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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
Actionable
Takeaways
Adapt to market conditions:
When Inna saw the 2022 downturn affecting their initial target market of software unicorns, she pivoted to enterprise customers. This required starting with paid POCs and gradually working up to larger deals with major corporations.
Category creation requires patience:
Inna recognized from day one they were creating a new category. As she explained, "I was aware it's category creation... But for the sake of fundraising, I had to bring those parallels... so I was trying to bring these parallels to existing tools for investors to understand where we are."
Build for enterprise scale:
Inna shares, "For the offering that we provide to companies like the augmented data management and access, you really need to have small Swiss panel. So it's not enough to have just one fork or one component of the Swiss knife, you really have to have full offering which is minimal."
Take controversial positions:
Rather than making incremental improvements, Inna advocated for a completely different approach to data management. "I actually thought it's a benefit to have controversial opinions and to some extent differentiate product because this is how you make change," she explains.
Blend investor expertise:
"You really need to have a blend of investors with different appetite and different business acumen so it can serve you on hiring, on reach out on different aspects of investors value add," Inna advises about fundraising strategy.
Conversation
Highlights
How Illumex Turned Data Pipeline Chaos Into a $6M Business
Most data observability companies start by chasing a market opportunity. Illumex started because Ina Sella was tired of being woken up at 3am.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Ina Sella, CEO & Founder of Illumex, shared how her experience managing data infrastructure at Meta became the foundation for a company that’s raised over $6 million to solve one of enterprise data’s most persistent problems: knowing when something breaks before your customers do.
The Problem That Wouldn’t Go Away
Ina spent years at Meta working on data infrastructure, and the same scenario played out repeatedly. “I was building a lot of pipelines for business teams and data science teams,” Ina explains. “And very often I would get paged in the middle of the night because something broke in production and I need to go and fix it.”
The frustration wasn’t just about lost sleep. It was about the inefficiency of the entire process. Data teams were constantly firefighting, and business teams were making decisions based on stale or incorrect data without even knowing it. The existing monitoring tools weren’t built for the complexity of modern data stacks.
When Ina left Meta, she knew this was a problem worth solving. But she also knew that diving into data observability meant entering a crowded market. “There are already a lot of companies in the space,” she acknowledges. “But I felt like if I had this problem and I worked at one of the best companies in the world that built all of these technologies, I’m assuming that a lot of other data teams are also experiencing this.”
Building Different From Day One
Rather than trying to build a better version of existing data observability tools, Ina focused on what made data professionals’ lives genuinely difficult. The insight was simple but powerful: most tools told you something was wrong, but they didn’t tell you why or how to fix it.
“We started working on building our data observability solution that is more focused on helping data teams to troubleshoot and resolve issues as fast as possible,” Ina says. The platform needed to go beyond alerts and dashboards to actually accelerate resolution.
This meant building capabilities that existing players weren’t prioritizing. Illumex’s platform provides full column-level lineage, showing exactly how data flows through pipelines and where problems originate. More importantly, it offers actionable recommendations for fixes rather than just flagging that something’s broken.
The Founder-Led Sales Journey
Like many technical founders, Ina had to learn sales from scratch. The early days were humbling. “I remember I had my very first sales call ever and I sent to one of my advisors the recording and he was like, you asked like maybe one question during the entire call,” she recalls. “You just talked the entire time. You need to ask questions, you need to learn about them.”
That feedback became a turning point. Ina shifted her approach from pitching to learning, using early sales calls as customer discovery sessions. “Even now when I go to sales calls, I always try to learn something from the customer that I didn’t know before the call,” she explains.
The learning curve extended beyond individual calls to broader GTM strategy. Initially, Illumex tried a product-led growth motion, but quickly discovered it wasn’t the right fit. “We thought about doing like a free trial or freemium, but it didn’t really work,” Ina says. The problem was implementation complexity—getting value from the product required integration work that prospects weren’t willing to do without guidance.
The solution was a hybrid approach: a self-serve option with immediate sales team involvement. “What we ended up doing is keeping the ability to self-serve and sign up, but we will contact you right away,” Ina explains. This allowed Illumex to maintain a low-friction entry point while ensuring customers got the support needed for successful implementation.
Competing in a Crowded Market
One of the hardest parts of Illumex’s journey has been differentiation in a space with well-funded competitors. The company competes against players who’ve raised significantly more capital and have larger sales and marketing teams.
Ina’s approach has been to lean into what makes Illumex different rather than trying to outspend competitors. “We try to be extremely responsive,” she says. “We try to be very hands-on with our customers. I’m very involved myself. I join sales calls, I join customer calls.”
This founder-led, high-touch approach has become a competitive advantage, especially with mid-market and enterprise customers who value direct access to the team building the product. It’s also informed product development in ways that would be impossible with more separation between leadership and customers.
The Enterprise Evolution
As Illumex has grown, the customer profile has evolved dramatically. “In the beginning we had a lot of kind of like initial customers that were more like mid-market companies,” Ina notes. “Today a lot of our customers are enterprise.”
This shift required changes beyond just the product. Enterprise sales cycles are longer, involve more stakeholders, and demand different types of proof points. Illumex has had to build out case studies, invest in security certifications, and develop more sophisticated ROI frameworks.
But the fundamental value proposition hasn’t changed. Whether it’s a 50-person startup or a Fortune 500 company, data teams are still getting paged at 3am, still spending too much time firefighting, and still struggling to prevent issues before they impact the business.
What’s Next
For Ina, the vision extends beyond just monitoring and alerting. “I want it to be the place where people go when they want to understand anything about their data,” she says. That means evolving from a troubleshooting tool into a comprehensive data intelligence platform.
The roadmap includes deeper AI capabilities, more predictive analytics, and broader coverage across the data stack. But the core mission remains the same: help data teams spend less time fixing problems and more time delivering value.
The lesson from Illumex’s journey is straightforward: the best category plays don’t always come from finding white space. Sometimes they come from experiencing a problem firsthand, understanding it deeply, and building something that solves it better than anyone else. Even if that means competing in a crowded market and learning to sell along the way.
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