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From Consulting Tool to Cloud Governance Platform: Rencore’s Unconventional Path to Success

Most startup origin stories follow a familiar template: founders identify a market need, raise capital, build a product, and scale rapidly. But what about the companies that find success by taking the road less traveled?

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Matt Einig, CEO and Founder of Rencore, shared how his company evolved from a bootstrapped consulting side project to a venture-backed cloud governance platform with $15 million in funding—all while maintaining the operational discipline that helped them weather economic downturns when many venture-backed startups faltered.

The Accidental Product: Starting Without a Grand Vision

Unlike founders who set out to disrupt industries, Einig and his co-founder weren’t initially looking to build a product company at all.

“My cofounder and I were in the consulting business, did IT consulting, business consulting and so on. We had a need ourselves,” Matt explains. They were implementing intranets on Microsoft technology for enterprise clients and built a static code analysis tool to improve their own project quality.

Then something unexpected happened: “Suddenly customers came to us and asked us, ‘Hey, can we buy this?’ And we figured, ‘Hey, why not? Let’s make a product out of it and see what happens.'”

This modest beginning—”not really the plan,” as Matt puts it—evolved into a surprisingly successful bootstrapped business. “We were surprisingly successful. If I think back to it now, we closed quite significant large enterprise customers all over the world.”

Embracing the Pivot: When Your Market Disappears

For seven years, Rencore grew organically, eventually reaching nearly 500 enterprise customers worldwide. Then they hit a wall: the proprietary Microsoft technology they built their product around was being replaced by standard web technology.

“We realized, okay, this is not going anywhere we want to go. This is a stagnating business, this is not going to grow,” Matt recalls.

Rather than trying to squeeze more life from a dying market, Rencore made a critical decision: leverage their extensive customer relationships to find their next opportunity.

“We basically interviewed almost over 300 customers over the course of two years and basically asked them, ‘Okay, now you move to the cloud, tell us where it hurts.’ And they kept telling us.”

These conversations revealed a much larger opportunity in cloud governance—helping organizations manage the security, costs, and lifecycle of their rapidly proliferating cloud resources.

Building for Market Expansion: The Architecture Decision That Changed Everything

When developing their new cloud governance platform, Rencore made an architectural decision that would prove invaluable: building a technology-agnostic platform rather than a Microsoft-specific solution.

“That choice at the time to build something generic instead of building something very specific actually proved to be an extremely good decision,” Matt emphasizes. “It allows us now to very quickly adapt to changes in the market and build something new by just integrating a new technology and then everything else automatically falls into place.”

This architectural flexibility became a significant competitive advantage. As Matt explains, “Whatever you build on top, your governance policies, your automations, your reports, your dashboards, your access reviews and so on… all of that is now for us, just content on our platform.”

The result? “That has a massive positive impact on the speed how we can develop and how we can also remain competitive to other market players.”

The Pandemic Accelerator: When Market Timing Meets Preparation

Just as Rencore was launching their new cloud governance platform, the pandemic hit—creating what Matt calls “a massive accelerator for organizations to go to the cloud.”

With remote work suddenly becoming the norm, enterprises needed to find ways for distributed teams to collaborate effectively. This created an enormous opportunity for Rencore’s governance solution.

“When we launched our product pretty much exactly four years ago, we had initial traction, grew relatively quickly, and then realized, okay, in order to take advantage of that momentum, we cannot do that out of our own cash flow anymore.”

The Venture Decision: Preserving Bootstrap Discipline

After eight years of bootstrapped growth, Rencore finally decided to raise venture capital. But unlike many founders who view venture funding as a license to spend aggressively, Matt maintained the disciplined approach that had served them well as a bootstrapped company.

“I was very much into the bootstrap mode, I have to say. Really keeping the money together, not living too wild and too big and rather be careful,” he explains. “When we switched to venture backed mode, we didn’t change our attitude that much… we tried to stay realistic, not going too wild with what we’re doing and not risking too much.”

This balanced approach proved crucial when economic conditions deteriorated. “Last two years maybe when economy went down, when wars broke out, energy crisis and all these kind of things… we were not at such a risk that we suddenly run out of money because we are spending significantly more than we earn, but rather could take the long game there.”

Building Long-Term Credibility: The Content Consistency Strategy

Before Rencore could effectively market their product, Matt had already spent years establishing credibility in the Microsoft ecosystem—a decision that paid off enormously when they needed to build awareness for their new platform.

“I was extremely active in that Microsoft ecosystem community and was giving speeches at conferences, keynotes, technical presentations and user groups all over the world quite heavily, actually about 30, 40 events per year,” Matt recalls.

This consistent visibility earned him Microsoft’s MVP award for ten consecutive years, building both personal and company credibility. “Throughout the last 12 years, we always wrote a lot of content and have also a lot of credibility in that area.”

Rather than chasing viral moments, Matt emphasizes that thought leadership requires sustained effort: “It’s eventually only all about consistency. You just need to keep on doing it and then step by step, you grow your visibility and your amount of followers and then people start interacting with you.”

Strategic Analyst Relationships: Beyond the Quadrant

Many founders view analyst firms like Gartner as simply a means to get placed in a Magic Quadrant, but Matt takes a more nuanced approach to these relationships.

“In order to really get something out of a collaboration with Gartner or Forrester or whoever else you want to work with, you really have to take it serious that you invest time in it,” he explains.

Matt also recognizes that analyst validation requires market context: “You cannot be alone on the market. So there needs to be some kind of market or a market that is forming… otherwise, Gartner analysts will not actually invest much time in that topic.”

Beyond validation, Matt uses analysts as strategic advisors, consulting with them on “our own go-to-market strategy… our positioning on the market… pricing and packaging, or building up your sales organization.”

The Long Game: Building a Technology-Agnostic Platform

Looking ahead, Rencore has ambitious plans to expand beyond Microsoft’s ecosystem to address cloud governance broadly.

“The long term vision, what we want to be, is actually a cloud governance platform. So a single tool that helps organization, in particular large enterprises, to govern all their cloud services that they are using in the organization.”

What started as a consulting side project has evolved into a platform with enormous growth potential—all because Matt and his team were willing to listen to customer pain points, pivot when necessary, and maintain operational discipline even after raising venture capital.

Matt’s journey proves there’s no one-size-fits-all path to startup success. Sometimes the most valuable lessons come from founders who find their own way.