5 Critical Go-to-Market Lessons from Hyperproof’s Journey to Enterprise Success

Personal crisis often breeds innovation. For Craig Unger, CEO of Hyperproof, a near-catastrophic FTC audit at Microsoft sparked a vision that would reshape enterprise compliance. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Craig shared hard-won lessons from building and scaling Hyperproof. Here are five key insights every B2B founder should consider.

1. Let Market Pain Drive Product Evolution Great products often emerge from firsthand experience with broken systems. At Microsoft, Craig faced potential fines of “a million dollars user a day” with “100 million unique users” during a critical FTC audit. The experience exposed a critical gap: “I had to do these really very deep audits, very little tooling help or infrastructure and of course I was really just a product person at that time.”

This pain point became Hyperproof’s foundation. As Craig notes, “Every workload at some point when it becomes important, serious and very high value will evolve out of a spreadsheet.” By deeply understanding the market’s evolution, he could anticipate where compliance tooling needed to go.

2. Take a Pragmatic Approach to Category Creation Rather than trying to force a new category immediately, Craig advocates for an evolutionary approach. “I think our goal is to create a new category, a different way of thinking about it. At the end of the day, I think people will end up looking at it as an evolution of what previously before was GRC.” This balanced strategy allows Hyperproof to push innovation while maintaining market relevance.
3. Rethink Traditional Analyst Relations For early-stage companies, Craig suggests abandoning the traditional analyst relations playbook. “When you’re a smaller company, it’s more beneficial to build relationships with smaller analysts, folks who work individually, they tend to have more unique viewpoints and they can kind of bring you into more unique situations.” This approach provides more bang for your buck than expensive traditional analyst subscriptions.
4. Maintain Ruthless ICP Discipline One of Craig’s most emphatic lessons concerns customer selection. “There’s a natural tension between taking on all comers in the beginning because you want to make revenue. And then you may create obligations for yourself to support customers outside of your ICP that really isn’t helpful to you.” His advice? “Try to lock in on your key customer, one that you can keep and expand and do that as fast as possible. It’s probably better to grow revenue slightly slower in order to do that.”
5. Embrace Market Education as a Strategic Imperative Changing established mindsets requires persistent market education. Craig draws parallels to security’s evolution: “Compliance is following the historical track of security where it started. Also as a small group of people, they may do penetration tests and send reports to the board and then you think your organization is secure.”

The key is demonstrating how “everybody has a role to play” in modern compliance, similar to how security evolved from a specialized function to an organization-wide responsibility. This kind of market education isn’t just marketing—it’s fundamental to category creation.

These lessons have driven real results. Hyperproof has been “growing at least two x a year for a number of years” while maintaining strong customer satisfaction. But perhaps more importantly, they’re changing how organizations think about compliance and trust.

Craig’s vision extends beyond just building better tools. He’s pushing for a fundamental shift in how organizations approach transparency: “The compliance and security world hasn’t really adjusted to that. In other words, they’re still laboring under the belief that in order to do well in the market, everybody that they serve needs to be convinced that they’re perfect and they don’t make mistakes.”

For B2B founders, these lessons offer a blueprint for building category-defining companies. It’s not just about having the right product—it’s about having the discipline to execute a focused go-to-market strategy while simultaneously educating the market about a new way of thinking. That’s how category leaders are born.