7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Selling Technology Nobody Believes Exists

A CISO joined a sales call and immediately said, “This is not possible.” No introduction. No pleasantries. Just flat rejection before the demo even started.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Ryan Lasmaili, Co-Founder and CEO of Vaulttree, shared how his company navigated the challenge of bringing fully homomorphic encryption to market—a technology so advanced that potential customers don’t believe it’s real until they see it working. After spending nine years solving one of cryptography’s hardest problems, Vaulttree discovered that building breakthrough technology is only half the battle.

Lesson 1: Demos Trump Everything When Selling the Impossible

When you’re selling technology that challenges fundamental assumptions, no amount of positioning or messaging can substitute for a live demonstration.

That skeptical CISO? After seeing Vaulttree’s demo, everything changed. “In the end we showed a demo and he was tipping out. He was sitting on the edge of the seat. We were seeing that because he was tipped back and forth the whole time, but he fell off his chair,” Ryan recounted.

The transformation wasn’t gradual—it happened within minutes. “After literally two minutes, it’s like, oh wow, okay, you do this, okay, we can do that, we didn’t even know,” Ryan explained.

For founders selling breakthrough technology, build your sales process around the demo. Not a slide deck explaining how it works. Not a technical whitepaper. An actual demonstration that shows the technology in action.

Lesson 2: The Education Challenge Is Your Moat

Most founders see education as a burden. Ryan sees it differently. “The biggest challenge definitely is the educational element,” he said. But this challenge creates defensibility.

Organizations start conversations believing they don’t need the technology. “Every organization that we are talking to, at the beginning, the conversation could be like, oh, we have no use case, or we don’t know, or this doesn’t work, right? But it’s mainly because they don’t understand really that their data and everyone’s data is vulnerable.”

This education barrier protects Vaulttree from competition. Competitors can’t easily replicate a nine-year technical breakthrough, but even if they could, they’d face the same education challenge. Each customer conversation becomes an investment in market education that compounds over time.

Lesson 3: Translate Technical Breakthroughs Into Business Outcomes

Security teams don’t buy encryption algorithms. They buy risk reduction, compliance simplification, and breach prevention.

Ryan captures the translation challenge: “I think it’s definitely still sort of a sector that is covered by peculiar. Like, imagine a room full of nerds, right, writing algorithms all day long that are really funky and you have to translate that into a language that everyone else is going to understand.”

Ryan uses a powerful metaphor: “It doesn’t matter how many onion layers you have, your data is still in readable form, so you literally just cut right through the onion.”

This metaphor acknowledges existing security investments, identifies the fundamental problem they don’t solve, and positions Vaulttree as addressing the root cause rather than adding another layer.

Lesson 4: Geographic Markets Require Different Value Propositions

Vaulttree discovered that the same technology needs completely different positioning across geographies.

“If you go to Asia, they are more interested in something that is going to help not only their own company, but also in benefit of the country and the people,” Ryan explained. “And then you go to Europe. In Europe it’s more specifically to GDPR and compliance and then you are going then let’s say to the US. For example, Canada and US. It’s more like, okay, how can we utilize this tech to also, for example, sell to my customers.”

These aren’t minor tweaks—they’re fundamentally different value propositions. Asia focuses on societal benefit, Europe on compliance, and North America on competitive advantage. Research what drives buying decisions in each geography and rebuild your pitch accordingly.

Lesson 5: Inbound Can Work for Complex Technology

Conventional wisdom says complex, technical products require outbound sales. Vaulttree proves otherwise.

“Most of our traction is inbound, which is amazing to see,” Ryan said. Once prospects understand the technology, conversion rates are exceptional: “Basically every conversation usually we have with an organization ends up in us moving this along to either a pilot, a POC and a customer.”

The inbound motion works because Vaulttree solves an obvious problem once customers understand what’s possible. The challenge isn’t creating demand—it’s helping prospects realize the solution now exists.

Lesson 6: Hire for Potential Over Pedigree

As Vaulttree scaled, Ryan took an unconventional approach to talent. “We are very unique in the way we, for example, bring people into the organization. It’s not your seven interviews and saying, okay, now you’re going to have to write several tests. Actually, we only do two interviews and we tend not to do a test.”

The results validate the approach. “One of our cryptographers never studied math, right? And she’s one of our most talented cryptographers,” Ryan said.

The hiring philosophy reflects Vaulttree’s GTM philosophy: “We don’t care what your background is, have you been to which college and for how long and which company? No, we care about people.”

Lesson 7: Think Beyond Your Product to the Ecosystem

Ryan’s five-year vision extends beyond Vaulttree’s success to enabling an entire ecosystem. “The possibilities of what kind of products and what kind of other potential technologies and startups are going to appear around the topic of encrypted data because it becomes now a possibility of building on top of encryption in a way that we could not have done it before.”

This ecosystem thinking creates multiple GTM advantages. Partners can build on your platform, expanding use cases beyond what you could develop alone. The ecosystem itself becomes a moat as switching costs increase.

Category creators should focus on enabling others to build value on top of their breakthrough. Your success isn’t just measured by your product adoption—it’s measured by the ecosystem that emerges around the possibility you’ve created.

The Pattern Behind the Lessons

These seven lessons share a common thread: selling breakthrough technology requires rethinking every assumption about traditional GTM. Demos replace decks. Education becomes a moat. Technical features need business translation. Geographic nuance matters. Inbound works for complex products. Potential matters more than pedigree. Ecosystem thinking compounds impact.

For founders building category-defining technology, Vaulttree’s journey offers a blueprint: solve the hard technical problem, then invest equal energy in helping the market understand what you’ve made possible.