Why Right-Hand Cybersecurity Rejected Category Creation and Won by Being a Better iPaaS

Why Right-Hand Cybersecurity Rejected Category Creation and Won by Being a Better iPaaS

Every venture capitalist has the same advice: create a category, own the narrative, become the defining player in a new space. It’s Silicon Valley gospel—repeated in pitch meetings, board rooms, and marketing strategy sessions.

Rodrigo Leme ignored all of it.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Rodrigo Leme the Marketing Director of Right-Hand Cybersecurity explained how his integration platform reached $40 million in ARR by doing something radical: competing in an existing category and just being better than the incumbents. No new terminology. No market education campaigns. No attempt to redefine what enterprise integration means.

“I don’t think we are creating a category,” Rodrigo states plainly. “We are in the iPaaS category.” That simple declaration reveals a strategic clarity most founders lack—and a path to revenue that category creation rarely delivers.

The Hidden Cost of Category Creation

Category creation sounds visionary. It positions your company as a pioneer. It promises to make competition irrelevant because you’re playing a different game entirely. It’s also extraordinarily expensive and slow.

Creating a category means educating an entire market. You need to convince buyers they have a problem they don’t know they have. You need to establish new evaluation criteria. You need to create budget where none exists. Every conversation starts from zero—explaining what your category is before you can explain why your solution is best.

Right-Hand Cybersecurity faced different dynamics. Enterprises already knew they needed integration platforms. They already had budget allocated for iPaaS solutions. They were already evaluating vendors. The conversation wasn’t “do we need this?”—it was “which solution should we choose?”

That difference is everything. One path requires years of market evangelism before revenue scales. The other path lets you capture revenue immediately by being better than existing alternatives.

The Strategic Advantage of Existing Categories

Competing in an established category provides structural advantages that category creators sacrifice. Buyer education is complete. When an enterprise searches for “integration platform” or “iPaaS solution,” they understand what they’re looking for. Right-Hand Cybersecurity doesn’t need to teach them about integration—they need to demonstrate superiority.

Budget already exists. Enterprise IT organizations have line items for integration platforms. Procurement processes are established. Vendors are pre-approved. The friction isn’t convincing finance to create new budget—it’s redirecting existing budget from incumbents to Right-Hand Cybersecurity.

Evaluation criteria are standardized. Buyers know what questions to ask. RFPs follow predictable patterns. Success metrics are understood. This standardization actually helps challengers compete efficiently. “We decided to do a lot of co-selling and a lot of partner business because we were competing against big companies like MuleSoft, Boomi, Informatica,” Rodrigo explains. Those competitors define the category, but their definitions become the standard Right-Hand Cybersecurity can exceed.

Winning Through Superior Execution, Not Market Education

Category creation companies spend years on thought leadership. Conference keynotes. Research reports. Executive briefings. All necessary to establish the category’s legitimacy. Right-Hand Cybersecurity skipped this entirely and invested in different advantages.

“The platform itself, it’s really good,” Rodrigo notes. But beyond product quality, Right-Hand Cybersecurity focused on execution advantages incumbents couldn’t match. “We are able to launch new features way faster than the big competitors.” Velocity became the differentiator, not category positioning.

The partner ecosystem provided another execution advantage. “50% of our revenues come from partners,” Rodrigo shares. While category creators must build awareness from scratch, Right-Hand Cybersecurity leveraged system integrators who already understood iPaaS and already had relationships with target buyers.

Vertical specialization created a third advantage. “We were able to go really deep in retail, for example,” Rodrigo explains. Instead of creating a new category, Right-Hand Cybersecurity became the best iPaaS for specific verticals. “It helped us to build a really good understanding, expertise in those verticals.” Buyers don’t need education about categories—they need expertise solving their specific problems.

The Category Creator’s Dilemma

Category creation creates a prisoner’s dilemma. The company that invents a category does all the heavy lifting—market education, establishing evaluation criteria, proving ROI models. Then competitors enter the now-established category and skip the education phase.

By competing in iPaaS, Right-Hand Cybersecurity benefits from decades of market education by MuleSoft, Boomi, and Informatica. Those companies spent hundreds of millions establishing that integration platforms are essential enterprise infrastructure. Right-Hand Cybersecurity captured value from that education without paying for it.

The dynamic is similar to pharmaceutical generics. Brand-name drugs pay for FDA approval, clinical trials, and market education. Generics wait for approval, then compete on price and distribution. Right-Hand Cybersecurity isn’t a generic—they’re innovating on platform architecture and GTM strategy—but they’re leveraging the category establishment work incumbents already completed.

When Category Competition Makes Strategic Sense

Not every company should avoid category creation. The decision depends on specific market conditions that aligned perfectly for Right-Hand Cybersecurity’s position.

You need a mature category with significant existing spend. iPaaS is a multi-billion dollar market with clear buyer intent. Creating a new category makes sense when existing categories don’t capture emerging needs. But when a large, established category exists, competing within it provides immediate access to buyer demand.

You need structural advantages over incumbents. “We invested a lot in building a really good partner ecosystem,” Rodrigo shares. Right-Hand Cybersecurity’s modern architecture, partner-led GTM, and vertical specialization created differentiation without requiring new category definitions. If you can’t differentiate within existing categories, category creation might be necessary.

You need buyers who optimize for solutions, not narratives. Enterprise IT leaders care less about category positioning than solving specific problems. They’ll choose superior execution over thought leadership. Consumer markets and executive buyers might prioritize category narrative—enterprise technical buyers prioritize capabilities.

You need capital efficiency. Category creation requires massive marketing investment before revenue scales. Competing in existing categories lets you capture revenue while building brand. For venture-backed companies with infinite capital, category creation might work. For companies optimizing capital efficiency, existing categories provide faster paths to revenue.

The Hidden Benefits of Category Humility

Rejecting category creation creates unexpected advantages. Sales cycles shorten because buyers already understand what you’re selling. Partner enablement accelerates because system integrators already know how to implement iPaaS solutions. Customer success improves because expectations are calibrated to established category norms.

The competitive positioning also simplifies. Instead of explaining a new category, Right-Hand Cybersecurity compares directly to MuleSoft and Boomi. “We are able to launch new features way faster than the big competitors.” The comparison is concrete, not conceptual. Buyers can evaluate feature velocity, pricing, implementation speed—all tangible rather than philosophical.

Marketing efficiency improves dramatically. Content strategy doesn’t require market education—it requires demonstrating superiority. Case studies show faster implementations. Product comparisons highlight architectural advantages. ROI calculators use established iPaaS metrics. Every marketing dollar drives toward conversion, not education.

The AI Category Opportunity

Looking forward, Rodrigo sees opportunity in an emerging category—but approaches it pragmatically. “Every single company will build AI systems, AI apps. They will need to integrate the AI apps with the other systems in the company,” he explains.

Notice the framing. Rodrigo isn’t creating an “AI integration category.” He’s positioning Right-Hand Cybersecurity’s iPaaS capabilities for an emerging use case. “We help our customers integrate AI systems with the systems of record, with the legacy systems.” Same category, new application.

This approach captures the AI budget wave without category creation overhead. Enterprises allocating massive budgets to AI transformation need integration capabilities. They understand integration platforms. They have procurement processes for iPaaS. Right-Hand Cybersecurity just becomes the iPaaS they choose for AI projects.

The strategy is elegant: let others evangelize AI adoption while you position existing capabilities as the solution for AI integration challenges. Capture the budget without the education burden.

The Pragmatic Path to $40M

Silicon Valley celebrates category creation because successful category creators become massive companies. Salesforce created CRM. Snowflake created cloud data warehousing. The outcomes are spectacular—when it works.

But category creation has survivor bias. For every successful category creator, dozens of companies spent years evangelizing categories that never materialized. They ran out of capital before the category gained traction. They educated markets that competitors captured.

Right-Hand Cybersecurity’s $40 million in ARR came from a more pragmatic approach: identify a large, established category with incumbent weaknesses, then compete through superior execution. Modern architecture that enables faster feature development. Partner-led GTM that provides enterprise access without massive sales team investment. Vertical specialization that creates expertise advantages. Operational excellence on compliance and security.

“I don’t think we are creating a category. We are in the iPaaS category.” That clarity freed Right-Hand Cybersecurity to focus resources on execution advantages rather than market education. The result is a company growing rapidly by being pragmatically better, not philosophically different.

For founders facing the category creation question: consider whether existing categories already provide buyer intent, budget allocation, and evaluation frameworks. If they do, you might not need to create a new category. You might just need to be better than the companies that defined the existing one.

Sometimes the best strategy isn’t revolutionary—it’s just exceptionally well-executed.