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How Huntress Built a $45M to $500M Cybersecurity Marketing Engine by Making Customers the Hero

Most cybersecurity companies sound exactly the same. They lead with AI-powered technology, chest-pound about their superior detection capabilities, and position themselves as the hero saving businesses from cyber threats. Jason Marshall, Chief Marketing & Growth Officer at Huntress, took the opposite approach—and it’s driving 70% year-over-year growth.

In a recent episode of Unicorn Marketers, Jason shared how Huntress has tripled in size over two years by flipping the traditional cybersecurity marketing playbook entirely. Instead of making technology the star, they made customers the protagonist of every story.

The Foundation: Word-of-Mouth Meets Digital Scale

When Jason joined Huntress two years ago, the company had already built something remarkable: genuine product-market fit in the SMB cybersecurity space. “The business had been initially like primarily word of mouth,” Jason explains. “And then Kyle and Chris, the co founders, really kind of figured out the events strategy. Right. Of field events and going out and you know, being with the community and learning from the community.”

The founders had cracked the code on educational marketing through physical and virtual events, but they lacked the digital infrastructure to scale beyond $45 million in revenue. “What hadn’t yet been developed was really any digital presence,” Jason notes. “Because, you know, the founders weren’t marketers and they didn’t have a, you know, really substantial marketing function.”

After raising their Series C, Huntress brought Jason in to build the marketing engine that could take them from $45 million to $500 million. His background in direct marketing, starting with catalog businesses in the mid-90s, gave him a metrics-obsessed foundation perfect for scaling digital channels.

The Customer-Hero Philosophy

The core insight driving Huntress’s success comes from a fundamental shift in narrative positioning. While competitors focus on their own technological superiority, Huntress puts customers at the center of every story.

“We really make the customer like the hero of the story,” Jason explains. “So in cybersecurity especially, there is a ton of chess pounding around. We have the best AI powered tech, you know, we have the coolest technology. We’re the best at this, we’re the best at that. And the industry is very much focused on itself. Right. And how great we are for doing this. And Huntress, you know, has completely flipped the script. Like we put the customer at the center of the story. They’re the hero of this journey and we’re just here to kind of support them.”

This customer-first approach extends beyond marketing messaging into product development and business model decisions. Rather than building complex, expensive solutions for enterprise budgets, Huntress deliberately focused on making cybersecurity accessible to businesses up to 2,000 employees.

The SMB Strategy: Porsche vs. Formula 1

One of Huntress’s most contrarian decisions has been staying focused on the SMB market while competitors chase enterprise deals. Jason uses a car analogy to explain their positioning: “There are some great companies out there that service the people that have Formula one car budgets, right? And that’s what we always, you know, joke around internally. It’s like, you know, if you can afford a Formula one car and you can afford to have, you know, Lando Norris or Max Verstappen driving your car and you can afford to have an entire team, you know, managing the car, you know, maintenance on the car, go for it, right?”

Huntress built something different. “We built a Lamborghini or Porsche, you know, to continue the analogy. And it’s still fast enough to wreck hackers. But when something goes wrong, you can take your Porsche into an Audi dealership and get it fixed and get back on the road rather than needing to, you know, have an entire pit crew surrounding you.”

This positioning strategy creates clear differentiation in a crowded market while serving an underserved segment. “Our ICP goes up to businesses with about 2,000 employees,” Jason notes. “So, you know, we’ll service anybody from, you know, the small startup that’s just getting going up to about 2,000 employees.”

The Go Giver Content Strategy

Huntress’s content strategy operates on the principle from the book “The Go Giver”—give more than you take. This translates to an 80% education, 20% product marketing split that differentiates them from typical cybersecurity marketing.

“You know what a lot of our business is actually based on? There’s a book that your audience is probably familiar with called the Go Giver, right? And it’s basically the core premise of the book is to give more than you take, right, or give more than you ask for. And that is what we are all about,” Jason explains.

“You can see it on our social presence. You can also see it like on Reddit, like we try to be very involved in the community and go back and try and teach people about cybersecurity, about how to stay safe. So, you know, if you go, you follow Huntress on LinkedIn or look us up, you’ll see a lot of educational content and it is almost all educational content that we put out there where most people are, come to my webinar, you know, book a demo, buy, buy, buy.”

This educational approach serves a larger mission beyond just customer acquisition. “We strongly believe that if we can help people get a little bit smarter, a little bit safer, you know, teach our, you know, our customers how to be, you know, the hero inside of their own organization that will, you know, breed loyalty to the business and will also just make them better stewards of their company.”

The Reddit Lesson: Value First, Always

One of Jason’s most instructive marketing lessons came from their initial failure on Reddit, followed by a successful pivot that demonstrates the power of leading with value.

“We started out saying, you know what, let’s just run ads, right? Let’s run the same type of ads we have on LinkedIn and see what happens, right? Where it’s like, hey, we just launched XYZ product, come check it out. It’s super cool kind of thing. And ROI was terrible. Nobody was clicking on the ads, nobody was interacting with the ads.”

The team stepped back and returned to their educational roots. “Our ads now on Reddit are actually generally things like redacted screenshots where we are showing, this is how a threat actor came in and tried to attack this business. This is how we noticed it, this is how we found it, this is how we remediated it. If you’d like to learn how to do this yourself, click this link, sign up. We’ve got webinars, no obligation, come get free training from us.”

The results were dramatic. “We completely pivoted it. Rather than again putting us at the center of the story and talking about how cool we are to giving back to the community and saying, you know what, let us teach you how to do some of this stuff. And the results have been unbelievable, overwhelming because we kind of stayed true to our core of who we are.”

Building Culture at Scale

Managing rapid growth while maintaining company culture presents unique challenges, especially in a remote environment. Jason’s approach centers on constant reinforcement of core principles.

“That’s a lot of the DNA of the company,” he acknowledges about the educational approach. “But I can tell you that if you are not a careful steward of that, if it does exist, it will vanish, right? I mean, we are right now, at any point in time, over the course of the last, let’s call it five years, about half of the company is new every year, right? Because we are growing so fast in terms of people in the business.”

“So it is a constant refrain that we need to just keep beating that drum, that we are building this business through education and community, right? That is how we do it. That is one of the things that makes Huntress unique.”

Remote Team Management at Scale

Jason manages a 45-person remote marketing team using structured communication and over-communication of clarity. His approach includes weekly business reviews that serve multiple purposes: alignment, mentorship, and culture reinforcement.

“I do weekly business reviews. So we literally, I take my entire team, literally the entire marketing team for an hour and a half once a week and we spend an hour and a half reviewing the business, right? Marketing as a section, performance marketing as a section, web as a section. And we go through and we say, okay, web team, where are we at against the initiatives? What blockers? Do you have any challenges?”

This approach helps with knowledge transfer and culture building. “That has allowed us to take a lot of young people and mentor them and let them listen and learn about how people think about the business. It teaches people about the business that might be coming in from the outside. It reinforces culture and it reinforces clarity.”

The Results: Customer Love and Growth

The customer-first approach has created something rare in B2B technology: genuine customer advocacy. “There are a lot of people who have unscrupulous business practices where they will like be channel first in the beginning and then try to cut out the channel as they grow. We have never done that, right? Huntrust is a channel first company. We always have been a channel first company. We always will be a channel first company.”

This commitment to partners and customers shows in their results. “We support our partners deeply and they trust us and we trust them and we take care of each other. And it’s really been the kind of the foundation of this business. Right. Education, community and our partnerships.”

The proof appears in customer testimonials and organic advocacy. “Customer love has made all of the difference in the world. Right. I’ve sold some products over the course of my 30 year career that I’ve been kind of okay product market fit, or quite frankly, just kind of an okay product where you have to try and apply a hell of a lot of marketing on top to move the growth numbers. And I can tell you it’s a whole hell of a lot easier when you have an army of customers behind you who are helping to spread the word and helping us grow the business.”

Jason’s final piece of advice reflects this customer-centric philosophy: “If you truly take care of your customers, they’ll take care of you. And if they don’t take care of you, they probably weren’t the type of customer you wanted anyway.”

Huntress proves that in an industry obsessed with technology superiority, making customers the hero of the story isn’t just good marketing—it’s a sustainable competitive advantage that drives both growth and genuine market differentiation.