7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building a Cybersecurity Company in a Market That Doesn’t Believe Solutions Exist

The hardest customers to sell aren’t the ones who don’t understand their problem. They’re the ones who’ve already tried solving it three times and failed.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Josh Shaul, CEO of Allure Security, walked through his company’s journey from seed funding to Series A preparation, growing at 10% compound monthly growth rate in one of tech’s most saturated markets: cybersecurity. His path offers seven counterintuitive lessons about building GTM motion when your biggest competitor is the market’s accumulated disappointment.

Lesson 1: Proof Points Beat Product Features Every Time

When Allure Security launched their brand protection platform, they had the technology to solve a 27-year-old problem: internet scams impersonating trusted brands. What they didn’t have was credibility in a market exhausted by overpromises.

“The toughest thing for us has been that this problem has been around forever. 27 years ago, people were sending out scams targeting America Online usernames and passwords,” Josh explained. “And because the problem has been around since the Internet has been around, there’s a tremendous amount of disbelief that the problem is even solvable.”

The breakthrough came from shifting strategy entirely. “We’re now to the point where we have the proof points and we have a dozen or so publicly referenceable customers that will go out and say, you can believe that they’re going to do this for you because you can look at the results that they’re delivering for us,” Josh said. “And that’s made it a lot easier for us as putting our customers in front of our prospects.”

Their GTM motion became customer-led by necessity. Rather than building elaborate sales decks or funding massive marketing campaigns, they focused obsessively on landing initial customers, delivering results, and converting them into advocates. Each success became ammunition against skepticism.

Lesson 2: Platform Relationships Are Infrastructure, Not Nice-to-Haves

Allure Security’s product depends on getting social media platforms, domain registrars, and hosting providers to take down fraudulent content quickly. Most companies approach this as support tickets. Josh built it as core infrastructure.

“The only way we found it to deal with that was to build relationships, was to actually find the people in these organizations that are responsible for the programs that deal with abuse, to build relationships with them, to establish a reputation where we proved ourselves over hundreds and hundreds of submissions that our submissions were supremely high quality,” he explained.

This required understanding each platform’s internal systems deeply. “These companies have they all have abuse policies, they all have reporting systems. And those reporting systems are often disjointed and very complex. And if you don’t use them exactly correctly for the right circumstance, then you get ignored,” Josh said.

The lesson extends beyond brand protection: when your product depends on third-party platforms, relationship quality determines product performance. Treat platform partnerships as product development, not customer support.

Lesson 3: Integrity Is a Long-Term Competitive Moat

In cybersecurity, vendors routinely promise comprehensive threat elimination. Competitors told buyers they could stop all attacks. Josh chose a different path.

“You just can’t stop people from putting things on the Internet, so the ability to completely eliminate the problem just isn’t there,” he acknowledged. Instead, Allure Security promises to “dramatically reduce the impact of scams on a business to the point that those scams aren’t having a meaningful business impact.”

This honesty comes with short-term costs. “I’m going to say what you do what you say kind of guy. But I swear I miss a lot of opportunity as a result of it,” Josh admitted. “Sometimes those short term decisions of hey, we’re not going to take that business, hey, we’re not going to make that promise, hey, I know that the competitor is making that promise and they can’t deliver, but we’re not going to do the same thing. Sometimes that’s painful.”

His reconciliation? “Somebody just made a promise they can’t deliver and they’re going to end up with an unhappy customer down the road who’s never going to want to do business with them again. And I’ll still be there as the one who is honest with them and hopefully that they’ll remember that.”

In markets saturated with hype, radical honesty becomes differentiation. The founders who resist short-term revenue from overpromising build long-term moats from trust.

Lesson 4: Target Economics, Not Just Technology

Most security companies focus on detection accuracy. Allure Security targets attacker profitability.

When they find a phishing site impersonating a client, they don’t just report it. “If somebody wants usernames and passwords, if somebody wants credit cards, our software knows how to generate those things and give them to the attacker. So we fill their bucket with data. Data that looks like what they want, data that feels like what they want. But brother, it’s not the data that they want,” Josh explained.

The strategy acknowledges reality: “You just can’t stop people from putting things on the Internet.” Instead, they make attacks economically unviable. “The idea there is we just want to make their life miserable. We want to break the business model, we want to make it more expensive by far to attack a client that’s protected by Allure Security than to attack a brand that’s not.”

This reframes the entire GTM narrative. Rather than promising perfect security—which buyers don’t believe anyway—they promise to make targeting your brand unprofitable for scammers. It’s a claim they can actually deliver on.

Lesson 5: Understand Where Your Category Really Lives

Gartner places online brand protection under “Digital Risk Protection Services,” which falls under “Threat Intelligence.” Josh sees this hierarchy as backwards.

“When you talk to any corporate CEO out there about threat intelligence, they probably look at you a little confusing. Like, I’m not sure what threat intelligence really means,” he observed. “But I don’t think there’s a single CEO out there of a single major business that doesn’t understand protecting their brand and protecting their brand online.”

This insight shapes how Allure Security positions themselves. They lead with brand protection—a problem every executive understands—rather than technical categories that resonate only with security teams.

The lesson: your category placement determines who you can sell to and how fast you can close deals. If your natural category doesn’t align with how buyers think about their problems, you need to pioneer a new one.

Lesson 6: Professional Criminality Demands Professional Defense

Understanding your competition means understanding their business models. Josh recognized that modern cybercrime has industrialized completely.

“You’ve got criminals all the way up the stack from people that are building tools to help you host a scam website to people that are helping you get traffic into your scam website. They all operate as a supply chain just like any other industry would,” he explained.

The sophistication is stunning. “A lot of these the toolkits that you’ll buy to host like a phishing website, they come with 24 x seven customer support,” Josh noted.

This realization reshaped Allure Security’s approach. You’re not outsmarting individuals—you’re competing against organizations with product-market fit, customer success teams, and continuous iteration. Your defense strategy needs equivalent sophistication.

Lesson 7: Growth Follows Vertical Concentration

Allure Security found traction by focusing on specific verticals rather than broad horizontal expansion. “For us the primary vertical where we’re seeing the most traction is in financial services, banks, credit unions, broker dealers, and even in the crypto space,” Josh shared. “We also see quite a bit of traction in ecommerce. Fashion brands are really heavily targeted by impersonation attacks.”

This concentration enables deeper understanding of vertical-specific attack patterns, more relevant case studies, and stronger word-of-mouth within industry networks. Their 10% compound monthly growth rate comes from dominating specific verticals, not from spreading thin across all possible markets.

The Compounding Effect

These seven lessons compound. Vertical focus generates proof points. Proof points enable honest positioning. Honest positioning attracts customers who become advocates. Platform relationships improve product performance. Better performance generates more proof points.

Josh’s journey shows that in saturated markets, shortcuts don’t exist. “I thought we would come out with like, here’s the solution to the problem we’ve all dealt with for all these years, and then market would embrace that,” he reflected. “But it was really different from that. It was a lot of skepticism.”

The path through skepticism isn’t better marketing—it’s better execution, captured in referenceable results, sold with integrity to concentrated markets. It’s slower than founders want and less exciting than investors prefer. But it’s what actually works when the market has heard every promise before.