7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building a New Enterprise Software Category

What does it take to create a new enterprise software category in 2024? While many founders focus on product development, the go-to-market challenges often prove more daunting. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Omri Gazitt, founder and CEO of Aserto, shared hard-earned insights from his journey building a cloud-native authorization platform.

1. Identify Unsolved Technical Problems That Scale

The best opportunities often hide in plain sight. While authentication has been solved by companies like Okta and Auth0, Omri noticed that authorization remained a persistent challenge. “Authorization is a more domain specific problem,” he explains. “There aren’t really any standards for that. And we’re just at the beginning of the process where we start as an industry making off-the-shelf solutions available to that problem.”

2. Embrace Competition as Category Validation

When building a new category, competition isn’t always bad. “We’ve gone from zero when we first started to about ten companies that are doing roughly what we’re doing, which is a blessing and a curse,” Omri notes. The key insight? Sometimes growing the overall category matters more than immediate differentiation.

3. Don’t Confuse Problem-Solution Fit with Product-Market Fit

Technical founders often mistake solving a problem for achieving product-market fit. Omri offers a crucial distinction: “We have a lot of good early indications that the problem that we are solving resonates and resonates strongly. But for product market fit… you really want there to be strong pull from the market on your solution.”

4. Build GTM from Zero

Enterprise GTM looks drastically different at startups versus big tech. “Working in a big company like Microsoft, there’s so much awareness of what Microsoft does and new things and there’s so many channels that are already established,” Omri explains. “Whereas as a startup you just have to build that from zero.”

5. Focus on Buyer Discovery

The technical challenge often isn’t the biggest hurdle. “The biggest problem is not necessarily the tech, it’s always how are you going to take it to market,” Omri shares. The key questions: “Who is the user, who’s the buyer, who are the people that are going to have the biggest pain… How do you find those people or how do you help them find you at the exact moment that they have the problem?”

6. Time Your Standards Strategy

Creating industry standards requires careful timing. Drawing from his experience with databases and SQL, Omri advises: “You don’t want to kind of go in too early because pre-standardizing things before you actually have some market pull is dangerous. But for this to really grow as a category… we’ll have to go create some standards and then compete within those standard frameworks.”

7. Target the Right Early Adopters

Aserto found two distinct customer profiles: “B2B SaaS vendors that want to move from a coarse grained authentication model… to a fine grained authorization model” and “enterprises that want to create a common authorization control plane for a number of their internal applications.” Identifying these specific use cases helped focus their GTM efforts.

Looking Forward

For technical founders building new categories, Omri’s experience highlights the delicate balance between technical excellence and market development. His vision for Aserto reveals how founders should think about category creation: “Our vision is to basically be the enterprise control plane for authorization in the age of SaaS and Cloud.”

The path to building a new enterprise software category isn’t just about solving technical problems—it’s about orchestrating the emergence of entirely new markets. Success requires equal attention to product development, market education, and strategic timing of standardization efforts.

For technical founders embarking on similar journeys, these lessons offer a roadmap for navigating the challenges of category creation while building sustainable go-to-market momentum.