The Onyxia Guide to Enterprise Product-Market Fit: When Your Customers Still Use Excel
When Fortune 500 CISOs are running billion-dollar security programs through Excel sheets, you’ve found either a massive market failure or a massive opportunity. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Onyxia founder Sivan Tehila revealed how this surprising discovery led to product-market fit in enterprise security.
The Excel Signal
The journey to product-market fit began with a pattern that seemed almost too obvious: “Almost any Fortune 500 CISO I spoke with showed me an Excel sheet that they’re managing since they started their position as a CISO in any company,” Sivan explains. This wasn’t just about outdated tools – it revealed a fundamental gap in security program management.
Understanding the Root Problem
Deeper investigation revealed why these manual processes persisted. “Companies bring external consultants to map their environment, and then they leave them with a nice report with all the recommendations, but no one really knows what’s relevant and what to do, and it’s really hard to track that,” Sivan notes. This insight helped shape Onyxia’s solution.
Identifying the Target Market
Rather than pursuing all potential customers, Onyxia focused specifically on mature organizations. “We’re focusing on mid sized companies and enterprises,” Sivan shares. “Companies that are less mature usually don’t have enough security products, so we can’t give them the value they need.” This focus helped ensure their solution could deliver meaningful value.
Building from Personal Pain
Sivan’s own experience as a CISO provided crucial validation: “I was very frustrated as a CISO that I need to handle a lot of manual work around measuring security programs and security performance and automate things.” This firsthand understanding of the problem helped shape the solution’s development.
Three Core Value Propositions
Through customer research, Onyxia identified three key problems to solve: “First, the ability to make decisions based on reliable data. We’re collecting data from different resources in the company to help security leaders understand their security posture, basically. And on top of that, we’re also helping them manage projects end to end, optimize ROI, and communicate their security programming to business outcomes.”
Regulatory Validation
The emergence of SEC regulations provided additional validation. “Many companies I spoke with a while ago got back to me recently and they told me, ‘hey, Sivan, we’re thinking about your product with their relation to the SEC regulation,'” she reveals. This external pressure helped accelerate adoption.
Mobile-First Innovation
Breaking from traditional enterprise software patterns, Onyxia made a bold choice: “One unique thing that we did, and we don’t often see that in security products, is that we built everything not only as a web app, but as a mobile app.” This decision reflected deeper understanding of how modern security leaders work.
Vision for Growth
The long-term vision extends beyond just replacing Excel: “Were talking about performance, or performance management, but the way I see Onyxia is really becoming a platform that combines different solutions for security leaders to manage all their security efforts in one place.”
For B2B founders, Onyxia’s path to product-market fit offers valuable lessons. Look for manual processes that persist even in sophisticated organizations – they often signal significant opportunities. Focus on customers who can derive immediate value from your solution. And perhaps most importantly, build for how modern enterprises actually work, not just how they’re supposed to work.
Sometimes the clearest signal of product-market fit isn’t sophisticated market analysis – it’s discovering that some of the world’s largest companies are still using Excel to manage critical operations. When you find that kind of manual process at scale, you’ve likely found an opportunity worth pursuing.
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