the most innovation-forward companies in the world already trusted. That credibility, built through concentration, opened doors everywhere else.

The Network Effects of Starting Narrow

Perhaps the most powerful advantage of Openpath’s geographic strategy was how it created self-reinforcing network effects. Scott describes the internal expansion pattern: “We can get into one building and then spread out virally throughout that organization to other buildings.”

This viral expansion worked particularly well in tech hubs where companies often had multiple offices in the same metro area or across the country. A successful implementation in a San Francisco headquarters would naturally expand to New York offices, then to satellite locations elsewhere. The geographic concentration at the start seeded nationwide expansion through account growth.

The lesson: concentrated customer acquisition doesn’t limit growth—it accelerates it by creating momentum that carries beyond the initial geography. One customer in a concentrated market often has operations in other markets, turning geographic focus into geographic distribution through natural expansion.

When to Abandon Concentration

The question isn’t whether to start concentrated—it’s when to expand. Scott’s approach shows the trigger points: product-market fit proven with enthusiastic customers, repeatable sales and implementation processes established, case studies and proof points that work outside the initial market, operational capacity to support distributed customers, and enough momentum that expansion feels inevitable rather than risky.

Openpath expanded when concentration had built the foundation to succeed everywhere else. Not before they’d extracted all the advantages concentration offered. Not because they wanted broader distribution for its own sake. When the concentrated market had taught them everything needed to win nationally.

The Mistake Most Founders Make

The opposite approach—launching nationally from day one—seems aggressive but actually slows growth. Resources spread thin across markets prevent depth in any single market. No word-of-mouth velocity develops. Brand building becomes impossible. Product feedback stays shallow. Every advantage concentration creates gets sacrificed for illusory market coverage.

Scott’s insight was recognizing that going narrow first would get them broader faster than starting broad ever could. The path to national presence ran through geographic concentration, not around it. Tech hubs first wasn’t limiting—it was the strategy that made everything else possible.