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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
Actionable
Takeaways
Leverage Community Support:
Building a strong, engaged community can provide invaluable feedback and initial traction, easing the transition to a paid model.
Validate with Early Customers:
Secure early customers by addressing their pain points directly, which can validate your product and attract investor interest.
Prioritize Context in Data:
Adding context to raw data can transform it into actionable insights, significantly increasing its value for end-users.
Plan for Hybrid IT Environments:
As more organizations adopt hybrid IT setups, ensure your solution is versatile enough to handle both cloud and on-premises environments seamlessly.
Invest in a Strong Marketing Team:
Hiring experienced marketing leaders who can hit the ground running with a clear plan is crucial for scaling your marketing efforts effectively.
Conversation
Highlights
From Security Tool to Observability Platform: How Elastiflow Found Product-Market Fit
Most network visibility companies fail quietly, trapped between expensive enterprise solutions and the gravitational pull of open-source alternatives. Elastiflow’s journey reveals why the middle ground isn’t where founders think it is.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Robert Cowart, CEO and Co-Founder of Elastiflow, shared how his company navigated multiple pivots before finding their footing in cloud-native observability. The path wasn’t straightforward, and the lessons came from painful market realities rather than strategic foresight.
The Genesis Problem
Elastiflow emerged from a specific technical frustration. Robert was working on network security problems when he identified a gap: “I was working in network security at the time and I realized that there was a need for better network visibility and a lot of the tools that were out there were very expensive, proprietary, difficult to deploy and manage.”
The initial vision seemed clear—build something more accessible than the legacy players. But accessibility is a loaded term in enterprise software, and Robert’s team would spend years discovering what it actually meant for their market.
Their first product attempt targeted the security space with network detection and response capabilities. The timing seemed right. Security budgets were expanding, and network visibility was a recognized pain point. But product-market fit proved elusive. “We realized that we were probably a little bit early to that market,” Robert explained. “There was a lot of competing solutions already that were taking the oxygen out of the room.”
The False Start with Open Source
Like many technical founders, Robert initially believed open source would be the wedge. The logic was sound: give away the core technology, build a community, then monetize through enterprise features or support. Elastiflow released their network flow collector as open source and watched it gain traction.
“We had released a network flow collector as an open source project that was based on Elastic and Logstash and got a fair amount of traction with that,” Robert noted. The downloads accumulated. The GitHub stars multiplied. But revenue didn’t follow.
This is where many open-source companies stall out—mistaking usage for demand, community for customers. Robert’s team hit this wall hard. “One of the challenges with that is that it doesn’t necessarily build a business on its own and you need to figure out a way to monetize.”
The pivot away from pure open source wasn’t philosophical—it was survival. They needed to build something people would pay for, not just use.
The Cloud-Native Breakthrough
The real inflection point came from watching where the market was actually moving. While Elastiflow had been building for traditional enterprise networks, the infrastructure landscape was transforming underneath them. Cloud-native architectures weren’t coming—they had arrived.
“What we saw was there’s a massive shift going on from traditional VM based and appliance based workloads to cloud native container and Kubernetes based workloads,” Robert observed. This wasn’t about jumping on a trend. It was about recognizing that their original thesis—better network visibility—mattered even more in ephemeral, distributed environments.
The technical pivot was substantial. As Robert described: “We realized that to really effectively do observability for those types of environments, we need to build a solution that is designed from the ground up to actually run in those environments, be deployed with the same CICD, GitOps type automation tools that devops teams are used to using.”
This meant rebuilding. Not iterating on the existing stack, but fundamentally rearchitecting for a different deployment model. For a bootstrapped company, this decision carried existential risk.
The Product Positioning Evolution
Perhaps the most instructive part of Elastiflow’s journey is how their positioning evolved—not through clever marketing, but through understanding what customers actually needed to hear.
Early on, they led with network visibility. Technically accurate, but it boxed them into a category dominated by expensive incumbents. “We’ve also expanded our messaging to talk about cloud native network observability and network detection and response,” Robert explained. “That helps us from a marketing standpoint to better align with the problems that people are trying to solve.”
The shift to “observability” wasn’t semantic. It repositioned them from a point solution competing with established players to a cloud-native platform aligned with how modern teams actually work. The difference mattered in sales conversations.
Robert noted the practical impact: “There’s a massive problem of lack of visibility in containerized and Kubernetes environments. eBPF is the latest, coolest buzzword that everybody wants to talk about. So being able to talk about how we use eBPF to provide that visibility definitely helps capture mindshare when we’re talking to prospects.”
The Sales Motion Reality
For technical founders, the hardest lessons often come from sales. Building a great product doesn’t automatically create a repeatable sales motion, and Elastiflow learned this through iteration.
Their initial approach was bottoms-up, targeting individual practitioners who understood the technical problem. “We have a product led growth motion where people can download and try our community edition free of charge,” Robert shared. This generated pipeline, but converting free users to paid enterprise customers required different muscles.
The enterprise motion meant longer cycles and different buyers. “We’re primarily focused on direct selling. So we have an outbound motion. We also have a good amount of inbound that we get through our website, through people that are downloading and trying our community edition,” Robert explained.
What’s notable is the pragmatism—they didn’t abandon the bottoms-up motion when adding enterprise sales. They layered approaches based on deal size and customer segment. Small deals could flow through self-service. Enterprise required white-glove treatment.
The Market Timing Question
One of the most honest moments in the conversation came when Robert reflected on their early security positioning: “We realized that we were probably a little bit early to that market.”
Being early is the polite way founders describe being wrong. But Robert’s broader point matters: even good products fail if the market isn’t ready. The security space had established players with momentum. Breaking through required either massive funding or a different approach.
The cloud-native shift gave them the different approach—a market where incumbents were flatfooted and customers needed new solutions. “The old way of doing things doesn’t work in these new environments,” Robert noted. Sometimes the best competitive advantage is building for where the market is going while incumbents serve where it’s been.
Building for the Long Game
What emerges from Elastiflow’s story isn’t a blueprint but a pattern: markets reveal themselves slowly, and success comes from reading signals correctly. Robert and his team tried multiple approaches—security, open source, traditional visibility—before finding the cloud-native observability angle that resonated.
The lesson isn’t that pivoting works. It’s that survival requires interpreting market feedback faster than you burn resources. Elastiflow’s evolution from a network security tool to a cloud-native observability platform wasn’t planned from day one. It emerged from paying attention to what customers actually needed versus what the founders initially built.
For technical founders navigating similar journeys, Robert’s experience offers a reminder: the product you start with rarely looks like the product that scales. The question is whether you can read the market signals clearly enough—and move quickly enough—to bridge that gap before running out of runway.
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